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- Skilled immigrant workers like Ricardo Manriquez and dairy herdsman Alex are integral to Wisconsin’s foundries and farms but face growing uncertainty under shifting federal immigration rules.
- Manriquez, on a temporary TN visa, helps design complex metal castings in Manitowoc but has a tenuous path to permanent residency as visa policies and fees change.
- On a dairy near Madison, Alex, who lacks legal status, struggles to recruit and retain workers as immigration enforcement tightens and labor pipelines dry up.
- Wisconsin employers in manufacturing and agriculture say the changing immigration landscape is shrinking labor pools, complicating hiring and long-term workforce planning.
Ricardo Manriquez starts his shift at the Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry headquarters in Manitowoc long before the sun rises. More than 100 miles away, on a dairy farm near Madison, a herdsman named Alex is heading out to the barn with his crew to milk a few hundred cows.
Both are middle-aged fathers with neat haircuts and sensible work boots. Both studied at technical schools and have years of hands-on experience in their fields. Both are immigrants from Latin America who settled in Wisconsin over the past two decades. The Trump administration’s efforts to ramp up immigration enforcement and overhaul visa rules leave both men and their employers in difficult positions.
The recruitment pathway that brought Manriquez, an engineer from Mexico with a temporary work visa, to Wisconsin remains mostly untouched by the Trump administration’s overhaul of federal immigration policy, but his prospects of securing permanent residency in the foreseeable future have faded. Alex, an undocumented immigrant from Nicaragua, is in a more precarious position. His small team is poised to shrink, and finding new hires is more difficult than ever.
At least one in 20 Wisconsin workers is a noncitizen, and many Wisconsin employers have watched recent federal immigration policy changes sever, clog or redirect their hiring pipelines. Those employers — in manufacturing, dairy and innumerable other segments of Wisconsin’s economy — are finding their bearings in the new policy landscape, and more shake-ups or reversals may lie ahead.
The Tijuana engineer pipeline
Manriquez’s office sits near a door to the Manitowoc plant’s labyrinthine production floor, where the motion alarms on forklifts periodically cut through the hum of heavy machinery and a Nirvana album blasting from a worker’s portable speaker.
“All my life I was involved with grease and cars and steel,” Manriquez said. His father was a mechanic, he said, and his hometown, Tijuana, is a manufacturing powerhouse. Relatively low labor costs have drawn hundreds of manufacturers to cities near Mexico’s northern border, which now serve as a hub for the North American electronics, automotive parts, aerospace and medical device industries.
With an electro-mechanical engineering degree from a local technical university in hand, Manriquez found work at Prime Wheel, an American automotive parts company with a corporate office and fabrication facilities in one of Tijuana’s factory districts. He spent nearly a decade there, working long shifts with tedious commutes while attempting to raise a family. “In Mexico, we work 48 to 60 or even 80 hours a week without extra pay,” he said. “You get paid $50 to $60 a day … If you have a family, it really doesn’t help. You need to do a side job.”
Though his supervisor promoted him from designer to project engineer, Manriquez saw few opportunities to climb higher at Prime Wheel’s Tijuana plant. Prime Wheel did not respond to a request for comment.
The TN visa program was Manriquez’s ticket to cross the border. A product of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the TN visa provides a three-year work authorization to Mexican and Canadian nationals with job offers for a limited number of high-skilled professions.
Compared with other types of employment-based visas, like the H-1B favored in the tech and health care industries, the TN visa offers a straighter path to the U.S. for skilled Mexican workers. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services approved nearly 16,000 TN visas for Mexican nationals in 2024, compared to just under 2,000 H-1B visas for Mexican nationals. Only 42 Canadians received TN visas that year.
Manriquez learned about an opening in Manitowoc through word of mouth, and Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry was already primed to use the TN visa program to recruit skilled engineers.
