“We’re not loading people into buses or deporting them, that’s not happening yet.” As he looked out over a crew of workers bent over as they rifled through muddy leaves to find purple heads of radicchio, he said
that as a businessman, Mr. Trump would know that farmers had invested millions of dollars into produce that is growing right now, and that not being able to pick and sell those crops would represent huge losses for the state economy.
“If we sent all these people back, it would be a total disaster.”
Mr. McClarty is not just concerned about his business, but also about his work force, he said.
Jhovani Segura, an insurance agent in Firebaugh, near the southern end of the valley, said
that as much as 80 percent of their new car insurance policies came from undocumented immigrants who, under a new state law, became eligible for driver’s licenses in 2015.
Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said
that limiting the use of foreign labor would push more Americans into jobs that had primarily been performed by immigrants.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s programming computers or picking in fields,” he said, “Any time you’re admitting
substitutes for American labor you depress wages and working conditions and deter Americans.”
The prospect has business owners in the valley on edge.