Cameron Winery -- sustainably farmed, non-irrigated, Oregon pinot noir and chardonnay

For literally 60 years the US Immigration system has been a dysfunctional mess. Neither political party has had the will nor the courage to do anything about it. But throughout this time, the need for immigrants particularly in the agriculture sector, has continued to soar concomitant with the desire of people to come here. And so they have come and we have hired them.

Throughout this time, it has been illegal to hire undocumented immigrants, but because agriculture would literally collapse in the US without them, with a wink and a nudge they have been allowed to stay. And at the same time, they have been cruelly taken advantage of. Employers are required to provide Social Security numbers for them (which are usually false) and this means that they have contributed millions and millions of dollars to the SS system while having no chance to ever reclaim it. They are often denied health care and are continually threatened with deportation even as they provide critical help to farmers.

In more recent years the Democrats have sometimes nibbled around the edges to soften this discrimination but have never actually fixed it. And the Republicans have taken to blowing up the system by criminalizing the entire gamut of undocumented immigrants. The hatred which they are spewing is palpable. But in spite of that, at the beginning of the current Republican administration it appeared that they might leave the actual agricultural workers alone as far as attempting to arrest and deport them.

But now that the harvest season is largely over, especially in more northerly latitudes such as Oregon, ICE has started to raid the farming communities in the Willamette Valley arresting literally tens to hundreds at a time. Of course harvest is only a small part of what these people contribute. In the vineyards, they are at this time of year replanting young vines where old vines have died or they do weed control, rodent control, etc. In 5-6 weeks they will begin the critical task of pruning the vines for the next vintage. This is a task which takes great skill and can only be learned over many years. It takes usually around 3 months to accomplish the entire job and then we move on to a number of other essential vineyard activities. Without these people helping us, we have no chance of bringing in a harvest next year.

The same situation is true for other sectors of agriculture as well. The attacks on our workers will not show up in the marketplace immediately but show up they will. And once the consumer realizes how many products are no longer available, it will be too late to correct the situation. In the case of wine, if we cannot pull off a 2026 vintage due to vineyards that could not be pruned, you will not see any inkling of that until well into 2027. And even then, there will of course be available some rotgut wine produced by “mechanical pruning” and “mechanical harvesting” but honest premium wines will be at a minimum.

So the question becomes “what can we do?”. Some of the wine community has been getting out and protesting along major highways in our area to try and alert passerby’s that we have a problem. Perhaps it is time to use the tried and true French approach and drive our tractors out on the same highways and gum up the works to bring attention to our plight. Whatever we decide, it is certain that doing nothing will not get the vineyards pruned.