Every Christmas tree comes with a story.
Many stories go untold because the people who lived them fear this could be their last Christmas with their families.
President-elect Donald Trump vows to start deporting people without legal immigration status as soon as he returns to the White House next month — up to 11 million people, according to his campaign speeches.
Oregon is the leading producer and exporter of Christmas trees in the U.S., and this $118 million industry rests heavily on the backs of the immigrant seasonal farmworkers who work the tree farms.
Most workers approached by Street Roots declined to talk on the record about their work harvesting Christmas trees, fearful that even having a Hispanic last name puts them at risk of the coming immigration sweeps.
Oregon farmworker Saul Moreno, who has been working the Christmas tree harvest for 15 years, spoke generally about his experience. Providing people with Christmas trees is hard work, Moreno told Street Roots.
It includes more than chopping down the trees. It includes planting, weeding, mowing and applying more than two dozen varieties of pesticides.
Officials at the Immigrant Coalition, a nationwide advocacy organization for immigrant workers, claim most of these pesticides pose health risks to workers.
According to a report by the National Institutes of Health, such risks include hematological alterations, respiratory issues, endocrine dysfunction, neurotoxicity, infertility and (most concerningly to NIH researchers) an increased risk of some types of cancer.
Immigrant workers already face significant health risks. The average life expectancy of an immigrant seasonal farmworker is 49 years, according to the National Library of Medicine.
After the trees are harvested, workers must also shape and package them for shipping.
Moreno said the harvest generally lasts a month, starting in early November. Work days run from sunrise to sunset.
Workers walk through the trees and mark the ones to be cut down. Moreno supervises crews of 20 to 30 workers as they cut down the trees with chainsaws and drag them through the fields.
All this is done in Oregon’s notoriously cold, rainy and windy weather.
Trees are then bailed with twine. A typical day repeats this process, tree by tree, some 600 times. Trees are loaded into trailers and taken to a loading yard where they are unloaded, counted and sorted.
Once the harvest is over, farmworkers must find additional work — often not until warmer weather returns.
Many members of the Woodburn-based farmworkers union Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (Northwest Farmworkers United), or PCUN, produce Christmas trees, according to Reyna Lopez, its executive director — whether it’s planting trees for the forthcoming seasons or harvesting the trees for the holidays.
“Farmworkers are a critical part of this industry,” Lopez told Street Roots. “It depends on hundreds of seasonal workers to meet the U.S. holiday demand. Any kind of mass deportation attack would have devastating impacts on our state’s economy.”
Christmas trees were ranked the 14th most valuable Oregon agricultural commodity in 2020, according to research from Oregon State University.
Oregon produced 3.17 million Christmas trees on 33,916 acres last year, according to the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service. Gross sales in 2023 totaled $118 million — up 10% from 2020.
The largest tree-producing counties were Clackamas County, with 9,442 acres and Marion County, with 7,711 acres.
“We don’t have any 2024 data yet,” Andrea Cantu-Schomus, the director of communications of the Oregon Department of Agriculture, told Street Roots.
The planting and harvesting of the trees “depend on an exclusively immigrant workforce and would suffer greatly if their workers suddenly disappeared,” Lopez said.
Lopez and other farmworker advocates point out that immigrants without legal status live with children and other loved ones who have achieved such status. Trump’s deportation plans cannot help but separate families.
Oregonians will not stand by while their immigrant neighbors are rounded up, said Lopez.
Trump told interviewer Kristen Welker of NBC’s “Meet the Press” Dec. 8 that some of the four million mixed-status families in the United States might be deported together — even when some family members are U.S. citizens or have legal immigration status.
“Immigrant Oregonians are not alone in their struggle,” Lopez said. “Oregonians are unified and connected to immigrants across our state because immigrants are a critical part of our neighborhoods, local economy, workplaces, congregations and schools.”
Researchers at Oregon State University estimated in a 2018 study that there are 28,940 migrant farmworkers in the state. However, that was six years ago, so the number is undoubtedly much higher now.
The 2018 numbers reflected a statewide increase of 2.1% since the previous attempt to get a head count of migrant workers in 2013.
“Estimating the number of migrant and seasonal farmworkers in agricultural positions in Oregon is a difficult task,” the study said.
Therefore, the number of immigrants who work in the state’s Christmas tree industry remains elusive. However, as with general agricultural labor in the state, growers rely on them.
And their reliance is increasing.
In 2019, before the pandemic further tightened the labor market, Oregon Employment Department officials reported that the state’s tree growers used farm labor contractors to hire migrant workers from California.
Farm labor shortages across the board prompted a federal bill to loosen restrictions on hiring immigrant farmworkers and create a path to citizenship for more than one million people. The Farm Workforce Modernization Act, introduced in 2019, has failed several times to pass through Congress.
Wages for workers in Oregon’s Christmas tree industry are better than in other states. Workers here make approximately $20 per hour, according to the job website ZipRecruiter. Workers in North Carolina (Oregon’s nearest competitor) start at $13 per hour, according to the same source.
Ninety-nine million people in the U.S. set up a Christmas tree every year, according to the Immigration Coalition.
At least 73% of farmworkers in the U.S. are immigrants, according to the coalition, and 70% of them don’t have secure legal immigration status.
Nonetheless, farmworkers and their allies will not be frightened, said Lopez.
“We will not allow divisions and the fear of deportation to be exploited against our immigrant communities,” she told Street Roots.
“Our networks will continue to educate, share trusted resources, provide direct support for deportation defense and deportation disruption and fight for policy protections that ensure immigrant families are safe in Oregon,” Lopez said.
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This article appears in December 18, 2024.