YORK SPRINGS, Pennsylvania — “I just had a thing against Mexicans, I guess. Stereotyping, maybe.”
Brian Amos has, for 20 years, run a motorcycle repair shop in the tiny borough of York Springs in Adams County. This rural area is known for the apple orchards that line its rolling hills and for the Battle of Gettysburg, which occurred just south of York Springs. The borough of York Springs, to the extent it’s known for anything, is known for its Mexican population.
The only grocery store in town is Lua’s Mexican Store. The only restaurant with a York Springs mailing address is El Rancho Grande just outside of town. York Springs is aptly known as “Little Mexico.”
And so it wasn’t a shock to Amos when, 16 years ago, a dilapidated building across the street was bought and converted into a dormitory for migrant workers from Mexico. But he wasn’t happy. “I looked at it like a negative thing,” Amos tells me from his bike shop.
Amos confronted the owner, Gary Lebo. Lebo owned Quality Greenhouses, a large wholesale nursery business that would bus in dozens of workers from Mexico every spring for the growing season. The conversation didn’t go well.
Come spring, Amos watched the buses of migrant workers unload out front of his shop. “I’m just like, oh, here goes neighborhood,” he says.
Then, a few weeks later, Amos found himself in a jam. He was trying to haul a very broken motorcycle off a trailer by himself. A crowd of his Mexican neighbors saw his struggle, walked over, and did the job for him.
One Mexican man named Alejandro started talking to Amos. “Holy s***,” Amos recalls himself thinking. “These are nice guys.” Alejandro, whom he calls “Honda,” “pretty much told me these are all family people that never been in any trouble in Mexico. That’s the only reason why they’re here.”
An hour after Amos tells me this story, Honda walks into the bike shop and greets him, his longtime friend and part-time employer.
Amos long ago outgrew his prejudices, and he sees the large population of seasonal workers from Mexico as a boon. “They’re really good,” he tells me. “They don’t get no trouble. They’ll do anything to help you. They’re really nice people. They’re family people, kind of very religious people. They’re very hard-working people.”
Most of the Mexicans living in York Springs are here on a seasonal agricultural guest-worker visa — the H2A visa. Hundreds of H2A workers from across Latin America work in the apple orchards in Adams County and the surrounding counties that sit in this microclimate perfect for growing fruit. In York Springs proper, most of the migrants work for Quality Greenhouses. They’re basically all from Mexico. According to Honda, the greenhouse workers all come from two adjacent states in Mexico: Guanajuato and Michoacan.
Quality, now run by Gary Lebo’s son Bret (whom Honda and friends call “bread” or the Spanish “pan” because he provides them their daily sustenance), recruits mostly by word of mouth. Honda’s connection was his brother. Some men are following in their father’s footsteps from Guanajuato to York Springs.
The employer arranges for the H2A visas, which the workers pick up at the border — in Monterrey, in Honda’s case. Buses typically takes them from the border to Pennsylvania. This year, though, Honda tells me they got flown from Monterrey to Baltimore, which is less than two hours away.
Under H2A rules, the employer is required to provide no-cost housing and transportation to the workers. In Lebo’s case, he has built some housing in York Springs or converted homes into dorms. Each Lebo house has a house big brother of sorts — a longtime guest worker who has a U.S. driver’s license for taking the workers to the greenhouses or shopping.
This is a great deal for the workers.
“I make good money,” Honda explains, “because I make dollars, and I send them to my town,” where his wife spends in pesos. In York Springs, “I don’t pay rent. I don’t pay bills. I don’t pay gas. … I just pay food. I go to Walmart and get food for the whole week. I cook for myself. I spend money at the restaurant just when it’s payday.”
Honda has been coming to York Springs for 16 years, and now he owns his home in Mexico outright, he tells me. It has three stories with four bedrooms and three bathrooms.
“Guys who come here, they feel like the won the lottery,” Amos says. And Amos, an unabashed supporter of President Donald Trump, is pretty happy with the arrangement. He gets regular help from Honda nine months out of the year, and he also gets quiet neighbors with clean lawns.
Everyone I spoke to in and around York Springs feels much the same way about the guest workers of the area. It’s a striking contrast to places such as Springfield, Ohio, or Charleroi, Pennsylvania, where large migrant populations have caused unrest.
Jobs Pennsylvanians won’t do
John is retired, and he spends his days hanging around the bike shop. He is very critical of President Joe Biden’s open-border policies and of the massive influx of Haitians under Temporary Protected Status — or, as he calls it when he tries to recall the name, “Preferred Immigrant Status.”
Brian Amos, a proud Trump supporter, has much the same politics.
For the Mexican guest workers of Adams County, though, both of them have only praise.
Unlike in Springfield or Charleroi, the locals don’t complain of cultural disruption. The migrant-worker housing is immaculately kept. “Here on Main Street,” Amos says, “any building that looks nice and has flowers on the front, it’s owned by Quality. And they have the nicest houses in town.”
Most importantly, nobody can claim that Honda or the other guest workers are taking anyone’s jobs.
The unemployment rate in Adams County is 3.2%. Every employer I talk to says it’s painfully hard to find help. Lua’s Mexican Shop, like every business around York Springs, has a “help wanted” sign out front.
