THE COURTESY OF THE OPPRESSED.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: OVER THE WALL

This summer, just as my family and I were packing up and getting ready to move from Madison, Wisconsin, to Oaxaca, Mexico, for a year, a lot of Mexican immigrant workers in Wisconsin's dairy industry were thinking about leaving, too.

The headline on a local news story produced by the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism declared: "Americas Dairyland and Trump in the rearview mirror as workers return to Mexico."

Reporter Alexandra Hall described watching the Hernandez family pack up a Honda pickup truck with all of their belongings before making the 2,300-mile drive from a dairy farm in Wisconsin back to Veracruz, Mexico.

"It looks like a scene from The Grapes of Wrath" farm owner Doug Knoepke observed, as he watched his workers get ready to leave.

Donald Trumps election, nasty rhetoric about Mexicans, and a raft of anti-immigrant bills and executive orders are spreading fear among immigrant families in Wisconsin and throughout the United States.

About 200 Latino immigrants--mothers, fathers, and little children--gathered on the steps of the state capitol in Madison in late June to protest legislation that would turn local law enforcement officers into immigration police.

Protesters held signs that said "Got Milk? Not Without Immigrants." Speakers addressed the crowd in Spanish and English. After the speeches, dairy workers and their allies delivered milk bottles to state legislators' offices. The labels on the bottles showed an immigrant worker and his child, and asked the legislators to vote against legislation that would split up families.

An estimated 80 percent of dairy workers in Wisconsin are undocumented immigrants.

"Without us, who's going to work 365 days a year in the cold and the heat?" dairy worker Miguel Estrada asked.

"I worry about the future for my kids," another dairy worker, Manuel Estrada, told me in Spanish after the demonstration. "One day my son came home from school and another little boy had told him, 'I don't want to play with you anymore--my father told me not to talk to Mexicans' He is so little. And he felt bad."

Several workers said they know people who are considering going back to Mexico because of the ugly political climate in the United States.

Harsh anti-immigrant bills, based on model legislation created by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), have been introduced across the country. In Wisconsin, one such bill was turned back this year through a massive organizing campaign. The Day Without Latinos general strike, organized by the Milwaukee-based immigrant-rights group Voces de la Frontera, got...