Members of the McClure Center published a report over spring break that updated research done in 2009 on the community impacts of Idaho’s dairy workforce, primarily in the Magic Valley.
Priscilla Salant, one of the writers of the report, said a major takeaway for both studies found the dairy industry had an overall positive impact for communities in the Magic Valley, although some areas were more heavily impacted than others.
The unemployment rate in the Magic Valley is low, and that’s largely due to the dairy workforce, Salant said. Jerome County has an unemployment rate of 3.3 percent, which she said means that basically everyone who is able to work is currently working. The recession did not impact the area the same way it hurt other communities in the state.
There are two sectors in the dairy workforce, she said — production and processing. Typically, more workers are employed for milk production, but there is a bigger economic impact on communities when there are more people employed in processing. Because of this, Salant said bigger urban areas in the Magic Valley, such as Twin Falls, experience more benefits of the dairy industry in Idaho.
Another significant portion of the report focused on how the Hispanic population in the dairy workforce influenced the positive impact on the community. Salant said the entire dairy workforce is largely Hispanic — many of them immigrants. According to the report, these were workers “who were willing to take jobs native-born workers would not, at least at prevailing wages.” This demographic benefited the communities in the region, the report concluded.
Salant, and others who contributed to the report, conducted 48 face-to-face interviews as part of the study, and several interviewees told them that a significant number of the immigrant workers were undocumented. However, they had no way of compiling data to get an exact number.
Salant said while the Hispanic portion of the dairy workforce had a positive impact on the Magic Valley, the number of immigrants in Idaho has remained stagnant since the recession. This is a result of lower birth rates and a decline in the number of Mexican immigrants entering the United States, she said.
She said the slowing population growth among Hispanics is a nationwide trend, but it has affected the labor shortage in the Magic Valley, which is another reason for the low unemployment rate.
In the future, it’s anyone’s guess as to how the level of immigrant populations will shift, Salant said, although she does not expect the number to increase significantly under President Donald Trump’s administration. One thing Salant said she is certain of is that immigration is a complicated topic — anyone who argues that it’s easy is kidding themselves.
Erin Bamer can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @ErinBamer