"Yarrabee Farms is owned by a prominent Iowa GOP family."
This is why we cannot clean up the immigration mess and get a border wall. There are far too many GOP "elites" who rely on the open borders cheap labor express. And they do not want anything to change. Having illegals in your work force keeps them compliant and suppresses wages. Unless and until we purge the GOP of these exploiters, whose natural home is the democrat party, we will make little progress.
The dairy next door to my farm has ten Guatemalan workers. The owner says they all have green cards. He is a republican.
But he has told me that he needs these workers to make the dairy profitable. As the owner, he does not live in a fancy house or have a flashy, opulent lifestyle. He lives in a double-wide manufactured home on site and drives about a 5-6 year old truck. He's not getting rich doing this.
Hiring locals as an alternative has become hardly viable because it with a price. First, there is not a pool of fine upstanding, hard-working citizens around here in rural country who willing to work in cow shit all day in the Florida heat and humidity for low pay. It is a miserable job. I know because I run a beef cattle operation next door on my place and the Florida heat and humidity is insufferable be in, let alone work in.
One local guy he hired seemed like a great guy and a reliable worker until he was arrested for child molestation six months ago. Oops! Another one got arrested in a drug bust and is in jail now. A third is hired and fired as he goes in and out of jail for 30 days at a time for DUI's. He keeps hiring him back because he can't find anyone else willing to do the dirty job.
The only local hire left is a guy my age, 70, who was a former big rig truck driver and mechanic. He does all of their equipment maintenance and repairs and tells me he can't work much longer because of his age and bad knees, but mainly because the money is just not enough to make it worth it. Everyone else but the owner and his adult son, are the ten Guatemalans.
The owner says it is almost impossible to hire locally. What he does get when he hires locally is problems. And doing so would almost certainly put him out of business because of the labor costs.
In the nine years I have lived next door to him, he's shown me to be a helpful neighbor, an honest, hard-working, church-going, civic-minded good guy like most of us are. I have no reason not to believe him.
I don't have the answer to the labor problem. But he has managed to find a way to make the dairy work. The previous two owners went bankrupt.
Free Traitors™ are burden to the party.