Crash shines light on immigrants in Christmas tree workforce
GERVAIS, Ore. (AP) — It was nighttime when Pedro Lucas came home, clutching receipts showing he had paid a funeral home to have the bodies of three immigrant laborers returned to Guatemala from Oregon.
The three, including two of Lucas’ cousins, were killed when a pickup truck slammed into a van carrying them and 10 other Guatemalans home from work at a Christmas tree farm. Lucas’ father, who arrived in America just seven months ago and sent part of his earnings to his wife in the village of Chacaj, was also in the van and remains in a coma, his back broken.
“It’s unknown if he’ll walk again,” Lucas said in Spanish.
The Nov. 29 crash shined a light on Oregon’s immigrant farm workers, the driving force behind the state’s $121 million Christmas tree industry, the nation’s largest.
“People don’t realize that the majority of this industry is immigrant labor,” said Reyna Lopez, executive director of a farm worker union called PCUN, an acronym in Spanish for Pine Workers and Farmers United of the Northwest.
The victims of the crash spent their last day loading Christmas trees onto trucks at Holiday Tree Farms, one of the world’s largest Christmas tree farms. They received paychecks from a contractor that Friday night in Salem and were headed home when the pickup truck crumpled their van. The Oregon Occupational Safety and Health Division is investigating, though a spokesman declined to provide details.
In 2017, 4.7 million Christmas trees were harvested in Oregon, 4 million in North Carolina and 1.5 million in Michigan, the country’s three largest producers, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Oregon doesn’t compile records on the percentage of immigrants in the Christmas tree industry, but it clearly relies on them. So do North Carolina and Michigan.
Oregon Christmas tree farmers, facing a tight labor market this year, used farm labor contractors who found migrant workers in California to help with the tree harvest, according to Oregon Employment Department officials.
Labor shortages have become a problem across the agriculture industry, sparking a push in Washington to address the issue. On Wednesday, the U.S. House passed a bill that would loosen restrictions on hiring foreign agricultural workers and create a path to citizenship for more than 1 million farm workers estimated to be in the country illegally.
The bill’s fate in the Senate is unclear, and the White House hasn’t said if President Donald Trump would sign it. But the 260-165 vote was a rare stroke of bipartisanship on immigration. The measure also requires farmers to use E-verify, a system that checks whether someone can legally work, which farmers have fought against in the past.
The administration has expressed support for growers who say they are desperate for immigrants to fill jobs, even though Trump pinned his 2016 campaign and his domestic agenda to building a border wall with Mexico and introduced policies that make it far more difficult for immigrants to win asylum.