Trump’s Shameful Anti-Immigrant Policies Are Starting to Disrupt Food Supplies

Cherries are rotting in Oregon because nobody is around to pick them. There’s a lot of cherry-picking around the data as to why there’s nobody picking cherries in Oregon, but the fact is that nobody is picking cherries in Oregon and they’re rotting where they are. From CNN:

They should have been picked a couple of weeks ago to tempt shoppers at markets and stores, or processed to garnish Shirley Temple mocktails, shiny and fat, promising bursts of sweetness. The lost harvest has hit almost a quarter of Chandler’s 125 acres of cherry trees—not because of bad weather, disease, or blight, just because there was no one to pick the fruit. “What you’re going to see is a bunch of fat, happy raccoons this winter,” Chandler said ruefully, standing amid his still burdened trees. “Unfortunately, we weren’t able to harvest these.”

This isn’t the last of these stories. Hell, it isn’t even the first. We’ve already heard about how California’s agricultural economy is literally dying on the vine. From Reuters via The Food Institute:

“Nobody feels safe when they hear the word ICE, even the documented people. We know that the neighborhood is full of a combination of those with and without documents,” central California farmer Greg Tesch told Reuters. “If things are ripe, such as our neighbors have bell peppers here, [if] they don’t harvest within two or three days, the crop is sunburned or over mature,” said Tesch. “We need the labor.”

When he was visiting the site of his brand-new concentration camp in the Everglades, the president made a lot of neck-noises about exempting farmworkers from his schemes and deprivations. He even found time to make some racist remarks about how strong a farmworker’s back is. Everything’s still going rotten, and that’s not a metaphor, either.