Immigrant farm workers are the lifeblood of the agricultural industry. Without them, the entire industry could collapse. Farmers know this, yet they voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, who ran on a mass deportation platform that was pretty clearly making no exceptions for their workers. Now one of those voters, in Trump’s home state of New York, is feeling the consequences of her vote:
“We had heard things were starting to get bad, some wineries in the area and quite a few in the Finger Lakes started losing workers. It was almost immediately after Trump took office that ICE started snagging people,” said Kelly Raby, a vineyard owner in Lewiston.
Last fall, Victor Pacheco, the foreman on Ms. Raby’s family farm for 23 years, was detained by ICE agents and deported to Mexico.
Raby told the New York Times she’s struggled to find a foreman who was as skilled as Pacheco. Farmers were already facing worker shortages before Trump was installed in the White House. But even so, she continues to support the man putting her livelihood at risk: “I still agree with Trump in a lot of ways,” she said, “but I’m more on the fence about him now. I don’t want to lose the immigrants who are working here and growing our food.”
It’s a summation of Trumpism: I don’t care what happens to others, as long as it doesn’t hurt me. And even then, I might put up with it. The fact is that we should all care about this, because the food we’re all eating likely passed through the hands of undocumented farm workers, and everyone from the workers rights groups fighting to protect them to the Trumpiest of Trump’s supporters know it.
Ask California Congressman Devin Nunes—an ardent Trump loyalist—who works his family’s farm. Ask America’s most racist congressman, Iowa’s Steve King, who has revitalized his state. Ask Trump, on a related note, who staffs his golf clubs. Yet he and his supporters are perfectly willing to pretend that none of this is happening.
Meanwhile, it’s real people suffering. “Today you go to work and you don’t know if you’ll come back home and be with your family again,” said apple orchard worker Eladio Beltran, a Mexican immigrant currently in deportation proceedings. We need real solutions when it comes to respecting the immigrants laboring on America’s farms and ensuring America’s farms can survive, because we’re all depending on it.