Idaho dairy built a multibillion-dollar empire on workers it kept illegal.

Rick Naerebout’s office looks toward the Snake River Canyon, where the ramp from Evel Knievel’s failed 1974 rocket jump still sits in the dust. The symbolism is almost too neat: a man who tried to clear a quarter-mile gap on a homemade rocket, now leading an industry that has spent decades trying to clear the gap of immigration law with a homemade contraption of “open secrets” and “favorable positions.”

Naerebout runs the Idaho Dairymen’s Association. He says about 90% of the workers at the state’s roughly 350 dairies may lack legal status. He calls it an open secret.

Read it for what it is. A confession.

The industry has spent decades building itself on labor it knew was outside the legal labor market. Now it wants credit for admitting the crime it depends on. That is not candor. It is leverage. Naerebout is not describing a problem. He is pricing the cost of leaving it alone.

“The [workers] see all this activity around them, and it’s not conducive to having your workforce feel welcomed or comfortable,” he said.

The uneasiness is real. So is the source of it. An industry that has gotten away with something for so long has started mistaking silence for permission.

Naerebout says, “We’re not taking jobs from Americans. The jobs are physical in nature and you’re out in the elements. They just don’t appeal to Americans.”

That is the lie at the center of every illegal-labor economy. The workers are not unavailable. They are unaffordable at wages that do not exploit them.

The dairy industry did not lose the American worker to temperament. It lost the American worker to a price. The industry prefers that price.

Last year, Idaho advertised 7,500 jobs through the H-2A temporary farmworker visa program. Four local residents applied.

Four.

That is not a labor shortage. It is the sound of an industry that has spent so long outside the legal labor market that it has forgotten how to recruit inside it—or never intended to. The H-2A program is designed for seasonal work. Dairy work is year-round. The industry knew that when it built its model. It built the model anyway.

Idaho is now the nation’s fourth-largest milk producer. It reached that position with a workforce that, by its own industry’s estimate, is nine-tenths unauthorized.

A saner reading of those four applications is not that Americans refuse work. It is that the industry never priced the work honestly, never built conditions worth showing up for, and never intended to hire anyone with the freedom to say no. Migrant labor without papers is cheap precisely because the worker cannot safely leave.

Susan Rios, a 65-year-old Burley farmworker activist, said of the jobs, “Go to a dairy, go to a farm. I’m sure that you will be hired immediately.”

That is not a defense of the labor model. It is an indictment of it.

Rios’s daughter and son-in-law self-deported to Mexico rather than risk his detention. Her granddaughters will not see their father taken by federal agents. The tears are real. So is the law. The husband was in the country without authorization. The industry that employed him did so outside the law. The system that allowed both to flourish failed in its duty.

The worker did not build this system. The employer built it and profited from it.

The dairy industry is not a victim. It is a participant in a multidecade violation of immigration law that operated in plain sight in one of the reddest states in the country. It wants workers who cannot complain, organize, leave, report wage theft, or call in sick without risking everything. It has built a multibillion-dollar enterprise on that vulnerability.

That is not an incidental feature of the business model. It is the business model.

The industry’s defenders now invoke “our ability to produce food to feed ourselves,” as though the choice were between milk and anarchy. As though Idaho’s ranking in the milk industry were a strategic necessity worth any human cost. It is not food security. It is a labor system dressed in the language of public need.

And the industry’s own political language gives away the arrangement. Brandy Perez, a local immigration attorney, credits the industry’s political clout in deep-red Idaho with keeping enforcement light. Not legitimacy. Not necessity. Clout.

Idaho has voted for Donald Trump three times. Multiple administrations, including this one, mostly looked the other way. The arrangement is bipartisan, multidecade, and entirely of the industry’s own making. The people who benefited from it do not get to call themselves bystanders now.

President Trump pledged in July 2025 to “sign them up so they don’t have to go.” Naerebout says he is taking the president at his word. But he also admits that “as quickly as we got into this favorable position with the administration, we could fall out of favor.”

That is not the language of a partner. It is the language of a supplicant who knows the favor can be withdrawn.

The industry is not negotiating a fix. It is hoping for a continuance.

Twice a week, an ICE deportation plane lands at the tiny Twin Falls airport. Heather Muth and other activists watch from the ground. They count the detainees through a telescope and call the flights small. The fact that twice-weekly deportation flights can seem small tells you how low the bar has been set.

The industry’s complaint about a “chill” translates into plain English: there are consequences to employing people whose legal vulnerability made them cheap.

ICE detention flights have accelerated under a Department of Homeland Security workforce that has more than doubled since the current administration took office. The enforcement rattling Twin Falls is not a spasm. It is the slow grind of a system trying to reassert itself against an industry that has been gaming it for thirty years.

The bipartisan bill that would remove the seasonal requirement from key agricultural visas has gone nowhere. The Republican-controlled Congress is in recess until after the midterm elections. The proposal may be framed as humanitarian relief, but a new visa is not automatically a moral solution. If it simply supplies the same captive workforce with a new stamp, it preserves the arrangement instead of repairing it.

The industry’s problem is not that the visa program is wrong. The industry’s problem is that a real legal labor system would force it to compete for workers at legal wages and decent conditions.

It has no intention of doing that.

We who eat the food grown and processed by vulnerable workers cannot pretend the arrangement is someone else’s sin. The country has built its tables on labor it refuses to protect. The Catholic tradition calls that pecado social: a social sin embedded in an economic order, not erased because each transaction carries a wage and a signature. The Torah says, “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien.” Jesus says, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”

The industry has not welcomed the stranger. It has recruited the stranger, depended on the stranger, and left the stranger exposed.

Romero said, “In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people … I order you: Stop the repression!” The command belongs here too. Stop building prosperity on people whose fear is part of the price.

Cows still have to be milked every day, all year. So does every other job in America. Pay legal wages. Make the work safe. Let workers organize, leave, report abuse, and return home without losing their lives to the machinery of enforcement.

The dairy industry will figure out how to do that legally, or it will get out of the way of people who will.

There is no third option.

The open secret is not a plea. It is a dare. And the industry’s own mouth is what wrote it.