But you don’t have to listen just to me. Listen to Sarah Lott Zost, quoted in the article, and still fighting the good fight back in the fruit belt. Her uncle Doug played basketball with me in high school, and her dad Jim was probably a better baller than both of us put together. And you can quote me on that too, brother.
For generations, white, followed by Black and then Hispanic migrant farmworkers have provided the backbone of the vast orchard industry in York Springs, contributing to Pennsylvania’s position as the fourth-highest apple-producing region in the country.
In more recent years, the workforce has been fueled by waves of Mexican migrant workers.
Many come and go with the seasons; others decide to stay, transforming what was once a predominantly white area. Latinos now make up half the population of York Springs, census data show.
Amid the contentious national rhetoric over immigration, York Springs offers a unique response to the ongoing — and baseless — portrayal by many Republican leaders from Donald Trump on down, that immigrants are ruining the country, bringing with them a surge in crime, gang violence, disease and are taxing local services.
The diverse population is reflected in the signs on Main Street: Lua’s Mexican store, El Rancho Mexican restaurant, Javi’s taco truck and Luz, Allegria y Esperanza Church, which tends to the spiritual life of many of the new residents.
But it’s the nuances of everyday life in the borough that attest to its dramatic transformation: The borough prints its notices in Spanish. The school district has fast-tracked bilingual services and ESL education to meet the demands of the surging Latino student population.
The Head Start program has gone full-tilt bilingual and several food banks and a clothing pantry help newcomers, the majority of whom live below the poverty line.
Local officials are puzzled by the angry rhetoric about immigrants.
“I understand that in some areas people see different things,”said Nina Tipler, a 31-year resident of York Springs and for the past six years its mayor. “We do not see that here. People want to come here and work hard and earn money and do what they have to do. They don’t bother anybody. They work, they shop, they feed themselves and move on.”
Tipler said the vitality of the region’s agricultural economy and its ability to meet its labor needs, rely heavily on the tide of workers from Mexico, and more recently, other parts of Latin America.
“I believe that all immigrants that come here legally are welcome and I hope that people understand that without these people coming into our country we would not be able to take care of the people born here,” Tipler said. “When I drive through the orchards, I don’t see people lined up to take jobs and work hard in the orchard all day, in the heat, the cold, the wind and the rain. Without these people, we would not have an economy.”
The Adams County fruit belt which comprises 120 fruit farms on 20,000 acres in York Springs and other communities, contributes about $580 million a year to the county’s economy.
One of the nation’s largest apple processors, Knouse Foods Cooperative, a five-minute drive from York Springs, sells the bounty of the region under popular brand names like Musselman’s, Lucky Leaf, and Speas Farm. The county generates $4.5 billion in gross domestic product and is home to a slew of food processing and manufacturing enterprises.
“If we did not have this reliable workforce, this all would be gone,” said Sarah Lott Zost, an apple grower whose family has been harvesting apples at Bonnie Brea Fruit Farms in York Springs for four generations.
“We would not be growing apples. A lot of people would have to switch to row crops or animal agriculture,” she said. “If you can’t pick your crop on time, you can’t have a farm. If people don’t show up to work, you can’t have a farm. We are fully dependent on their ability to come here and do the work.”
Zost said immigrant labor is critical not just for her 750-acre farm.
“I would say that’s true for the entire fruit industry here because we have really short seasonal work needs that are extremely difficult to fill locally, even though, we are offering what I would consider to be fair wages,” said Zost, a Michigan State University graduate who is the family enterprise’s business manager.
Those wages start at roughly $17 an hour, but the provisions for housing and transportation mandated under the federal H2A visa program, which is extended to seasonal agricultural workers, add to the wage value.
Every morning just after sunrise at this time of the year, caravans of vans and trucks transport hundreds of pickers from their homes in the borough to the orchards, where they work all day under the blazing sun.
Others head for the food processing plants; as well as the giant plant nursery, Quality Greenhouse, wholesale grower of annuals and perennials that provides much of the mid-Atlantic region’s independent garden centers and nurseries with plants and flowers.
