Fruit everywhere, but who will pick it?

How our broken immigration system hurts Leelanau County farmers

By Jacob Wheeler
Sun editor

Rosa Valenzuela and her family look forward to their annual trip up north, to see old friends, to prepare picnics in the park and to swim in Lake Michigan when the waters warm by mid-summer. But the Valenzuelas are not your typical visitors: they come not to lie on the beach or sip wine, but to work in Leelanau County’s fruit orchards. They are seasonal migrant laborers, on whom our agricultural and tourism economy depends.

Every April for the last 23 years, Rosa and her husband Saturnino, both natives of Mexico, have made the 1,700-mile journey north from southern Texas, up through the Mississippi River Delta and the cornfields of Illinois, to Gary and Christy Bardenhagen’s farm east of Lake Leelanau. Their travel group sometimes totals 20: the Valenzuelas have four kids between the ages of 14 and 25; Rosa’s parents, and her sister Sylvia and her husband and children typically join them, as do other family members.

They arrive here in the spring and prune apple trees, then plant and pick strawberries, then cherries, then raspberries. Autumn is apple harvest season, which keeps the Valenzuelas busy through the end of October. In early November, as the forests shed their leaves, these migrant workers follow the flocks of geese and head south again. Back in Mercedes, a Texas town just north of the Rio Grande and the U.S.-Mexican border, Saturnino picks oranges — his hands callused and strong from six months of hard work in Michigan.

“The Bardenhagens are more than bosses, they are like friends,” says Rosa. “If we arrive here and have no money, or if there is little work, like last year when the crops froze in the spring, they help us.” That symbiotic relationship between farmer and farmhands appears commonplace, based on conversations with many Leelanau County growers who rely on the same migrant families, year after year, to pick their crops.

But that relationship is being tested by chaotic immigration policies that vary by state and foster a climate of fear among Hispanic workers in the United States. Migrants traveling north toward the next harvest can be stopped by police and asked for their citizenship paperwork — traffic stops that can lead to deportation, even for those who have lived and worked in this country for decades. Municipal law enforcement in six states, Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina and Utah, are now required to ask Hispanics for proof of citizenship.

Fear of deportation has deterred many migrants from making the spring journey northward. “Many are afraid of traveling now,” says Rosa Valenzuela, whose brother-in-law was caught and deported to Mexico in 2012, leaving her sister alone with four kids. “Every year there are risks: sometimes they stop us in Texas or Illinois and check our papers or check us for drugs. But we’ll continue to come here. The work is good, and the people are very nice.”

A day without a Mexican

Gary Bardenhagen says that the absence of Rosa’s brother-in-law in the fields was palpable. This was a banner year for apples and cherries, and many hands were needed in the orchards. “He is a good, hard worker who does the work of two. Missing him was like missing two workers.” Bardenhagen adds that the brother-in-law tried to get legal permission to be in the United States, after entering the country illegally, but failed. Like millions of Mexicans and Latin Americans who don’t have the financial or legal resources to wade through the draconian process of securing a tourist or work visa into the United States, he came across the Rio Grande, “mojado,” or wet.

“We could have used more help this year,” echoes Gary’s son Steve, who has seen a precipitous drop in the number of new workers available. Approximately 35 migrants live in housing units owned by the Bardenhagens. Some workers are leant out to other farmers who need help. “When I was a kid, people always came by looking for work. You don’t see that anymore. What you get are people you already know from previous years.”

Last year’s spring freeze and decimated crop also sent many migrants elsewhere in the country to find employment. Their eventual return to Northern Michigan could take years. But the political dangers facing migrant farmers pose a bigger hurdle to local agriculture.

The Bardenhagens and other Leelanau County farmers speak in a unified voice in calling for federal immigration reform that would streamline the rights of migrant laborers who travel across many states to find work. These farmers’ political beliefs often differ, but they all want a path toward legalization for the approximately 11 million undocumented workers in the United States. For them, legalization (dubbed “amnesty” by opponents) is less a hotbed political issue, and more a necessary step to help them continue to harvest Northern Michigan’s fruit crop.

