A better dairy safety net fix?
After reading Farm bill fixes may be coming in dairy’s safety net, our duly elected officials should first entirely eliminate “crooked operators” from the process. They can act quickly to require all dairy farmers and all ag-related processors to comply fully with current labor laws, and E-verify all employees before they are hired. If that results in every mega-dairy going “belly up” without their illegal immigrant labor force, so be it and good riddance.

No honest U.S. citizen should ever have to compete with crooked operators in the marketplace. No employer of illegal aliens has any right to expect assistance or consideration from USDA or any other governmental agency.

That’s the message that Rep. Glenn Thompson, R-Pa., and Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., should be taking to USDA: Enforce the law first before you put in any “fix.” Crooked operators should be sent to jail instead of sending their slimy, smirking lobbyists to Washington, D.C., to demand that our laws be changed for their financial benefit.

The mega-dairy business model has always been based on illegal alien labor. Enforce the law.

Sylvia Pagel

Winnebago, Ill.

Editors’ note: This may be a popular viewpoint, but overlooks a few facts. While undocumented workers are a problem, not every large-scale dairy has a hand in it. Most already use E-verify. Yet it doesn’t stop fraudulence, i.e. stolen or duplicate Social Security numbers. It only checks for valid IDs.

“Let them go and good riddance" creates vast economic hardship for communities having their livelihoods invested in supporting the dairy industry. You impact not just dairies but ethanol plants which count on selling distillers grains, plus farmers that need corn, sorghum and hay markets.

Finally, dairies much in need of a "fix" aren’t mega-dairies. They are family farms employing mostly family members, and, increasingly, robots.

Dairies of all sizes are extremely frustrated with the current H-2A agricultural guestworker program. Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, acknowledges that it’s “expensive, flawed and plagued with red tape.” That’s why he wrote the Agricultural Guestworker Act, now under consideration by Congress.

Two ‘thumbs up'
(Regarding Las Vegas, making sense of the senseless) You get two “thumbs up” for that editorial. I sure hope more folks see through the politics that Schumer, and etc., are spewing.

I had a conversation with a lifetime friend just yesterday about carrying “concealed” in church. It really surprised me; she does!  

I thought that the plane that went down in Shenksville, Pa., was the lesson to all of us — that we should be able to decide to defend ourselves. Where would the number have ended in Texas without an armed citizen?

Dean James,

Dansville, Pa.