These California farmers went for Trump. Now he could deport half their workers. [View all]
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Source: Politico
12/26/2024 05:00 AM EST
SACRAMENTO, California — California farmers could soon enjoy bumper crops thanks to President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to lift water restrictions. But who will pick them if he follows through on his deportation threats?
The country’s largest agricultural constituency backed Trump in November, bucking California’s deep-blue electorate over his campaign promises to “open the faucet” and deliver more water to the state’s parched, conservative-leaning Central Valley. But now it’s reckoning with an uncomfortable contradiction: Trump also campaigned on mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, who make up at least half of the state’s agricultural workforce.
That’s left California’s agricultural barons, who employ the most farm workers of any state in the nation and grow half the produce consumed in the United States, nervously parsing Trump’s rhetoric.
“To say it would have an impact on California would be an understatement,” said Chris Reardon, vice president of policy advocacy at the industry group California Farm Bureau Federation. Reardon, who declined to say who he voted for, has been fielding calls from members asking him what exactly will happen to workers. “We just don’t know yet,” he’s told them.
Read more: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/12/26/california-farmers-trump-water-workers-00195839
That’s left California’s agricultural barons, who employ the most farm workers of any state in the nation and grow half the produce consumed in the United States, nervously parsing Trump’s rhetoric.
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