New guest workers fill empty Brewster orchard jobs
100 Jamaican men have arrived to take Gebbers Farm slots
.Post a commentPrint By K.C. Mehaffey


Monday, May 31, 2010



From thier farm worker housing complex near Monse, Clifton Brown, at left, and Leon Campbell, tell of their experience in the Brewster area after arriving from Jamaica. An estimated 200 Jamaican workers have arrived in Brewster and are working at Gebbers Farms through a guestworker program.

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Robert Webster, owner of The Music Store, has seen an increase in interested shoppers since Jamaican workers have arrived in Brewster.

Enrique Campos, owner of La Moda a clothing store in Brewster, doesn’t think his business will rebound from the recent Gebbers Farms firings.

Johnine Moore, a hair stylist at Kacena’s Style Carrefour in Brewster, talks about the impacts on businesses from the recent Gebbers Farms firings and the Jamaican workers that were brought in as employees.

At least 100 Jamaican workers have arrived in Brewster and are working
at Gebbers Farms through a guest worker program.

BREWSTER — The panic is over.

Five months after Gebbers Farms fired an undisclosed number of undocumented workers during a federal audit, Jamaican guest workers have started to flow into Brewster to fill some of the jobs.

That’s a welcome sign in this town, where residents who held jobs here for 10 and 20 years were suddenly let go following the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement action in December.

Months later, some say the impact wasn’t as great as they feared. Many people stayed, or left and came back. The school district — which prepared for a major drop in student numbers — reports that enrollment remained steady, currently at 912 students.

Even if some of those fired moved away to find work, some businesses believe the worst is over. And with new workers arriving, there’s a renewed hope that business will continue to pick up.

Long reliant on immigrant labor, Brewster is happy to see new faces in their grocery stores, and in the thousands of acres of orchards that surround this small Columbia River town.

People here are accustomed to migrant labor. This time, instead of workers from Mexico, they’re seeing Jamaican men who are all staying at a newly built Gebbers Farm camp a few miles northeast of town.

The camp is made up of rows of bright white buildings separated by walkways, and flanked by a large building where dozens of men eat, wash up after their evening meal, or sit at a long central table to watch a big-screen television at one end of the room.

Some were reluctant to talk late last week.

But those who did had few complaints, despite the cold and rainy weather so distant from their tropical island.

“I know it’s going to get hot, like, next month,â€