“Young white men don’t want to work anymore,” says Travis, who is in his 40s. Travis digs graves at the nearby Mt. Olivet cemetery, which is well kept. Travis hires unskilled labor for the mowing and weed-whacking. After a couple of Michelob Ultras, Travis tells me, “I just fired two 23-year-old white boys because they didn’t work hard. I’ll hire Mexicans all day long.”
Politicians and employers who seek more immigrant labor always talk about “jobs Americans won’t do.” It’s often just an excuse for employers who want to pay lower wages. But in York Springs, every last person says that there’s not enough nonimmigrant labor.
“You’re not going to get people that were born here to pick apples anymore,” Bill says from Rocco’s. “You’re lucky to get them off the damn couch.”
“I think that the whole labor shortage that we’re suffering from,” says John, the retiree at the bike shop, is because “young people growing up don’t do side jobs, don’t do summer jobs, don’t do after-school jobs anymore. … I have no malice against anyone that comes here to work legally, and if they’re filling a job void, it’s because we let the void occur.”
“They don’t want to work,” Larry, another lunch patron at Rocco’s, tells me, talking about the local white population under age 30.
“They don’t want to do what we do,” says Jeff, holding up his callused hands. Jeff and Larry, both in their 60s, drill wells. Jeff’s an enthusiastic Trump supporter whose main beef with Vice President Kamala Harris is the open border. He believes Adams County needs these hundreds of Mexican guest workers.
‘This isn’t a new thing’
Crucially, the migrants of Adams County don’t represent a dramatic change. “This isn’t a new thing, like you’re talking about in Charleroi,” says Neil, a local HVAC repairman enjoying lunch at Rocco’s on Main Street. “It’s been going on here forever. Farmers depend on these guys. They run the farm.”
Guest workers coming in the spring and leaving after the harvest are now part of the standard rhythm of this place. “That’s pretty much the way it’s been since I was a kid,” says Bill, Neil’s partner at both lunch and business. Both men are Trump supporters who also attack Biden’s open borders.
This is a crucial distinction for understanding where and when diversity causes problems. Often what people see as the problems of ethnic diversity are really the problems of rapid change. In Springfield and Charleroi, the population is rapidly increasing. Local Anglophone grocers catering to Midwestern, white Americans give way to patois-speaking shops catering to a Haitian clientele. It’s analogous to the problems of gentrification, where things are done a certain way for generations and then a new demographic comes in and does things differently.
York Springs has seen a lot of change over the decades — locals lament the loss of businesses along Main Street. “It’s become devoid of commerce,” John says. “Here in town, there used to be barbershops. There used to be two gas stations. Used to have several grocery stores.” Now there’s only a grain and feed shop, two Mexican shops, and a place to get your motorcycle repaired.
But the busloads of Mexicans didn’t drive them out. The culprit was instead the Walmart trucks that roll down Main Street on the way to the supercenters in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, or Gettysburg, Pennsylvania — where Honda does all his shopping.
On this score, Brian notes that the guest-worker population is not a boon to the local retail economy. They send almost all of their earnings back to Guanajuato and Michoacan.
These workers don’t represent business for local car dealers or restaurants, really. York Springs is little more than a bedroom community. It’s quiet. And for a lot of locals, that’s a huge boon.
‘Don’t bother anyone’
“We’ve got no muggings,” John says. “We don’t have drug sales on the street. They are self-policing.” John passes along a line from the former police chief: “If they have a bad guy in the bunch … they rat him out to the cops right away.”
“Get out there in the farmland, those guys don’t bother anybody,” Bill at Rocco’s says. “They’re happy to be working.”
That phrase, “they don’t bother anybody,” starts to bug me. It’s not terribly collegial-sounding. It’s a very rural type of compliment. Maybe the type of people who move to Adams County are the type of people who hold that definition of neighborliness: Keep your lawn clean and don’t cause any trouble.
And why would York Springs have no trouble with crime in contrast to the other places that have seen an influx of young adults from Latin America? It has got to do with the guest-worker visas and the employers.
“They won the lottery,” John says of the visa-holders. “The caveat is don’t get in trouble. If they get in any kind of legal trouble, they’re on the next bus back, and their job is done. They don’t get invited back again.”
Amos agrees: “The ones here working on a visa, they’re scared to death to not get invited back, because what they’ll earn in three days work here, it takes them a month to make where they come from.”
A scared-straight population that doesn’t participate much in the local economy hardly sounds like the melting-pot American dream stories we sometimes hear. It sounds like a second-class population that does what it’s told because it doesn’t really have rights.
The Mexican workers generally don’t give me an interview, either because of the language barrier or because of their desire to stay out of trouble.
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Honda, who has been taking English classes at a local church on Wednesday nights and has been practicing at the bike shop for 16 years, is the exception.
I ask him if he follows immigration debates and immigration politics. He says he tries not to have opinions on American politics — you know, so as to not cause trouble. But Honda does offer me one opinion: “In 16 years, I’ve seen lots of presidents. In my experience, Trump is better.”
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Publish date : 2024-10-18 07:05:00
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