The refugees were headed to a city 150 miles away, but the public uproar over their imminent arrival quickly migrated across county lines, down the lush rural roads of south-central Wisconsin and here into the quiet town of Baraboo where Dr. Eleanor Vita had recently retired. She set out to research the matter herself, which was how, within the dull depths of government reports about resettlement, she found what she believed was proof of dishonesty about the cost of the program.
She had underlined the documents in red pen; she had shared her concerns with confidants and neighbors; and now she was standing at a lectern before the Sauk County Board of Supervisors to present what she had found.
“When you really think about it, who really costs us money? The children,” Vita told her local representatives.
Buried in the report’s tables, she explained, was the fact that the children of refugees were an outsize burden on state and local resources because they enrolled in public schools but would not pay taxes until they reached adulthood. Her diction was precise and economical as she spoke about fiscal accountability and the burden this placed on local budgets.
“When you look at all of these studies, when you think about it, the federal government is using state and local government to fund this,” she said. “We are asking for a pause until our county taxpayers are informed of the overall net cost of resettling refugees in our county.”
“There is no transparency, no transparency in the current refugee resettlement process,” she added.
It did not escape Vita, 66, that she was the only person of color in the drab Sauk County boardroom, where nearly four dozen other riled-up members of the public had also gathered to implore their government leaders to prevent refugees from being sent here. Who better than her, Vita thought, to speak to this issue? She had come to the United States from the Philippines in the 1970s when she was 18 years old, four years after martial law had been declared there. She was an immigrant herself, and a mother, and an educated professional.
Across the country, disagreements about immigration policy are still at the heart of politics eight years after Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign, which was propelled by warnings about foreigners bringing drugs and violence into the United States. It was persuasive rhetoric that year for many in Wisconsin, a state once seen as a Democratic bulwark but which had come to swing between political parties on vanishingly thin vote margins.
The same was true of Sauk County, a rural area northwest of Madison, where 93 percent of residents are White, about 1 in 5 have college degrees and a growing number are over 65 years old. Like Wisconsin itself, Sauk County went twice for Barack Obama, then for Trump in 2016, then for Joe Biden in 2020. This is a swing county in a swing state.
There was plenty of critical local business facing the elected board of supervisors this term: the sale of a public nursing home; the rising cost of housing; funding for public schools; the scarcity of day-care options for working parents.
But on an August night in Baraboo, those concerns were edged out by the question of who belonged in America at all, as has so often been the case throughout the political era ushered in by Trump, who is betting once again that a campaign built on dire warnings about immigrants will carry him to the White House. Facing a close race against Vice President Kamala Harris, the former president’s rhetoric has become increasingly dark, culminating in the spread of unsubstantiated claims by Trump and his running mate that refugees in another Midwestern town have been kidnapping and eating people’s pets.
In Baraboo, the discussion was framed in the dry language of county government bureaucracy, on an agenda where it was listed as “Item 17 (C): Refugee Resettlement Resolution 64-2024.” If passed, it would ask state lawmakers to give places like Sauk County more say over whether refugees could move within 100 miles and require public notice before they did so. Away from the spectacle of a presidential campaign, here was a collision of values between neighbors. The discussion would also become a tangle of facts and emotions.
As she spoke, Vita’s remarks rankled one supervisor in particular, a man named Shaun Harris, 43, a professional writer and stay-at-home dad who had joined the county board just four months before. Vita had been introduced that evening by a like-minded ally as “a math genius,” someone with the credibility to talk about this issue truthfully.
“What are you a doctor of?” Harris asked.
“I’m a physician,” Vita said. “Family medicine.”
“Okay. And what are your qualifications as a ‘math genius’?” he asked.
Vita felt a flash of anger at the question.
“I am a chemical engineer. I worked for 10 years, I worked —” she said.
“As a mathematician? As an economist?” Harris asked.
“Uh, partially,” she said
“Do you have any legal expertise?” Harris asked.
“No, but I can read and I have a brain,” Vita said.
Her lips were pursed.
