Jeff Marchini and others in the Central Valley here bet their farms on the election of Donald J. Trump. His message of reducing regulations and taxes appealed to this Republican stronghold, one of Mr. Trump’s strongest bases of support in the state. As for his promises about cracking down on illegal immigrants, many assumed Mr. Trump’s pledges were mostly just talk. But two weeks into his administration, Mr. Trump has signed executive orders that have upended the country’s immigration laws. Now farmers here are deeply alarmed about what the new policies could mean for their workers, most of whom are unauthorized, and the businesses that depend on them. “Everything’s coming so quickly,” Mr. Marchini said. “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. “I’m confident that he can grasp the magnitude and the anxiety of what’s happening now.” Mr. Trump’s immigration policies could transform California’s Central Valley, a stretch of lowlands that extends from Redding to Bakersfield. Approximately 70 percent of all farmworkers here are living in the United States illegally, according to researchers at University of California, Davis. The impact could reverberate throughout the valley’s precarious economy, where agriculture is by far the largest industry. With 6.5 million people living in the valley, the fields in this state bring in $35 billion a year and provide more of the nation’s food than any other state.

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California Farmers Backed Trump,
but Now Fear Losing Field Workers
Workers rifle through muddy leaves to find purple
heads of radicchio. California farmers could lose
workers, many of whom are unauthorized, if
President Trump’s immigration promises come to
pass.

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MERCED, Calif. — Jeff Marchini and others in the Central Valley here
bet their farms on the election of Donald J. Trump. His message of
reducing regulations and taxes appealed to this Republican stronghold,
one of Mr. Trump’s strongest bases of support in the state.
As for his promises about cracking down on illegal immigrants, many
assumed Mr. Trump’s pledges were mostly just talk. But two weeks into
his administration, Mr. Trump has signed executive orders that have
upended the country’s immigration laws. Now farmers here are deeply
alarmed about what the new policies could mean for their workers, most
of whom are unauthorized, and the businesses that depend on them.
“Everything’s coming so quickly,” Mr. Marchini said. “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. “I’m confident that he can grasp the magnitude and
the anxiety of what’s happening now.”
Mr. Trump’s immigration policies could transform California’s Central
Valley, a stretch of lowlands that extends from Redding to Bakersfield.
Approximately 70 percent of all farmworkers here are living in the
United States illegally, according to researchers at University of
California, Davis. The impact could reverberate throughout the valley’s
precarious economy, where agriculture is by far the largest industry.
With 6.5 million people living in the valley, the fields in this state bring
in $35 billion a year and provide more of the nation’s food than any
other state.
The consequences of a smaller immigrant work force would ripple not
just through the orchards and dairies, but also to locally owned
businesses, restaurants, schools and even seemingly unrelated
industries, like the insurance market.
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“If you only have legal labor, certain parts of this industry and this
region will not exist,” said Harold McClarty, a fourth-generation farmer
in Kingsburg whose operation grows, packs and ships peaches, plums

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and grapes throughout the country. “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. Many of them have worked for him year-round for
more than a decade, making at least $11 an hour. After immigration
officials audited his employee records a few years ago, he was forced to
let go of dozens of employees.
“These people had been working for us for a long time, and we depended
on them.”
Now he worries that a Trump administration could mandate a
Homeland Security Department program called E-verify, which was
aimed at stopping the use of fraudulent documents. In all but a few
states, the program is voluntary and only a small fraction of businesses
use it.
Farmers here have faced a persistent labor shortage for years, in part
because of increased policing at the border and the rising prices charged
by smugglers who help people sneak across. The once-steady stream of
people coming from rural towns in southern Mexico has nearly stopped
entirely. The existing field workers are aging, and many of their children
find higher-paying jobs outside agriculture.

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Workers packing a bin at a farm in California’s Central Valley.
Many growers here and across the country are hopeful that the new
administration will expand and simplify H-2A visas, which allow them to
bring in temporary workers from other countries for agricultural jobs.
California farmers have increasingly come to rely on the program in the
last few years.
But Mr. McClarty and others say that legalizing the existing work force
should be the first priority. While they support the idea of deporting
immigrants who have been convicted of serious crimes, they oppose
forcing people to leave the country for minor crimes, like driving without
a license. Since the election, they have continued to call their
congressional representatives and lobbied through trade associations,
like the Western Growers Association, whose chief executive is part of
Mr. Trump’s agricultural advisory board.

