Trump wants more migrants on US farms, as of this week Ag Sec is promoting Jan 1st Rule change as a way to hire more migrant farm workers for less pay.
With deportation raids
sending a chill across farm country, the Trump administration wants to make it easier for U.S. farms to hire migrant workers, angering critics across the political spectrum.
On January 1, new emergency rules took effect, allowing
U.S. farms to hire more workers and pay less in wages for migrants coming in on H-2A temporary labor visas.
Speaking during a visit to Louisiana this week,
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins framed the changes as a way to help farmers struggling to find U.S. workers in the absence of deeper congressional reforms.
“We are working to make very quick change as quickly as we can to basically open up the market so that these labor questions can be resolved,” Rollins
said.
Last fall, as the Trump team proposed the new rules, it put a finer point on the situation: the administration’s
deportation raids and border crackdown were exacerbating the farm world’s already chronic shortage of workers. Trump has carried out a massive deportation effort across the nation, with some critics warning it could impact farms where migrants were employed. They warned that a reduction in farm workers could lead to food price increases.
“The near total cessation of the inflow of illegal aliens combined with the lack of an available legal workforce, results in significant disruptions to production costs and threatening the stability of domestic food production and prices for U.S consumers,”
the Department of Labor warned, adding that stepped-up immigration enforcement under Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” could eliminate another estimated 225,000 farm workers.
The issue of staffing on U.S. farms is a politically complicated one for the president.
Agricultural areas tend to lean Republican, but
about 40 percent of the farm labor force is not legally allowed to work in the U.S.
That tension can be seen in the wide range of responses to the president’s agriculture policy.
Some farm owners say they would hire more U.S. workers if they could, but Americans don’t want the jobs and migrant workers have thus become an existential part of the business.
“If this program went away tomorrow, farming would cease,” Walter King, one of the co-owners of Nelson-King Farms in the Mississippi Delta region, recently
told The New Yorker.
Meanwhile, everyone from U.S. farmers to labor groups to immigration restriction advocates have denounced the Trump administration’s stance on H-2As.
“I don’t think it’s fair that our pay will be lowered so much,” an undocumented farm worker in Idaho who gave her name as Maria
told The New York Times, as she fears her wages will drop from $17 to $11 dollars per hour in the face of the new rules.
The United Farm Workers union has sued over the rule change, alleging the public was not given proper opportunity to comment, and arguing that the new H-2A system will harm foreign and domestic workers alike.
“There is nothing ‘America First’ about expanding exploitative guest worker programs that undercut and displace American workers,” union president Teresa Romero
said in a November statement when a lawsuit was announced, referencing President Trump’s “America First” slogan.
“President Trump’s wage cuts serve only one purpose: they make it easier for big agricultural corporations to exploit cheap foreign labor through the H-2A program and replace American farm workers, or avoid paying them a fair market wage,” she added.
The new rules will cost H-2A workers about $2 billion in wage cuts and will put $3 billion of downward wage pressure on U.S. farm employees,
according to an analysis from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports lower levels of immigration, argued in a recent
Washington Examiner op-ed that the Trump administration is bowing to pressure from agribusiness on the H-2A question, rather than pushing farms to adopt cost-saving mechanization.
“The long-term competitiveness of American agriculture is not served by caving to the short-sighted demands of agribusiness lobbyists or the Luddite demands of unions,” he
wrote. “Instead, the federal government would best serve the interests of farmers, farmworkers, and the nation as a whole by helping the harvest of fruits and vegetables transition to the 21st century.”
The Independent has contacted the White House for comment.
“These actions come at a time when every dollar saved will go a long way in ensuring the continued business success of these American agricultural operations,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said in a statement to
The Independent, noting the cost of inputs for farmers and ranchers went up under the Biden administration
. “The farm economy is in a difficult situation, and President Trump is utilizing all the tools available to ensure farmers have what they need to be successful.”
President Trump has acknowledged the tension between his immigration policy and his support for U.S. farmers.
“Brooke Rollins brought it up, and she said, ‘So, we have a little problem. The farmers are losing a lot of people,’ and we figured it out, and we have some great stuff being written,” the president
said last year during a speech in Iowa.
That summer, the administration announced it would avoid deporting large numbers of immigrants from key industries like agriculture and hospitality,
only to rapidly change course.
The administration has focused more on crackdowns in big cities than raids on farms, but the smattering of large operations at farms across the U.S. has still
sent fear through the agriculture community.
Roughly one in seven California farmers said they had lost workers linked to immigration enforcement and fears over future operations,
according to a recent Michigan State survey.
