October 29, 2026
Idaho’s Cheap Slave Labor Lobby Bragged about Beating You
By: Brian Lenney
The Idaho cheap labor lobby just said the quiet part out loud…
Rick Naerebout runs the Idaho Dairymen’s Association. And the Washington State Dairy Federation.
In a new article, 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 around $200,000 on nine Republican primaries to protect what he calls the “firewall” of moderate senators.
Their guy won in 8 of those 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:
“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, the cheap labor lobby rolled out the “Idaho Alliance for a Legal Workforce” and sponsored an economic study with a press conference to try and scare the Legislature (didn’t work).
The Idaho Farm Bureau hosted it.
Their study admits 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 saying we should “stay away from government red tape policies like e-verify.” E-Verify is how you check that a worker is legal. And the ironic part is they named their group after the exact thing they’re fighting against: a legal workforce.
Their “fact sheet” says losing these 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.”
Yes, they wrote that.
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. 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. Rig it that way and the only answer you can ever get is more cheap foreign labor.
The scenario they ran was roughly 70% of Idaho’s illegal workforce gone in a single year.
Show me the Idaho bill that does that. You can’t. So instead they built a scary hypothetical and waved it at the Legislature and the press as if any bill we pushed did that.
And they can’t keep their own numbers straight anyway. 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 though.
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 kidding.
What American wants to show up to a crew where nobody speaks his language, in lousy 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.
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 kid down the road. But 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.)
So here’s your homework. Go look up which nine races that $200,000 went into. Then ask your state senator, by name, which side of the firewall they’re on.
Vote YES on HJR6.
Cheers,
Brian