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Farmers are also anxiously awaiting the administration’s plans to alter
longstanding trade agreements. Mr. Trump has said he will pull out of
the North American Free Trade Agreement if he cannot negotiate better
terms for the United States. Growers would benefit if Mr. Trump
negotiated more favorable terms. But backing out of the agreement
entirely could provoke retaliation from Mexico that would hurt
California’s agricultural industry, which earned $21 billion from trade
last year.
Yet, many of Mr. Trump’s supporters say they are counting on him to
follow through on his promises. 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.”

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Sorting radicchio at a packing plant in Central Valley. Some farmers have used the
same undocumented workers for years.
The prospect has business owners in the valley on edge. Patricia Pantoj
runs a travel agency in Madera, north of Fresno, where the city’s
approximately 60,000 residents are predominantly Latino and work in
the fields. This year, she said, fewer people than ever before traveled
back to their hometowns in Mexico.
“They didn’t want to risk it,” she said. “Everyone is scared, even if they
have papers.”
A few doors away from the travel agency, Maria Valero said all the
customers at her gift shop were undocumented.
“If they went away, I would be out of business tomorrow,” she 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.
“If there were mass deportations, we would have to cancel half of our
policies,” he said.
In Ceres, north of Merced, the public school district is the largest
employer by a large number, and many of the jobs were created to
support the children of immigrants. Administrators say any crackdown
would result in huge job losses and would reduce funding, which is
distributed by the state based on need, for all the children in the district.
Most of the workers in Mr. McClarty’s vineyards and orchards have well-
established lives in the area.

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Sergio Rueda, left, and Lazaro Garcia prune peach trees at an orchard in
Kingsburg, Calif.CreditMax Whittaker for The New York Times
Javier Soto, 46, bought a home for his family of five in Reedley, a city of
25,000 that calls itself “the world’s fruit basket.” He has worked for Mr.
McClarty’s farm for the last six years and his supervisor knows he is here
without papers.
“It is more scary now that he is really the president and we see what he is
doing,” Mr. Soto said.
They are hopeful Mr. Trump will not make good on most of his threats.
“Quien más habla, menos hace,” they tell each other — the more you
talk, the less you do. There are too many of them, they reason, to throw
them all out.
“We’re just waiting and praying, hoping that somebody can convince
them that we are not hurting anyone by being here,” said Isabel Rios, 49,
who has been picking grapes for the last two decades. Like most women
in the fields, she covers her face with a bandanna to protect against the
blaring sun, dust and pesticides. Her two children, 9 and 18, are
American-born citizens and she worries what will happen to them if she
is sent back to Mexico. “Who will benefit if we are not here?”
Mr. Marchini, the radicchio farmer, said he felt similarly after seeing
generations of workers on his family farm send their children to college
and join the middle class. Mr. Marchini’s family has farmed in the valley
for four generations and he grew up working side by side with Mexican
immigrants.
He said that no feasible increase in wages or change in conditions would
be enough to draw native-born Americans back into the fields.
It was the other conservatives, Mr. Marchini said, who were out of touch
about how to deal with foreign workers. “If you find a way to get in
here,” he said, “there’s a need for what you do.”
Correction: February 9, 2017
An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of a Central Valley
farmer in some later references. As noted in earlier references, he is Harold
McClarty, not McClatchy.
Correction: February 14, 2017
An article on Friday about farmers in California’s Central Valley worried about
President Trump’s immigration policy misstated the northern edge of the
geographical region. The Central Valley stretches from Bakersfield, in the south,
to Redding — not Sacramento — in the north.

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A version of this article appears in print on February 10, 2017, on Page A10 of
the New York edition with the headline:
Farmers Backed Trump; Now They’re Worried.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/09/us/california-farmers-
backed-trump-but-now-fear-losing-field-workers.html?_r=0