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When Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry purchased a metal castings manufacturer in New Hampton, Iowa, in 2024, the company absorbed the plant’s team, including four TN visa holders. It has retained those workers and hired three more since the acquisition, including Manriquez, who joined the company last February. Most came from Tijuana’s metals industry.
The company is trying to build a domestic pipeline. It has a relationship with Wisconsin’s technical college system, which trains engineers for a range of manufacturing roles, including on quality control teams like Manriquez’s. “It’s really hard to say if (those) skill needs are growing or shrinking,” said Ian Cameron, dean of Northcentral Technical College’s School of Engineering and Advanced Manufacturing, noting that day-to-day responsibilities and compensation for engineers with similar titles vary between companies.
But attracting and retaining talent for plants in small Midwestern towns is a constant challenge, said Michelle Szymik, the company’s human resources director. New Hampton, population 3,500, sits in a quiet stretch of northeast Iowa, and skilled engineers with U.S. citizenship tend to favor less-isolated workplaces.
Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry’s product line compounds its recruiting challenges. The foundry produces intricately detailed castings for Dodge sports cars and SpaceX satellites, among other clients, and few students of U.S. technical colleges have mastered the skills needed to design those castings by graduation. “It takes a long time to come up to speed on that kind of stuff,” Szymik added. “So we do internships, but at the end of the day, it’s really nice when you can find somebody who’s already got the skill set.”
Mexico’s advanced manufacturing industry provides a straightforward solution. Engineers like Manriquez come with years of experience and, Szymik said, are more willing to settle in small towns to “take care of their family and build a career.” Manriquez can earn more in two hours than he did in a day in Tijuana, and he no longer spends hours of his day trapped in gridlock.
The visa comes with trade-offs. Manriquez’s wife and children remain in Mexico, and while they are eligible to join him in Manitowoc as dependents, his wife would not receive work authorization.
The TN visa is not a path to permanent residency, and Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry would eventually need to sponsor Manriquez for another employment-based visa before helping him secure a green card and a long-term career with the company.
One of the more common paths would involve securing Manriquez an H-1B visa, which would allow him to simultaneously hold a “nonimmigrant” visa and apply for a green card. But the company would first need to prove it can’t find an equally qualified U.S. citizen for the job. If it finds a qualified candidate, Manriquez would be out of a job and on his way back to Tijuana.
The company spent nearly $12,000 to transition another employee from a TN to an H-1B visa, most of which went to legal fees. The Trump administration raised that hurdle even higher last year, introducing a $100,000 fee for new H-1B visa applications — a price tag few employers can afford, including Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry.
Wisconsin’s manufacturing sector could bear the brunt of the new H-1B fees. Of the more than 1,600 workers employed in Wisconsin who received H-1B visas or renewed their visas last year, roughly a quarter worked in manufacturing. No other sector in the state sponsored more H-1B visas in 2025.
Manriquez can still renew his TN visa, but the breakneck pace of the Trump administration’s policy changes gives him reason to wonder whether that will remain true. “Suddenly, one day to another, (things) probably can change,” he said.
Wanted: ‘a good future for our children’
On a chilly morning in early December, Alex wore only a long-sleeve thermal shirt and a vest as he checked on the herd.
“We deal with the cold and the heat. We’re out there in all of that,” Alex told Wisconsin Watch in Spanish. “And it doesn’t matter to us because what we want is to work. What we want is to build a good future for our children.”
Alex is at ease around the animals. He studied agricultural sciences at a technical high school, and he was partway through a veterinary degree at a university in Managua 15 years ago when he headed north from Nicaragua to the U.S. He feared that the country’s security apparatus would some day come for him — a vocal opponent of authoritarian President Daniel Ortega.
He eventually approached an attorney about obtaining legal status, only to learn he had missed the eligibility window, which ended a year after his arrival. Because he lacks legal status, Wisconsin Watch has agreed to use only his first name.
“After 15 years in this country that respects your rights as a person, as a worker,” he said, going back to Nicaragua feels unthinkable. His brother, who spent four years working in Wisconsin, recently returned to care for his son, reporting back that allegiance to the ruling party is now required to access government services.