Studies shows that our agricultural economy in its current form wouldn’t function without immigrant workers planting seeds, picking fruit, driving tractors and packaging goods. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 71 percent of crop workers surveyed between 2007-09 were foreign born. And that number is growing. A 2007 agriculture census counted 82,462 Hispanic operators on 66,671 farms and ranches nationwide, up 14 percent from 2002.

Meanwhile, rural populations are aging and shrinking in Leelanau County and other communities across rural America. Fifteen percent of the U.S. population lives on 72 percent of the nation’s land base, and those communities saw a net out-migration of 179,000 between 2010 and 2012. As rural farming communities age, Latin American immigrants figure to play a larger role in the agricultural sector of the future. A Michigan Farm Succession Study last year by Michigan State University found that only 38 percent of Michigan farmers planning to retire within the next 10 years will pass their farms on to a single heir.

Statewide, noncitizen farm owners represent 28 percent of the state’s total 56,014 farms, which generate annual sales of $5.8 billion. According to Ruben Martinez at the Julian Samora Research Institute, many Latino farmers are buying blueberry farms in southwest Michigan. The Wolverine state could take a page from Iowa, which recently awarded grants of $50,000 to three rural counties to help them attract immigrants.

“People are afraid of endorsing (comprehensive immigration reform),” says Don Mitchell, whose farm is around the corner from the Bardenhagens on Horn Rd. “But we need a clear set of regulations. Sending them all back (to Mexico) would be a stupid idea, and it would devastate our agriculture.” Mitchell points out that, since Georgia passed the law mandating citizenship checks on routine traffic stops, it has faced a dearth of agriculture workers. “The following season in Georgia, they had to let the crops literally rot in the fields.”

Expansion of the temporary worker visa program, according to legislation passed by the U.S. Senate under Democratic Party control, projects that visas would increase to 337,000 within three years and raise the nation’s Gross Domestic Product by approximately $2 billion next year and $9.79 billion by 2045. By contrast, if the share of agricultural workers continues to decline at its current rate, Regional Economic Models, Inc., projects that total U.S. agricultural output would fall by 3-6 percent, at a cost of $6.5-$12 billion.

Four miles east of Mitchell at Cherry Bay Orchards, Don Gregory has seen the number of migrants decrease, year after year. “It was evident to us after 2012 that we weren’t going to get enough workers to harvest our apples this year,” he says. So this year Gregory paid a recruiting firm to hire workers under the H2A visa system, which guarantees laborers a prevailing wage of $11.30 per hour and includes transportation to and from Northern Michigan with amenities such as weekly town trips to Traverse City. While the elevated wage was welcome news to H2A workers, it increased Gregory’s cost for pickers by 80 percent. “At this rate, I’m not sure that we can afford to stay in the apple business using a program like this,” he laments.

Gregory hired 25 workers under the H2A program, a far cry from the 50-70 pickers he typically uses. As a result, the apple harvest, which usually concludes by Oct. 20, wasn’t finished until early November. Had Halloween brought an early freeze, the remaining crop could have been destroyed.

A more aggressive Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has also stymied Gregory. Last year the federal agency tasked with finding and deporting undocumented workers conducted half a dozen audits among local farmers, and handed out “do not hire” lists. “A good portion of our labor force, some people who had been with us for 7-8 years, were on that list,” laments Gregory. “We had to turn them away. … The onus used to be on the person who came here to work. Today the onus is on the employer.”

[The Leelanau Unit of the Grand Traverse Area League of Women Voters studied the topic of immigration reform and agricultural migrant worker visas. View the recommendations from their 2012 study here. The now independent League of Women Voters Leelanau County has continued a working study group and is updating their research and will present findings at a League of Women Voters Leelanau County meeting in February.]

