Yawning, José pulls on his grimy work pants, then his boots and sweatshirt, releasing smells of cattle and hay into the air. The October morning is cold enough he’d see his breath if the farm wasn’t consumed by darkness, the moon hidden behind heavy clouds.

José’s wife, Victoria, calls out in broken English as she walks up and down the aisles of the barn: “Come on, let’s go. Come on, come on.” The cows glare at her before they begin, one by one, their familiar stroll toward the milking parlor.

The daily routine is like the one familiar to generations of Wisconsin farm families. But unlike those farmers, this young Mexican couple, José and Victoria, said goodbye to their families and traveled 1,720 miles to work long hours on a dairy farm in western Wisconsin among people who do not speak their language and in a place where their residence is illegal.

José says most Americans don’t like immigrants. “They think that we are here invading their territory. But we aren’t left with any other option because the situation in Mexico is very, very difficult.”

Despite the ever-present threat of deportation, José and his wife have a sort of job security they never found in Mexico: Their employment is all but ensured by the need for inexpensive labor at larger dairy farms that are increasingly common across Wisconsin’s rolling pasture lands.

The couple’s story is representative of roughly 5,000 immigrants who have become the labor backbone of Wisconsin’s signature industry. Immigrants now account for about 40 percent of the state’s dairy labor force, up from just 5 percent 10 years ago, according to a 2009 study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Program on Agricultural Technology Studies. While that study didn’t explore immigration status, earlier federal surveys have estimated that half of all immigrant crop workers nationwide are working illegally.

José and Victoria requested that their real names be withheld out of fear they might be identified by law enforcement and pursued as illegal immigrants. Though interviewed in Spanish, José and Victoria have learned enough English to understand directions on the farm and to function daily in western Wisconsin while raising two bilingual children.

To say José and Victoria work from sunrise to sunset would be inaccurate — their day starts in darkness before the sun rises and ends in darkness, well after its final rays have been blocked by the hills to the west.

With empty stomachs, save for a large mug of fresh milk from the cows, mixed with instant coffee and honey, Victoria and José climb into their pickup truck and drive the five-minute stretch of highway to the dairy farm.

While Victoria begins herding the cows into the milking parlor, José prepares the milking equipment.

The work requires some skill. In addition to directing animals using shouts, whistles and movements, he also operates machinery including the milk pumping system.

“Sometimes I come tired and there’s something I forget to do,” says José, recalling one morning a few months ago when milk began spewing on the floor from an overhead pipe because he forgot to correctly prepare the pump. “There’s a lot to remember.”

Once the cows walk into the parlor, José sanitizes their teats before attaching suction cups. The mooing crescendos as the remaining cows grow impatient. Ten at a time, the cows are milked and led back to the barn.

By the time the cows return, Victoria has cleaned the barn and filled the stalls with feed. When finished, she comes to the parlor to help her husband finish milking.

The two talk sparingly as they focus on work, an old radio crackling out Mexican mariachi and ranchera songs to the background noise of industrial-sized fans. By the time the sun rises, the work has become mechanical, routine.

Ask Victoria if it’s boring, and she laughs: “I don’t have time to be bored.”

Four hours after the morning milking began, the last cows head back to the barn, and José and Victoria clean the parlor.

At 11, the couple returns home to cook lunch — already six hours into the workday. Victoria, who works about 40 hours a week, usually spends the rest of the day doing chores or running errands. José works an average of 70 hours a week.

For their labor, José earns $11 per hour and Victoria earns $8 per hour, and their combined take-home pay is about $1,900 every two weeks. Little remains after their employer deducts taxes (including Social Security, which they are ineligible to receive) and they cover their rent, truck payment, gas, utilities and groceries — plus the $200 per month they send to help support families back home in Mexico.

At the end of their long days, José and Victoria return to their modest but comfortable home, an old two-bedroom farmhouse they rent from their boss for $330 a month. Awaiting them are their 13-year-old daughter, Maria, and 8-year-old son, Antonio. The children have already finished their homework for the following day (there’s no TV until it’s all done).

It’s dinner time. Antonio and María run around the large kitchen, excited as mom prepares their favorite dish: spaghetti cooked in a rich tomato-cream sauce with corn and jalapeños. The children speak fluent Spanish and English, and their conversations switch frequently between the two. They always speak Spanish to their parents, who understand English well but are still uncomfortable speaking it.

