Many farmers in California’s Central Valley, where 70 percent of the farmworkers are in the U.S. without documentation, voted for Donald Trump. But as Trump takes a hard line on immigration in his first few weeks in office, some farm owners are worried he won’t make any exemptions for agriculture, says the New York Times.
“If you only have legal labor, certain parts of this industry and this region will not exist,” said Harold McClarty, a fourth-generation produce farmer in Kingsburg, Calif. “If we sent all these people back, it would be a total disaster.”
McClarty is concerned that the Trump administration will implement E-verify, a Homeland Security Department program that tries to stop the illegal use of identification documents. But it is currently voluntary and few businesses use it.
Other farmers remain hopeful that Trump, as a businessman, will recognize the profits at stake if they are forced to deport their workforce before the crop can be harvested.
“I’m confident that he can grasp the magnitude and the anxiety of what’s happening now,” said Jeff Marchini, a Central Valley radicchio farmer who voted for Trump.
For many growers, a good solution would be expanding and streamlining H-2A visas, “which allow them to bring in temporary workers from other countries for agricultural jobs. California farmers have increasingly come to rely on the program in the last few years,” says the Times.
Meanwhile, Christopher Ranch, which grows 5,000 acres of garlic in Gilroy, Calif., is contending with the labor shortages by paying $15 an hour, well above the $11 it used to pay, says the Los Angeles Times. The company now has a 150-person waiting list for applicants.
“The total supply of farm laborers in Mexico, for which growers in the U.S. compete, declined by 150,000 workers every year between 1980 and 2010, according to a study last year by Diane Charlton and Edward Taylor, researchers at Montana State University and UC Davis,” says the LA Times.