Immigration reform needed

Black Star Farms managing partner Don Coe, an outspoken advocate for the rights of migrant workers, says that the H2A visa system floated by some in Washington as a solution to the immigration debacle doesn’t work for Leelanau County because the harvest period on a given farm is too short, and migrant workers here often move back and forth between various employers.

Coe heard from many apple growers throughout Northern Michigan that a shortage of migrant hands forced them to only pick the most valuable apples, and leave the others on the tree. “It’s very difficult to make the decision to invest in new plantings when you don’t know if you’ll have an adequate labor force in the future,” he says.

L. Mawby vineyards owner Larry Mawby, whose typical harvest crew of 12 shrunk to eight this year, laments that farmworkers can’t move more freely, back and forth, between the United States and Mexico. They haven’t been able to since the passage of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, which overwhelmed the Mexican market with cheap foods produced in the United States and subsidized by the U.S. government. That gutted Mexico’s domestic agriculture market and sent workers emigrating northward by the hundreds of thousands to seek their livelihood in el norte.

One way Michigan could lure back migrant workers would be to take a page from Washington state and work with the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to grant them driver’s licenses, suggests Don Mitchell. (A 2008 change in Michigan law now requires proof of legal residence in the United States before one can acquire a driver’s license.) Having valid Michigan licenses would alleviate the dangers of driving through unfriendly transit states such as Georgia, and naturally lure workers back to the mitten state every spring. Plus, adds Mitchell, the money the DMV would make on the driving exams and license fees would pad the state’s meager coffers.

But granting driver’s licenses is no substitute for comprehensive federal immigration reform, says grower Ben LaCross, who farms just west of Lake Leelanau. LaCross typically has the help of between 10 and 12 pickers. This year he had to pull four of his regular farmworkers off the tractor and away from fertilizing the orchards to pick fruit.

“We were all short on seasonal agricultural labor this year, says LaCross. “The largest processers were almost an entire shift of workers short.” When the Glen Arbor Sun spoke to LaCross in early November, he pointed out that there were still plenty of apples and wine grapes to be picked, even though migrants were packing up and heading south.

LaCross recently returned from his fourth trip to Washington, D.C., to lobby lawmakers for change. “Our federal immigration policy has made our mobile agricultural workforce cautious in how they move around country,” he says. “The government has done the agriculture sector a disservice by not addressing the undocumented workforce of 11 million.”

U.S. Congressman Dan Benishek, a Republican who was elected during the tea party wave election of 2010, has visited LaCross’ farm on Lake Leelanau and met with him in Washington. Benishek, who represents Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and the northern third of the Lower Peninsula, is Michigan’s only member of the House Committee on Agriculture. He has shown no willingness to legalize the migrant workers who already come to Northern Michigan every spring to pick fruit.

“Dr. Benishek has been hearing from citizens in Northern Michigan that they want to see a solution that first secures the (border) and then improves the system so that people who want to come here can the right way — legally,” the Congressman’s staff wrote to the Sun. “He believes we can achieve those goals with a step-by-step approach, rather than a 1,000-page bill. Dr. Benishek is interested in looking at different plans, but he wants to see something that first truly secures our (borders) and also improves the system so those who want to come here legally can.”

As politicians squabble, and as the Republican Party debates whether to extend an olive branch to Latin American immigrants and push for reform or maintain their hardline stance, Northern Michigan farmers hope that enough workers turn up next spring to pick their crops, and keep our region’s agriculture engine humming along.

“Farmers have told me there aren’t people to work,” says Marcelino Tapia, a migrant who has traveled between Florida and Leelanau County for the last 23 years to work for Mitchell, Mawby and other growers. “I know lots who want to come and work here. But many don’t have licenses, and it’s impossible for a family that doesn’t have papers to drive 24 hours and pass through very strict states like Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio. That’s why people aren’t migrating here as often.”

“When we are fewer pickers, we have to work harder, work more hours, and work later in the season, through rain and snow.”

Sarah Eichberger contributed to this report.