After dinner, the children watch impatiently as dad navigates the DISH Network Latino channels. They want to watch “The Hulk,” but he prefers a Spanish-language soap opera. At a suspenseful moment in the show, José and the children watch with worried looks on their faces. Meanwhile, Victoria is curled up in a blanket on the sofa, exhausted from the day’s work.

It’s a home life not unlike that of other families in rural Wisconsin. The difference is, their home life is almost all they’ve got.

The family doesn’t usually go out to dinner, a movie or bowling like other local families. Twice a month, when they get their paycheck, they drive into town for a Domino’s pizza: Hawaiian with jalapeños. But as soon as it’s ready, they jump back in their pickup truck and drive out of town to eat their meal back at home.

Sometimes they all drive into town to go shopping, but out of hesitation to communicate with store employees and a general feeling that they aren’t welcome, their trip differs from that of most families. “Sometimes we eat out together, or go to the mall — only to look, nothing else,” José says.

But while longtime residents of rural Wisconsin might see people like José and his family as outsiders, the fact that the immigrants are settling here is because the children of many established families are leaving.

Tim Servais, who has a 240-cow dairy heard outside La Crosse, remembers a time when the children of dairy farmers used to work on the farm, learning the ropes with the goal of one day inheriting it as their own.

Those days are disappearing for many families. Servais says farmers today simply have fewer children, and those children don’t always share the traditional vision of taking on the family business.

It’s not hard to understand why children are choosing to go to college or pursue other industries over farm work.

“It’s labor intense,” Servais says. “When you’re (on) a dairy farm you’re on call 24-7, 365, no matter if you’re on vacation or you’re down at the local store or what.”

That fact had profound consequences for Servais after he expanded his farm operation in 1995. At first he relied on local adults, teenagers and farm kids to do what work he couldn’t handle himself. He liked the comfort of personally knowing the backgrounds of his employees. But about three years back, Servais found the locals had stopped coming to his barn door. “I just couldn’t find people to do the work.”

Those who did come, often high school students, were generally unreliable, a big problem in a business that requires timely and skillful milking at unusual hours.

“There are all kinds of people that want to come around and work, but it’s to their convenience,” Servais says. “It’d be Friday evening and they call at 5 o’clock and they’re supposed to be there at 5 o’clock — ‘I’m not going to make it tonight, something came up.’ Well you know what came up, something more fun than working.”

In need of a work force he could depend on and afford, Servais turned to immigrants, and he now employs three of them.

“They don’t get paid a lot now, but that’s one thing I’m working on is paying them more because I really appreciate the fact that they’re helping me out, and they’re very good,” Servais says.

That sentiment is echoed widely throughout rural Wisconsin.

Loren Wolfe, co-owner of a 575-cow dairy farm near Cochrane, says he needs Latino immigrants to milk his cows or “we’d barely be in business.”

The need for immigrant workers is exacerbated by low milk prices, as farmers depend upon cheap labor to remain profitable. Wolfe’s business partner, John Rosenow, estimated the pair would have to pay native workers twice the rate his Latino employees are willing to work for — $7.25 an hour, according to one of their immigrant employees.

Rosenow, who employs eight Latino workers, says even if he could find local workers who were dedicated to farm life, the increased salary costs would bankrupt his business.

Plus, Rosenow says, farmers hire immigrants because they are “excellent,” hard workers. In fact, they are “so much more capable than what we could find before” with local workers.

Although dairy farm owners follow the same legal hiring laws as all employers, many say the process is complicated by the assumption that many Latinos are undocumented, meaning they don’t have the proper work visas or have come to the United States illegally.

“In my opinion there is a high percentage of undocumented labor that is being used in dairy farms,” says Erich Straub, a Milwaukee attorney who specializes in deportation defense. Straub says because of contradictory immigration laws, it is in the best interest of farmers not to know if their workers are illegal.

“See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. I don’t think they want to know,” Straub says. “I think they’re in a very difficult position where they have a need for labor, they have a declining labor pool in their community ... it’s a very challenging environment for farmers to run a business.”

