Farmers in Deep-Red Pennsylvania Struggle to Find Workers

Can you elaborate?

the issue is pay, but it is hard to evaluate pay on a dairy, as the work occurs 365 days a year, with a few intense periods when haying and or planting and harvesting corn,calving, and then mostly 3~4 hrs a day, one very early in the morning, so there are only odd situations that make it worth while to anybody, and as pointed out, loosing labour can instantly change all of someones plans. I read the article diferently as my grand parents and uncles farmed in Penn state, one of them as a dairy farmer and those experiences with them fills in the blanks. It takes a lot of creativity and decisivness to survive in dairy and family farming, margins are small but often the equity is high, so the temptation to sell out to big business is always there.

"Immigration question" doesn't have a solution because without the immigrants the economy collapses. And, besides, not having it solved allows Republicans to run on the platform of solving it, as you said. But if there is a single politician in the US history who is not only willing to kill the economy, but has an unquestionable approval from the voters to do it, that's Trump, so who knows.

One thing that Trump did very effectively was take advantage of how people will selectively hear what they want to hear if they're desperate, and not pay attention to fine details that might suggest a different meaning than they're taking.

For example, someone who thinks that doing a lot of labor is a sign of good moral character might think "deport the lazy criminals" sounds reasonable, and ignore the details which suggest that the crime in their mind is "being foreign", leading to surprise when those you thought of as "good people" are being deported.

(None of that removes the responsibility for the consequences of your actions, of course, just that it's not necessarily that they thought he wouldn't follow through, and more that they only remembered what they wanted to hear.)