PortlandExpat

The Idaho cheap labor lobby just said the quiet part out loud... Rick Naerebout @RickNaerebout runs the Idaho Dairymen’s Association @idahodairymens. And the Washington State Dairy Federation. In this new article (screenshotted) he talks about how they beat you in the 2026 primaries: “We’ve already lost our House to the far right.” Far right is what he calls the Idaho House for passing a bunch of immigration bills that never made it out of the Idaho Senate. So they spent $200,000 on nine Republican primaries to protect what he calls the “firewall” of moderate senators. They won 8 of the 9 races. Then they bought billboards: “We could track when people were passing these billboards, then push a digital ad to those same people.” They grabbed your phone’s location when you drove by then they chased you onto social media. He said “it freaked our board out.” Freaked me out too, Rick. Then he bragged about their playbook saying: “Take out Idaho. Put in Kansas or Utah. Pick your red state. We don’t care.” It's true, they don't care about you. Back in February of this year, the cheap slave labor lobby formed the “Idaho Alliance for a Legal Workforce,” and sponsored an economic study with apress conference to try and scare the Legislature (didn't work) and the Idaho Farm Bureau @IDFarmBureau hosted the press conference. Their study admits that nearly 90% of Idaho’s dairy workforce is foreign-born. The source for that number is literally “According to the Idaho Dairymen’s Association.” And Naerebout told NPR last month that some 90% of the workers at Idaho’s dairies may not have legal status. That’s the cheap slave labor business model in writing. Then they quoted developer Tommy Ahlquist @TommyAhlquist saying we should "stay away from government red tape policies like e-verify.” E-Verify is how you check that a worker is legal. The irnnic part is that they named their group after the exact thing they’re fighting against - a legal workforce. Their "fact sheet" says losing these slave workers would make the housing crisis worse. Page 2 of their study says Idaho’s population boom “increased housing demand and led to sharply rising prices.” They wrote that. But Idaho’s construction workforce nearly doubled from 2014 to 2024 and home prices went up 168% anyway, because every illegal worker they import needs a house too. Plus, their study only looks at what happens right away, before anybody has time to fix anything. And they admit they “assume price stability.” That’s economist-speak for: in our made up model, prices never change. Including the price of labor. Well here in the real world, when a dairy can’t find workers, it raises pay. And higher pay pulls Idahoans off the couch or out of worse jobs (or the dairy buys a machine that does the work of three guys). But their "model" doesn’t allow any of that. Wages are frozen. So the worker just vanishes and the job never gets filled. When you rig it that way the only answer you can ever get is more cheap foreign slave labor. The scenario they ran was roughly 70% of Idaho’s illegal workforce gone in a single year. But show me the Idaho bill that does that. They built a scary hypothetical and waved it at the Legislature as if any bill we pushed did that. And they can’t keep their own numbers straight anyways. Workers removed: 28,725 in the press release. 25,611 on page 34. 26,824 on page 37. Page 34 also says “total job losses of 1.16 million.” That’s every job in Idaho! And the authors’ contact email is a gmail account (just saying) My favorite line is on page 20. States less dependent on illegal labor “will likely benefit,” because companies will expand there. They name Wisconsin and Maine. So their own economists think leaning on illegal labor is a weakness? Naerebout told NPR the jobs “just don’t appeal to Americans.” No shit. What American wants to show up to a crew where nobody speaks his language, in shit conditions, for pay built around workers who can’t complain? Of course it doesn’t appeal to Americans. They built it that way. And notice nobody in that crowd ever finishes the sentence with a wage. Cheap labor jobs only appeal to people with no other options. That’s the whole point. And their own economists admit the fix exists. Page iv says that over the long run “adjustments and investments in other market segments, as well as substitutions for other activities, will be necessary.” Page 20 says “Investments in capital are likely to be made.” That’s higher pay. That’s the robot milker. That’s hiring the white American kid down the road. They cut every bit of it out of the model, because a study where Idaho adapts can’t sell amnesty (their goal). Pay Idahoans. Buy the equipment. Enforce the law so the dairyman who does it right isn’t undercut by the one who doesn’t. Idaho first. All of it points at their SAWA amnesty bill. It turns guest workers into 350-day “temporary” workers and gives legal status to illegals who were here by May 31, 2026 and worked in ag. It caps their wage growth around 3.25% a year and folds meatpacking into “agriculture.” I thought 1986 was supposed to be the last amnesty (I was 7 years old, but still).