Life, liberty, beaches and pie—for our foreign-born workers, for us all

Photo from 2024 Glen Arbor Fourth of July parade by Jacob Kurtz

By Bob Sutherland

Sun contributor

July 4 has always been my favorite holiday since I was a young child running around Glen Arbor in the 1970s. The fireworks were shot off on the beach just steps from my house and I welcomed my neighbors to the place I love for a night each year. It was just beautiful to watch a sunset with these 1,000 friends, then to watch the sky slowly darken over the Manitous. How could that many people be so quiet, and so together, I wondered? And then that moment of impatience, when I wondered if something was wrong—why weren’t they those fireworks shooting off?—and just then, like the firemen read my thoughts: Phseeuuut … Boom.

Laying in the cool sand looking up at the red, white and blue fireworks, I felt such pride being an American.

Yesterday, our chef at the Cherry Public House told me that he saw a border patrol agent driving down M-22 a week ago. He knows those agents because he lived most of his life in Sault Saint Marie, a town at the northern U.S. border. But he was miffed that they were patrolling Leelanau—200 miles from the border and a border that just so happens to be the safest in the world.

It is nerve-wracking for our foreign and local workers at Cherry Republic because we are a team and family and we don’t want to be broken up any more than the hard-working families we’ve seen on television torn apart in pools of tears these last six months.

In this moment at Cherry Republic, we are hosting a refugee family from Central America that St. Phillips Catholic Church in Empire reached out to our company for help. The father has taken on the difficult job of stirring our four giant scalding jam and salsa kettles in our Empire plant. When I visit him at the cherry factory, he steps down from his ladder, puts down his big paddle and we chat a bit about his former life as a lawyer. He is humble and still working on his English, so our conversation is short.

At the end of the Biden administration, his wife earned her papers to work in the United States as well, and she immediately took a job baking for our company. There isn’t a person in our cherry factory that hasn’t been uplifted by these Central Americans’ presence and friendship.

Unfortunately, because of the legal wrangling going on between the courts and The White House, our Central American refugees can no longer work. Their legal status is in question. While the Latin American family is in shock and nervous that they might be deported, I just cannot believe it, that this is America. And so I look at the bright side. Hey, it’s a forced vacation—and coincidentally—during prime summer—so yes, forced vacation by the president of the United States which just so happens to be forced on my worker in one of Michigan’s great vacation towns. It makes me laugh. The pot stirrer in Washington shutting down the pot stirrer in Empire.

A close friend in Wisconsin who is active in the refugee communities across Lake Michigan reached out to me this spring for help employing and housing a talented young lady that recently escaped from Afghanistan in those harrowing last days before the Taliban took over. Her name is Banoo and she is knocking it out at work in the finance department, but she also has stolen every one of our hearts with her joy and appreciation for her new life in Glen Arbor. Besides working her desk job, she is taking online classes from the University of Arizona and is helping out in the Public House. If you have a chance come hear a story from Banoo about the compassionate United States men in uniform that saved a busload of young ladies on nearly the last plane out of the war-torn country.

For the moment, Banoo’s work/study status seems secure.

In these dramatic months since the election, where Americans are being asked to accept a harsher reality, asked to distrust people that don’t look like us, asked to stop letting ourselves be taken advantage of by the less deserving, I wondered how our heartfelt little Leelanau County tucked away on a peaceful peninsula like hobbits in the Shire would react.

The verdict is still out on where Leelanau will land. It is reassuring to see one of our county commissioners that has been the least generous to the most vulnerable recently advocating for more programs for early childhood in the last month. I see our sheriff giving recent protesters all the respect the first amendment rights command.

During this week of Fourth of July celebrations, many of us that read the news are wondering anew what it means to be an American?

In the meantime, while we decide who we are, my work is to make Cherry Republic an all-American place to visit, a place of generosity and smiles and ruby red morsels of joy, a place of Life, Liberty, Beaches and Pie. We can’t make Cherry Republic what we all know and love without Mustafah, a student from Turkey that is working his second summer at Cherry Republic, or Freda, a student from China running food at the Public House. Parth came to us four years ago as an intern from India—he now manages our complex data streams. Our kitchen staff are an eclectic crew of documented workers from Mexico.

Going back in time, to when I was a child, my father used to direct the Migrant School in Lake Leelanau that we Leelanau County citizens put together for the children who wanted to learn instead of work the whole day. My father didn’t get paid much. Nobody did. But this school was a genuine way to give back to these hardworking Mexican families picking cherries in our county. It was about Leelanau County being a good host.

And I think of our refugees from Central America. He cannot work. He cannot pay rent to live in a home my company owns. We are giving him money for food and to cover his bills. Our community has never ever been such a complete host. My father and all those old cherry farmers would be so proud.

Bob Sutherland is president of Cherry Republic.