Voters in agricultural communities of Central Washington asked for nothing when they voted for Donald Trump last November. And that’s exactly what they got.
The heartland of our state’s multibillion-dollar crop and orchard export economy is in the crosshairs of Trump Administration’s trade and tariff policies. Trump is putting it all together: immigrant undocumented farmworkers are targeted for deportation; high tariffs are being slapped on imports which will lead to retaliatory tariffs on stuff we ship abroad.
“I represent a trade economy: I represent the success of what innovation and trade get you,” Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., told a bevy of administration officials at a recent Senate Commerce Committee hearing. She cited a familiar figure–that two of every five Washington jobs is linked in some form to our export/import economy.
Washington exported $7.6 billion in agricultural products last year. In the last decade, I and other scribes poked fun at Gov. Inslee when he led door-opening trips (“junkets”) across the Pacific to market our cherries and apples. Jokes about frostiness flew through the cold warehouse full of Asia-bound spuds where Cantwell held a press briefing. We should not laugh. Seventy percent of our potato crop is exported, along with 30 percent of apples (largely to India), and 25 percent of cherries (mainly China-bound).
Trump screwed around with this trade in his first term, slapping a tariff on steel and aluminum from India. India retaliated by taxing our apples. The result, Washington’s India apple market plummeted from $120 million to under one $1 million. How ‘bout them apples?
Spurred on by Washington’s congressional delegation, the Biden Administration negotiated a lifting of India’s retaliatory tariffs on apples, chickpeas, and lentils. However, only two years later Trump has slapped a 25 percent tariff on India’s exports to the United States.
As usual, retaliation was a Trump motive, for vengeance fuels him and he was mad at India’s continued purchase of Russian oil. The consequences for such Indian exports as carpets were devastating: A $500 carpet now carries a $125 tariff with a threatened doubling to $250.
If you don’t like Trump’s tariff decisions, wait a minute for the whipsaw consequences. The cycle of retaliation gets repeated. In Cantwell’s words, “When tariffs strike our farmers, just as they did in the first Trump administration, it’s not going to be fun. It’s going to be a nightmare for our farmers.”
Who gets to feel it? “Families, communities, and businesses across Washington state,” says Gov. Bob Ferguson. To add insult to injury, retaliation will also hike prices on imports that we consume, such as avocados and tequila from Mexico.
The hurt goes up and down, but largely impacts our state’s 100,000 migrant farmworkers, 24,000 of whom are unauthorized. Rebutting Vice President J.D. Vance, Yakima’s Catholic Bishop Joseph Tyson wrote recently: “The vast majority come here not out of criminal intent, but out of a desire to provide a better life, for themselves, for their families and children.”
Bishop Tyson, speaking in an eloquent Guadalupe Feast Day homily a few years back, delivered an uneasy, blunt analysis of the Washington economy. “We fail to tell the truth that without undocumented immigrant labor, we would have very little food on our nation’s table,” said he. “We fail to tell the truth about the human cost this takes on our region’s agricultural workers — the fear of deportation, and the constant fear of family separation.”
On these shoulders rest the largest segment of Washington’s economy, larger than Boeing or Microsoft. It is sustained by a shadow economy, and that economy’s epicenter is four counties — Benton, Franklin, Lincoln, and Grant — at the heart of Trump country.
So it has been for decades. A colleague at the Seattle PI, Hilda Bryant, would go into Central Washington migrant camps to expose dismal living conditions. The local establishments hated her.
Bryant encountered racism and condescension. But the Latino community carries its weight and then some. That community includes farmworkers, farm owners, entrepreneurs, state legislators of both parties, state Supreme Court justices, and U.S. District Court judges.
Cantwell and Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, are co-sponsoring legislation to take back from the executive branch the authority to impose tariffs without Congress’ approval. All new tariffs would expire after 60 days unless Congress explicitly approves them. Says Grassley, “Trade wars can be devastating, which is why the Founding Fathers gave Congress the clear Constitutional authority over war and trade.”
Iowa’s agricultural exports total a whopping $17.1 billion, yet GOP loyalist Grassley is confronted with a President who has neither read nor respects nor abides by the U.S,. Constitution. Trump may and likely will fold. Not Cantwell. Not representing a state that looks outward.
This story also appears in Cascadia Advocate.
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“As usual, retaliation was a Trump motive, for vengeance fuels him and he was mad at India’s continued purchase of Russian oil.”
By no means wishing to defend these tariff policies in general, but this one makes sense to me.
Would we give Russia favorable trade deals so we could sell them more potatoes, while they do what they’re doing in Ukraine? No, we would not, I hope. India is helping prop Russia up, so … isn’t it obvious by extension? Does India have to send their own troops to Ukraine to torture and kill, before we consider them responsible?