People in the audience clapped at her retort.
“I don’t think I’m going to earn any friends tonight,” Harris said.
* * *
Harris sat with dread at the front of the board room, worrying that the other 30 members of the county board of supervisors would side with Vita — and what it would say about his community.
“Quick show of hands here. How many people here have family that came over on the Mayflower? None?! None, okay,” Harris said to the room in a deadpan. “I have a brain and I can read, too, and I read the report, and picking out one little bit of it is disingenuous.”
The county supervisors in Sauk were elected but received just $90 per board meeting and kept outside employment. They weren’t staffed with advisers and were officially nonpartisan, though membership seemed to lean conservative. Harris wondered how many of his colleagues had time that week to look through the resolution to understand what was before them. Several seemed surprised to find the issue on the agenda at all.
Harris spoke quickly as he explained that the report cited by Vita, which had been published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, found that refugees contributed more money through their taxes over time than they cost to assist. The children of refugees were often American citizens.
“That’s a lie,” several members of the public stated from the back of the room.
“Baloney!” a man shouted.
Harris had also carefully read the refugee resolution and reached out to state bureaucrats for more information. He learned that it was symbolic because refugee resettlement falls outside the authority of county government.
More maddening to him, Harris also learned that there were fewer than 10 refugees settled in all of Sauk County, according to the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families. The county did not have a single refugee resettlement agency, and the closest one was in Dane County, about 50 miles away from Baraboo. Without an agency there to manage placements, groups of refugees headed to Wisconsin in the future were highly unlikely to end up in Sauk County, and those who would were likely to have family connections in the area.
Harris pushed through more heckling as he spoke.
He did not consider himself to be a crusader or someone looking to pick fights on behalf of liberal positions. He was a Republican for much of his life, voting for President George W. Bush twice before “learning more about the world” and voting for Obama, Hillary Clinton and Biden. He moved here 15 years ago following his wife, a physician who grew up in Sauk County. He wrote novels and comic books. He had not intended to run for office but won a last-minute write-in campaign in April that was driven by concern over a plan to sell a county-run nursing home. Occasionally, he found himself overwhelmed by the range of issues coming before the board.
Tonight’s conversation was a jolt. It bothered Harris, who was a former social studies teacher with a master’s in education, that refugees and immigrants in the country illegally were often conflated. He believed in helping people in need, which he had learned from his father, he said, who was a retired police officer and his idol. He thought this resolution was dividing this county to score political points for Republican politicians, who were debating similar measures in county boards across the state. This felt more about the fight than about the outcome, an attempt to whip up fear even in a place where no refugees were coming.
That’s what Harris thought was so wrong with politics in America in 2024: that fear could be so easily manipulated, that the bonds between neighbors were acceptable collateral damage to those seeking political power.
“These are not illegal immigrants coming through our southern border. They are not bringing fentanyl. They are not criminals. These are legal immigrants,” he continued. “These are people who are escaping hellish situations hoping against hope that there is a place where decent people will say, ‘You can be safe. We will take care of you. We will help.’”
“And I’m hoping Wisconsin be that kind of place, but I guess not from what I’ve heard tonight,” he added.
In March, Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, vetoed Republican legislation that called for local input before refugee resettlements. That bill had followed uproar over news that roughly 20 Somali families, who had fled violence and instability, would resettle in Eau Claire, a city about 150 miles from Baraboo. The governor said the bill duplicated existing federal law on refugee resettlement.
Read carefully, the resolution before the Sauk County Board of Supervisors encouraged the reintroduction of the legislation.
“Anne Frank would have been a refugee if her father had not been denied because refugee limits were lowered during the ’30s and ’40s. Because it was argued that our economy could not handle the influx of Jews and foreign Jews were too dangerous to let into the country,” Harris told the other supervisors and the public, sounding increasingly strident.
“It’s the oldest trick in the book,” Harris concluded. “You never go broke selling the American public fear, and that’s what’s going on tonight.”
“Oh, Lord,” a woman said in the back.
