To the editor:
Before July 4, we all need to take another look at the photo on page one of last week’s Leelanau Enterprise. It shows a justifiably proud Steve Bardenhagen holding a flat of fresh strawberries, picked just in time for our Independence Day weekend. As we enjoy the fruit and fireworks and fun of our national holiday, we can thank the Bardenhagens and other local growers for the wonderful abundance before us.
There’s a bigger picture, though. Look more closely, and you’ll see in the background a dozen or so workers, their back bent in harvesting the berries by hand. We don’t see their faces, don’t know their names, their nationalities, their stories — how they got to Leelanau County, where they’re going next, what they’re going to do. What we do know is that wherever they go in the United States, they will probably live in peril, worried that an antagonistic American government might arrest, detain, and deport them.
