Most of America’s cattle are milked by immigrants. On Dale Hemminger’s farm in upstate New York, cows are being milked by robots. When a cow wants to be milked, it approaches the machine that cleans its udder, attaches cups to the udder, draws milk and takes out the drink.
In the barn that Hemminger plans to open this year, some robots will roam the floor like automated pooper scoopers, picking up manure.
President Donald Trump should visit. He may learn something about the limitations of his strategy to improve the wealth of US workers by forcing immigrants to leave the country.
There’s a big hole in the simple, persuasive argument that Trump’s policy will pressure employers to hire Americans: For most jobs, the place is cheap and likely to be replaced by a robot. And what jobs can robots do? Many will simply leave the country.
A real choice
Farmers, in particular, are faced with a choice between hiring immigrants and hiring Americans. Many jobs performed by immigrants are best understood as a form of mud. They only exist because immigrants are there to make them. The most important reason, of course, is that recent immigrants tend to work for much lower wages than Americans. And they are more than willing to do dirty, dangerous and demanding jobs that most Americans would not even consider.
“I’m trying to put this right because I don’t want to alienate my non-robot customers, but it’s not a very desirable job,” said Whitney Davis, an automation technician at Finger Lakes Dairy Services in upstate New York. “It’s hot in the summer, it’s cold in the winter, it’s cow dung — and on top of that, it’s really a social activity.
Employers have been replacing workers with machines at least since the invention of the plow 6,000 years ago. In recent decades, in the United States, the easy availability of cheap immigrant labor slowed that march of progress. Milking robots are widely used on European dairy farms, but are still relatively new in the United States.
Reducing immigration changes that calculus. More than 750,000 immigrants have left the US workforce during the first half of 2025, according to the Pew Research Center, creating a growing challenge for industries that rely heavily on those workers. Dairy farming is very close to that list: Immigrants make up more than half of that sector’s workforce.
Hemminger was quickly discovered, installing his first milking machines in 2007 after authorities arrested one of his employees. “I just decided that I will not risk that both my vegetables and milk will depend on workers whose papers can be a challenge,” he said. “That was the main driver.”
Before he started using robots, Hemminger’s farm produced about 800,000 pounds of milk per hour of human labor. Today the farm produces 2.5 million kilograms of milk per hour of human labor. He employed half as many people as he needed – a dozen workers to manage his herd of more than 2,000 dairy cows.
AI to expand range
Artificial intelligence is expanding the scope of work that robots can do. Companies are releasing machines like the LaserWeeder G2, which looks like a row of white metal cabinets mounted on a tractor but is basically a real-life Terminator: eye cameras, two Nvidia microchips for the brain and a pair of laser guns for weed-killing. It can grow a field of crops equal to the number of 75 workers per day. And it doesn’t need to rest.
Some industries have historically relied on low-cost labor from foreign countries running for self-employment. White Castle is installing robots to work at fast food stations, replacing one worker per shift. Amazon, the nation’s second largest private employer, estimates that automation will displace more than half a million of the company’s workers by 2033.
Agricultural automation can be a worthy goal in any management activity. It has long been one of the great engines of human development. The American Farm Bureau Federation estimates that in 1940, one farmer’s work fed about 20 people. Today, the work of one farmer, raised by many types of technology, provides food for more than 160 people. That freed up many people to do many other things with their lives.
By 2024 the average hourly farm wage was $18.12, about 60% of the average hourly wage for a non-farm worker, according to the Department of Agriculture. Even if jobs paid $30 an hour, would Americans go back to the farm?
It seems impossible. In 2011, of the roughly 500,000 unemployed North Carolina residents who were required to apply for state benefits, only 268 applied for farm jobs, according to an analysis by economist Michael Clemens. Farms hired almost all of those who applied, but only two-thirds showed up on the first day, and only seven worked during the harvest.
The bottom line is simple, Hemminger said: If American farms can’t import labor, Americans will have to import the fruits of that labor instead.
Despite the president’s conflict, the Trump administration has been quietly trying to accept the fact that America’s farms need immigrant workers, at least for the foreseeable future.
False hope
In November the administration announced changes expected to allow more than half a million seasonal workers each year – an increase of more than 25%. In a regulatory filing, the Department of Agriculture said the expansion is necessary because “trained and qualified American workers will not make themselves available in sufficient numbers.”
Chaos, false hope, quick attempts to fix your problems – all painful and useless.
Other administrations would have promised that leaving the immigrant workforce would bring real benefits without misleading Americans about the nature of those benefits. It may want to help family farms – for example, by providing cheap financing for automation. It would be open and fair to deal with the immigrants who will continue to milk the nation’s cows for many years.
Hemminger’s farm is a vision of a better future.
Trump doesn’t know how to get us there.
Binyamin Appelbaum is the lead economics and business writer for the New York Times editorial board.