Drive up and down the main stretch of Route 94 cutting through the borough, and you will see a profusion of color and foliage from the well-tended gardens and front porches that belong to the homes where most of their workers live. Quality provides the housing and the plants.
“Quality owns some of the properties and those are easy to pick out,” said Borough Secretary Catherine Jonet. “They are the ones with all the hanging flowers and potted plants. They are beautiful.”
Jonet said that in the 15 years she has worked for the borough, she has never met a problem caused by its Latino residents.
“They are great, what they have done for the community,” Jonet said. “They follow the rules and regulations and the law. They pay their taxes. They pay their bills. They are doing what they need to do to contribute to the community. I have no problem with them.”
Jonet quips that most of her difficult conversations usually involve the older — white — residents; and those are usually over the steep $75 citation that residents get if they don’t move their car off the street on street-cleaning day.
“It’s the whites that don’t pay,” Jonet quipped. “Latinos if they get a ticket they come in and pay, and they are nice. I have a lot of people yelling at me. It’s very cruel.”
The Latino residents — whether here for the season or newly established members of the community — have embraced York Springs.
“Es muy tranquilo,” said Geraldo “Gerry” Sanchez, a Vera Cruz, Mexico native who has been picking apples at Bonnie Brea for 20 years.
“One must work. I have a wife and children in Florida. I have to work. This is a nice place.”
No machine can do the work that Sanchez and his fellow pickers do. The job requires dexterity and the ability to climb high up a narrow wooden ladder precariously propped against the tree to snap off each individual fruit from its branch.
The job attracts legions of immigrants, many from the avocado growing region of Mexico — the cultivation and harvest of that fruit resembling that of apples.
Sanchez said he tries not to pay much attention to the hostile rhetoric.
“You can’t generalize people. People are all the same no matter where they are from,” Sanchez said in his native Spanish. “But it’s a different world now. ”Times have changed. There’s everything in the world. All kinds of people. Good people. Bad people…but now you hear a lot about the bad stuff.”
Sergio Barragan, owner of Rancho Grande, the Mexican restaurant along Route 94, a popular destination for borough residents, echoes that sentiment.
“I live with a lot of gratitude,” said Barragan, a Mexico City native, who has lived in the U.S. for 50 years, most of it in New York and the last three years in York Springs.
“We Latinos come here with one intention — to work. To advance our families. There will always be bad people everywhere. But those bad people do not represent us.”
Although Barragan’s life was changed by his immigration experience, he agrees with some of the anti-immigration sentiment.
“I came here to work,” Barragan said. “To advance my family. But now you have some people coming through and they make us look bad. A lot of people coming in now want the government to take care of them. That’s not the majority of people in York Springs.”
More perplexing is the seemingly disjointed intersection between communities that need immigrants and those who rail against them.
Trump thrust Charleroi, an aging steel town in western Pennsylvania, into the national spotlight with scathing attacks on Haitian immigrants there — the same rhetoric he used against Springfield, Ohio.
Local officials in both communities have fought back against the torrent of unfounded criticism.
Charleroi Council President Kristin Hopkins-Calek said her community is “steeped in a rich history of immigration” and that the Haitian immigrants have contributed to a rise in population there for the first time in decades, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.
Data show that immigrants commit proportionately lower rates of crime compared to native-born Americans.
Even those who represent predominantly agricultural regions have been hostile to immigrants. This past year, Sen. Doug Mastriano, R-Franklin County, introduced legislation to impose a 10% fee on out-of-country electronic fund transfers by undocumented immigrants.
“Illegal immigrants hurt Pennsylvania’s economy by sending money out of the United States and back to their country of origin,” said Mastriano.
Zost said her workforce is legal, each worker presenting documents required by law, including H2A visas; but she is uncomfortable portraying immigrants with broad brushstrokes.
“That is one of the reasons they are happy to do the work and work as many hours …it’s to send money home,” she said. “Everyone is paid over the table. They are paying income tax. They pay federal, and state and local taxes. They buy fuel. They pay fuel tax and buy clothes and food. I think they contribute to the economy in a great way. This feels like an unfair target on them.”