Alex has worked in dairies and manufacturing since arriving in Wisconsin, settling down at his current workplace in south-central Wisconsin to join his partner, with whom he has U.S.-born children. To minimize their risk of crossing paths with immigration enforcement, Alex’s family has cut back on all but the most basic errands. “We no longer think, ‘Oh, it’s a summer weekend. Let’s go to the mall. Let’s take the kids to an amusement park,’” he said. “We’ve reduced it to the minimum: if we need to go to a clinic or a hospital for a medical appointment, to school, to buy food.”
Alongside his daily duties leading a crew of fellow immigrant workers — all from Nicaragua — Alex serves as the farm’s recruiter. He’s held the role for the past five years, giving him a front-row view of the federal immigration crackdown’s impact on hiring.
“It’s been eight months since the last person came (to ask for work),” he said. “Before, people came here constantly.”
With two members of his small crew preparing to leave the U.S., Alex now relies on his extensive network of former colleagues and acquaintances across Wisconsin to drum up replacement candidates. He’s competing with manufacturers who can offer overtime, but the farm’s isolation is now a selling point.
“Right now, security is a consideration. A farm is more separate, less involved, fewer moving people and cars,” he said. “The working conditions will be a little harder, but there’s more security.”
The farm’s owner, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid drawing the attention of immigration enforcement officials, added that skilled dairy workers can now be more selective when searching for new jobs. “The (labor) pool is clearly getting smaller,” he said. “If you don’t have a number of things — a nice, comfortable, attractive facility, one that people want to work in, if you don’t have a good company culture, and if you can’t provide housing, you’ll have a hard time hiring and retaining people.”
Wisconsin Farmers Union President Darin Van Ruden expects the labor drought to inflate farm wages. “You’re going to have to pay more to keep help,” he said, “which means paying someone $25 an hour versus $15.” Not all farms will be able to afford the new labor market, he added.
Alex’s employer says he has looked into the H-2A program, which provides temporary visas for hundreds of thousands of seasonal farmworkers each year, as a backup if his current crew shrinks. At least 16% of the agricultural employers that hired through the H-2A program last year own dairy herds, up from just 6% in 2020, but most sought agricultural equipment operators in seasonal job listings submitted to the U.S. Department of Labor. But the H-2A program does not provide visas for year-round roles like milking cows — a core responsibility of Alex and his crew. With that source of labor off the table, the farm’s recruitment options are slim.
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While some farmers are exploring reducing labor needs through automation and rotary milking parlors, akin to a lazy Susan for cows, those options don’t eliminate the need for workers entirely.
While automation may reduce the need for some types of labor on dairy farms, some workers may simply shift to other tasks, said Hernando Duarte, a farm labor management outreach specialist with UW-Madison.
“Maybe you can need less people in the parlor,” he said, “but who is going to feed the calves? All the calves have to be fed two or three times a day. I’ve also seen more people moving more into tractors and feed work.” Rotary milking parlors, he added, also require trained staff to operate and clean.
Many workers who will learn to operate the automated milking equipment, Duarte added, will likely come from the same labor pool that currently keeps many Wisconsin dairies afloat: immigrants. But Wisconsin’s technical colleges are also preparing dairy science students for the industry’s technological frontier. Dr. Greg Cisewski, dean of Northcentral Technical College’s School of Agricultural Sciences, Utilities and Transportation, said several graduates have gone on to manage automated milking operations.
Meanwhile, Alex is preparing for the worst. He and his partner have arranged to temporarily transfer custody of their children to a U.S. citizen if they are arrested or deported, and he has been sending money back to Nicaragua for years to build a backup nest egg.
When Alex came to the U.S., he left behind a 1-year-old son. He has kept in touch, and his now-teenage son recently shared his plans to study veterinary medicine. “The degree I couldn’t finish is the degree he’s going to study,” he said.
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