Dairy industry warns of shortages and rising prices if it doesn't get cheap guest workers

The current H-2A agricultural guest worker program just doesn't work for dairy farmers'and they're hoping immigration reform will change that. If it doesn't, they warn, we could see dairy shortages and rising prices. There is this one flaw in the argument, though:

"They can never adequately explain why they can't raise wages," said Eric Ruark, research director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform in Washington. "If there's a labor shortage, you raise wages. That's classic supply-and- demand. Maximizing profits for the producer should not be the main goal of our food system."

H-2A visas are only for seasonal or temporary work; since dairy farms operate year round, that's not very useful to them and they want a guest worker program that meets their needs. Without immigrants, a report by the National Milk Producers Federation claims, retail dairy prices could rise by 61 percent. But that's if you just subtract immigrant dairy workers and don't replace them with anyone else, leading to milk shortages. The milk producers apparently aren't giving any thought to raising wages significantly from their 2008 average of (according to the same report) $9.97. And while subtracting the 41 percent of dairy workers who are immigrants from the industry, leading to major shortages, might well increase retail prices by 61 percent, raising wages even by 50 percent would have a much smaller effect on prices, since wages are hardly the only component of pricing. In other words, it's a little like when the CEO of Papa John's exaggerates how much providing health coverage for full-time workers will increase the cost of a pizza.

So when dairy farmers are out talking to reporters about how even though they could sell more milk if they had it, they can't expand their operations because of a shortage of immigrant labor, and saying they can't raise wages because it would cut into their profits too much, what you have is a pretty obvious dairy industry campaign for cheap immigrant labor. And while we need immigration reform, it should not be geared toward providing cheap, long-term but ultimately disposable at the whim of the employer, labor to avoid raising wages over $10.