* * *
Later, Vita would think back with resentment about the moment Harris had called her credentials into question. She looked up Harris and learned he had degrees in American studies and film from the University of Notre Dame. She thought dismissively: How is his training any more relevant than mine?
Back in the Philippines, where she grew up the precocious daughter of an electrical engineer, Vita had excelled at math, she recalled. When she moved to the United States as a college sophomore, she earned money by grading her peers’ calculus papers as a teacher’s assistant. She studied chemical engineering, which included economics classes, and in time also earned a medical degree at the University of Southern California. She spent 16 years working with the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.
When she was still new to America, Vita recalled, she was deferential and self-conscious about her accent. She prided herself on now mostly speaking without one. That girl who doubted herself as a new immigrant to America had learned not to let her confidence be shaken.
She had worked hard, she said, to build the life she had and to be treated with respect.
After her retirement, she and her husband, a lawyer, had moved in 2022 from Minnesota back here in south-central Wisconsin, where they had lived in the late 1990s and still owned a home. With time to fill, Vita joined the county board’s health committee as a citizen member, where she pushed forward the refugee resolution.
Although she presented an economic argument in front of the board, in truth she was also very nervous about crime. Vita dislikes politics, she said, but she had become increasingly fearful about illegal immigration. A registered Republican, she plans to vote for Trump in November.
She looked into statistics that suggested immigrants — including those in the country illegally — were less likely than natural born American citizens to commit crimes. But she was skeptical about their methodology and conclusions. All of this put her at odds with a brother who is a “staunch Democrat,” she said, and her daughter, who is also liberal.
Vita resented the insinuation that she was racist for her safety concerns about undocumented immigrants.
And there were also her questions about fairness.
“It isn’t fair for the U.S. to just let all of these millions of people in when I had to wait 10 years to get in here,” she said in a later interview. “And then what are the people doing who are here illegally? I see on TV the crimes are done by some of these illegal aliens who to me are not supposed to be here.”
“And to me, illegal immigrants are taking the easy way out. They’re not working for things that they want or need,” she added.
In this board room, at least, the crowd of four dozen was with Vita. They had heard about the issue on local TV news and on social media, and Vita saw their presence as proof of widespread solidarity with her cause. Vita’s husband was with her, too, to echo her concerns.
Many who spoke also carefully couched their arguments in economics.
“I think that funds should be spent on taking care of our homeless veterans, first and foremast,” Cindy Ormsen said during public testimony on the issue.
“We know that our schools, health care and police departments are being stressed to their limit,” Gordon Statz said.
The crowd cheered.
“I will request the public to please show restraint on applause,” interjected the county supervisor who was presiding over the meeting. “It doesn’t take much for a meeting to get out of hand.”
A man named Richard Matthews walked up to the lectern.
“The last two, three years, we’ve seen the line grow at the Beyond Blessed Food Pantry. We’ve got hundreds of cars now waiting; they start lining up at 12 o’clock. So we’ve got people in our own town, our own county that need help,” said Matthews, talking rapidly, one thought crashing into the next.
“In Aurora, Colorado, a Venezuelan gang has taken over an entire apartment complex there; they’ve chased all of the residents out. It’s quite a story,” Matthews continued, repeating a claim circulated on conservative media that Aurora’s police department has said is untrue. “In the U.K., they are arresting people for writing Facebook posts that object to the illegal immigration in their county. They’re clearing out the jails by the thousands, and they’re putting their own people in jail just for complaining about the illegals. That’s what they’ve got slated for us here.”
Matthews, 66, was a Democratic voter for nearly all his adult life, motivated by antiwar positions he embraced as a student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the early 1980s. In 2016, he supported Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the Democratic primaries; when the party machinery mobilized against Sanders’s candidacy, Matthews felt it was done to him personally, he said in an interview. He and could not bring himself to cast a ballot for Clinton. He voted for Jill Stein instead. Voters like Matthews had contributed to Clinton’s unexpected loss in Wisconsin that election, which gave Trump the presidency.