While most farmers will tell you they follow the rules, Straub says the larger problem is that employment law is vague enough to allow some undocumented workers to slip through the cracks.

Employers must require all job applicants to fill out a federal I-9 employment eligibility form and show multiple forms of identification to prove they are authorized to work. Employers send the applicants’ Social Security numbers to the Social Security Administration for tax purposes. Unless they receive a “no-match” letter stating that a Social Security number does not match a known worker, applicants are cleared for employment.

Undocumented immigrants often evade the issue by guessing at a valid number, or by paying someone to provide them with a Social Security number of an eligible worker, immigrants and experts say.

Employers must examine a worker’s identification documents and make a good faith decision as to their validity. The confusion arises with the notion of “constructive knowledge,” which states that employers who have an indication that employees may not be eligible must take further steps to ensure their eligibility or terminate them. Constructive knowledge could arise from a document that looks false, a “no-match” letter, or even overhearing the worker say that a visa expired.

But Tom Hochstatter, a Milwaukee attorney who specializes in immigration law, says the constructive knowledge provision creates unique problems for dairy farmers.

“Dairy farmers,” he says, “are freaked out because their situation is such that, while they might not know that any particular person is legal or illegal, they know statistically that if they have 15 dairy workers ... statistically the chances are that some don’t have genuine documents. There’s this fear.”

Rosenow, the Cochrane farmer, says the constructive knowledge provision gives farmers an incentive to know as little about the legal status of their workers as possible.

“If a reasonable person could look at the documents and would make the assumption that they’re legit, then you accept them,” Rosenow says.

There is no shortage of immigrant applicants at Wisconsin’s dairy farms.

Sandi Zirbel, co-owner of a 635-cow dairy cooperative outside of Green Bay, says as many as 19 out of 20 applicants for open positions are immigrants. As for the current staff at Zirbel Dairy Farms, seven of the nine farmhands are immigrants.

“They’re more likely to seek this type of work,” Zirbel says. “Why somebody would want to leave Mexico and come to Wisconsin to milk in the middle of winter, I don’t know ... but there’s a lot of them up here.”

Ask José why he came to Wisconsin, and he will tell you that it’s all about opportunity.

He, Victoria, María and Antonio each hold distinct memories of their life in Mozomboa, Mexico, their hometown of 3,000 located near the Gulf of Mexico, 175 miles east of Mexico City. While José took whatever daily jobs he could find on a local farm, the children sold snacks and water to locals as street vendors.

They all agree the hardest part of their drawn-out move was when José and eventually Victoria went to work in the United States, leaving their children behind.

“We couldn’t see them growing,” says Victoria, who tears up as she recalls leaving to create a new life for her children in America. After two years of separation, she returned to Mexico in 2007 to bring her children across the border.

José and Victoria don’t like talking about their journey into America — that episode in their life is over. But the kids can’t keep from recounting the story, the memory of the blisters on their feet walking north through the desert with their mother.

José says he came here because he wanted a job with a wage that could support his family. He entered the U.S. legally with a work visa, but decided not to return to Mexico after it expired.

“I love this country because there are many opportunities, many jobs — not like in Mexico,” José says. “And it’s more beautiful. Wherever one goes, one sees beautiful pastures.”

But opportunity is not the same as security. A couple of state-issued photo IDs and Social Security numbers they purchased illegally for $400 each are all the documentation they have. Neither can get a driver’s license. Neither can get subsidized public health insurance in Wisconsin.

The cost of medical treatment is a problem José and Victoria know all too well: Three months ago, Victoria was rushed to a hospital for appendicitis. A $20,000 hospital bill on their kitchen table is a reminder of the challenge of being without insurance.

As María listens to her mom retell the story of the late-night hospital trip, a worried look creeps across her face. She knows her parents don’t have the money to pay the bill, and she’s scared about her future.

But, in her usual manner of making a lesson out of their challenges, Victoria turns to María, wipes away her own tears, and smiles: “If I were dead, how could I pay the bill then? Life is more important.”

Editor’s note: The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism (www.wisconsinwatch.org) is a recently formed nonprofit that makes its in-depth work on major topics available to news outlets statewide. For this report, the center collaborated with several organizations, including the Country Today, a weekly newspaper that focuses on agricultural and rural issues.