美国国家公共电台 NPR In Garlic Capital, Tariffs And Immigration Crackdown Have Mixed Impacts（在线收听）

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Gilroy, Calif., calls itself the garlic capital of the world. And two policies of the Trump administration, one on trade, the other on immigration, are having mixed effects on this agricultural community. NPR's Jasmine Garsd visited the town caught in the middle.

JASMINE GARSD, BYLINE: It's about 50 degrees outside, but for a moment, it looks like it's snowing. The morning air is pungent and savory, and those flakes falling from the sky are garlic skin pieces drifting away from the peeling facility I'm standing outside of. I'm in Gilroy, south of San Francisco, at the Christopher Ranch, the largest garlic producer in the country. Ken Christopher, executive vice president, tells me it didn't always look this busy. In the 1990s, he says, the industry was hit hard by cheap Chinese garlic imports.

KEN CHRISTOPHER: U.S. garlic was trading around $40 dollars a box in the 1990s. Chinese garlic flooded the market, and at $10 dollars a box. And it severely undercut a lot of U.S. growers.

GARSD: Only a few garlic farms survived. Christopher Ranch was the biggest. Christopher says about 6 percent of its garlic is bought from China. The rest is home-grown.

CHRISTOPHER: It was really hard. You know, we're talking reduction in workforce. We're talking reduction in work hours. We had furlough days, just simply, just to get through the year.

GARSD: The struggle went on for years. Then in 2016, Donald Trump was elected president, and his stance on Chinese imports was pretty clear - tax them.

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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We are now making it clear to China that after years of targeting our industries and stealing our intellectual property that theft of American jobs and wealth has come to an end.

GARSD: Christopher flew out to Washington last year to testify in favor of tariffs on Chinese garlic. That would mean Chinese garlic at your supermarket would be way more expensive than American-grown. When he talks about tariffs, Christopher's face lights up. He says his dream tax on Chinese garlic is over 400 percent. In the end, the Trump administration went for a 10 percent tariff. He remembers when it was announced.

CHRISTOPHER: My co-workers and I, sort of texting each other, email sort of flying back and forth. A co-worker of mine actually got me the flag that was flying above the U.S. Capitol the day they got enacted.

GARSD: The ranch says their garlic sales are up by about 20 percent since last year. They've even had to pull garlic from storage to meet increased demand. But like most American agriculture, a lot of this town's labor force is immigrant. And the Trump administration's crackdown on undocumented labor has hit many California farmers hard. Christopher says he thinks about this all the time.

CHRISTOPHER: If the Republican Party is pro-business, if they want to support industries across the country, they need to realize that immigration is a critical function of that.

GARSD: Driving through downtown Gilroy, it's clear this town has close ties to Mexico. The streets are lined with taquerias, discotecas, and there are sites in the outskirts that house migrant workers.

GERARDO BARBA: Just in general, there has been a lot more fear, just fear to be out in public.

GARSD: I'm with Gerardo Barba, an outreach coordinator for Catholic Charities. He says the mood here has changed.

BARBA: We started noticing changes recently with the higher amounts of actual arrest that ICE conducts. Generally, going to people's homes, knocking on the door.

GARSD: At the Gilroy Catholic Charities office, I meet a man who packages garlic at the Christopher Ranch. He says they're great bosses. He gets paid $15 an hour, a solid wage for a farm worker. He recently got his green card. And yet...

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Speaking Spanish).

GARSD: He asked that his name not be used because he has family members who are undocumented and worried about getting deported. If that happens, they've asked him to take care of their children. He says even though business is booming, there's a lot of fear, and he wonders...

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Speaking Spanish).

GARSD: ..."If enough people get deported, who's going to harvest all that garlic?" Jasmine Garsd, NPR News, Gilroy, Calif.