Matthews felt some refugees legitimately needed help, but feared that bad actors could slip through because of government incompetence. He did not believe that made him racist or xenophobic. As an English teacher, said Matthews, who was White, he had admired the resilience of his Black and Latino students.
He felt disillusioned by what the Democratic Party had become, believing it no longer stood for free speech. He said he planned to vote for Trump in November, despite not liking him very much.
“I’ve seen some firsthand experience with ‘refugees,’ and like a lot of things, it ain’t all it’s cracked up to be,” Matthews said at the meeting. “With the kind of people they’re going to send us, refugees, illegal aliens, would you trust this government to send you the people they say they’re going to send you? God bless America.”
* * *
As the supervisors deliberated, many appeared inclined to vote for the resolution in question.
“What’s the difference between a refugee and an illegal immigrant?” supervisor Brian Peper asked. “In my theory, they’re kind of talking about illegal immigrants, but they’re disguising it as a refugee. To me, not all refugees are illegal, but all illegal immigrants are illegal.”
“Yes!” a few people in the crowd exclaimed.
Harris fumed.
“The feds have admitted that the vetting for this refugee program is less than desirable,” supervisor Andrea Lombard said. “If we do not pay attention to this, we are inviting the Trojan horse into our country. That Trojan horse was truly a terrible thing for that country.”
“Yes!” members of the crowd shouted. “That’s right!”
“Voting for a pause is not racist or xenophobic or any of these other things,” supervisor Mark Detter said. “My father came over from Germany on a boat. And a part of my bloodline that, I’m Native, not much, but I gotta think that that side wished they would have vetted the White man a little bit more, you know?”
Several supervisors also noted Harris’s research, and some appeared less likely because of his remarks to cast a vote for the resolution.
Another supervisor, Marty Krueger, weighed in with his own experience navigating the collision of facts and fear as mayor of a nearby town, where Harris lives.
“It also reminds me of a very ugly time, probably the ugliest time in my six years as the mayor of the city of Reedsburg, when I was successful in recruiting an industry out of Illinois that employed a large number of Hispanics,” he said, noting that some people’s “ugliness and idiocy” in response to the new workers “is something that I’m ashamed of to this day.”
Vita said she that felt the insinuation of racism was being lobbed specifically in her direction.
She said she felt that the speakers were suggesting she was inferior to them, and that their comments were condescending.
If she was a refugee, she thought, would she want their help if it was rooted in pity rather than respect, in charity rather than dignity?
* * *
The next supervisor who spoke had heard enough: “Obviously, there’s a lot of passion about this issue. I’ll be brief. This is a feel-good resolution whichever way it goes, it has no legal standing or force,” Lynn Eberl said. “I move to table this indefinitely.”
“Motion to table,” the chair said. “Is there a second?”
“Second, table indefinitely,” Harris said, speaking quickly, seeing suddenly a way to put the issue to rest without further animosity.
“Second by Harris,” the chair said. “You may vote to table now.”
The question put forward by the resolution had been whether refugees should be allowed in Sauk County or not. Now the board was using a procedural move to vote on not voting, on letting the issue slide in the background since it did not concern them.
Vita’s hand rose to cover her mouth as the votes were tallied.
“I can’t look,” she said to herself.
Her hand traveled up to cover her eyes.
A few moments later, the tally came in:
18 Yes.
8 No.
1 Abstention.
5 Absent.
“This will be tabled indefinitely,” the chair said.
In deciding to table the issue, they had defied their loudest constituents, some of whom fumed later that their elected leaders did not care what they thought. But the county supervisors had also declined to weigh in definitively in a vote that might lend symbolic support to refugee programs.
The chair continued: “Item D, Land Resources and Environment Committee …”
As he spoke, the dozens who had come to discuss refugees got up at once, and filed quietly out of the room. The national election loomed, and they’d have a say then as well.
Vita picked up her belongings and began to walk out of the board room when three women stopped her to thank her for her advocacy.
“I tried,” she said, and she was determined to keep trying.
