VICE’s “Immigrant America” series added a new episode this week.
Milking cows is a dirty, monotonous job, and as we found out in our latest episode of Immigrant America, it’s not a job many unemployed Americans are willing to do. But for some reason the government doesn’t give dairy farms a way to recruit foreign workers legally, so most feel forced to hire illegal immigrants. This makes the farms and their workers easy targets for immigration authorities looking to fill deportation quotas. We went to upstate New York to try to understand the cat and mouse game going on between dairy farms and immigration authorities. We found a lot of wasted taxpayer money, racial profiling, and a broken system that unnecessarily treats family farmers and hardworking immigrants like criminals.
Watch.