It’s funny, but not in a funny haha way, to watch conservative white people respond to this issue with something like multiple personality disorder.

I live deep in Trump country in agricultural Michigan. We don’t need many immigrant agricultural workers in my county, because the sorts of things that are mostly grown around here are harvested by machine. People are fiercely anti-immigrant.

But just a couple counties north, cherry orchards are dominant. Michigan is a regional powerhouse in cherry production, and has a national impact too. And guess what? You can’t pick cherries effectively with a machine. The cherry harvest is, and has been for as long as most people can remember, dependent on traveling immigrant workers, many of them from Mexico.

When Trump took office and did everything he could to frighten Mexican immigrants and drive them out of the country, cherry farmers in Michigan began to panic. They knew their fruit would rot on trees if a labor shortage ensued.

It did. Cherries rotted. Cherry farmers suffered. And the Great American myth that white agricultural workers would step forward and do the job?

That myth got exploded. Most people around here who want a job already have a job. Just ask local restaurant owners who can’t find workers.

But what didn’t get exploded is anti-immigrant sentiment. People are still white-hot angry about brown-skinned workers “stealing” their jobs, even though that anger is irrational, and even though cherries rotting on trees hurts the economy around here in so many ways.