The Center for American Progress Action Fund, an independent, nonpartisan policy institute, has found that undocumented immigrants do not receive most federal benefits, including Social Security and Medicare. Rather, overall, immigrants contributions are a net gain to those entitlement programs.
Mastriano recently condemned a rumored plan to turn an old school campus in Franklin County into a facility for child refugees.
The immigrant minors, Mastriano said, would “spike crime, assaults, rapes,” and terrorize the community.
Tipler said that portrayal doesn’t reflect the real experience of communities like York Springs.
“The immigrants that come to my town are very low key,” she said. “They are coming here to do a job. Most people may not have their entire family with them. It may just be the men. They just want to do their job and make the money for their families and go back home.”
In Pennsylvania — especially the south-central region — where agriculture is big business, anti-immigrant sentiment is counter-productive, local stakeholders say.
“It’s surprising how so many people vote against their own economic interest,” said Susan Rose, Dickinson College emeritus professor of sociology and former director of its Mexican Mosaics, a research initiative that led longitudinal studies looking at the Mexican migration into Adams County.
“There is absolutely no question about it,” said Rose.“You talk to any farm owner and they will say that are absolutely dependent on migrant workers.”
Rose cited a slew of crime and law enforcement studies, including out of the Brenner Center for Justice, that show that new immigrants, largely Latinos, had proportionally lower crime rates compared to native-born people.
In the case of Adams County, she said, the center’s studies have shown that the vast majority of Latinos arriving in recent years are singularly focused.
“You have people working who are paying taxes who really want to stay under the radar for the most part,” Rose said. “They are not committing more crimes. That’s clear. Trump’s rhetoric on that is completely fabricated.”
Rose said immigrants in Adams County have revitalized food desert areas, established a newspaper and elevated the idea of bilingualism.
“I‘ve seen greater diversity in the community,” Rose said. “For me that’s exciting and it’s exciting for children in school where Spanish is more of a focus in terms of bilingual education. For me it’s a net plus in terms of looking at the community.”
Michael Holland, the senior pastor at Luz Allegria y Esperanza Church in York Springs, has a unique perspective on the tide of immigration that has changed the town.
Holland has heard heartbreaking accounts from his parishioners of their brush with extreme danger and hardship as they crossed the border. One Honduran mother in his church, he said, fled her hometown with her two daughters after the older one was repeatedly raped by gangs.
Border patrol denied entry to the older daughter because she was 18 and she had to return.
“That gives me compassion for the people I work with,” Holland said. ”When you hear these stories about suffering and extreme danger it makes me want to say how can we help you put your life back together. The majority of them are decent people that have gone through hardship in their homeland.”
Holland said that beneath the veneer of goodwill and co-existence, some of the immigrants have experienced discrimination in the area.
“It’s unfortunate how people who have come through such hardship end up being rejected or bullied or facing racism at Walmart,” he said. “They have come to a place thinking they are going to have security and safety and instead they are hated and rejected.”
Holland said critics of immigration must not be dismissed.
“We have to hear what their concerns are and address that concern,” he said. “I‘m the first to say I know that happens. There’s good and bad everywhere. …Everybody would be in agreement that we need to control the immigrant flow.”
In recent years, the Latino residents of York Springs have joined in the town’s Christmas tree lighting celebration, adding a unique flavor to the festivities. Residents have welcomed help from their new neighbors who offer to assist with garden work and home upkeep.
On any weekend, men assemble at the park to play soccer and even for that, Tipler said, they asked permission.
“We are very proud of our town,” Tipler said. “We are a very close-knit community. The biggest thing about our town is that all people that live here contribute in some way to seed and beautify our entire country.”
On a recent steamy afternoon, Zost joined some of her crews as they rushed to finish the day’s picking of Golden Delicious apples.
Years of working alongside the workers has helped her become fluent in Spanish — and a defender of the role of immigrants in her community.
“It’s not fair to people doing wonderful work in keeping our food supply secure and functioning,” Zost said. “There are people out here doing good work. We have dealt with ICE in the past being in the area. Nobody likes it. No matter who is in your workforce. It puts everyone on edge and creates a problem. We just want to be left alone to get the job done by great people doing great work”.
