The agriculture bait and switch

The Department of Labor’s new rule cutting farmworker wages bluntly states that souped-up immigration enforcement has devastated the agricultural workforce and created a significant “risk of supply shock-induced food shortages,” according to a document filed in the Federal Register last week. The document also indicates that American workers are simply not interested in and do not have the skills to perform agricultural jobs, at odds with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’s claim that the farm workforce will soon be 100 percent American.

“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 document says, adding that “this threat will grow” given new federal funding for immigration enforcement under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

The rule seeks to bring in guest workers through the H-2A program at lower wages, potentially reducing wages across the spectrum for all farmworkers, regardless of legal status. But in order to do so quickly, Trump’s Department of Labor is surprisingly citing the downside risks of its own president’s mass deportation program, arguing that it is causing “immediate dangers to the American food supply.”

  Prospect

Does Trump know they're saying that?

Only one of two things can be true: Either Trump’s Labor Department actually believes that Trump’s immigration enforcement is destroying the agricultural sector and threatening food security, or they are pretending this threat is real in order to crush wages for both foreign and domestic agricultural workers. Neither look particularly good.

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In some states like California, Washington, New York, and Arizona, the resulting wages for H-2A workers will be well below state minimum wages.

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THE RULE IN QUESTION CONCERNS WHAT IS KNOWN as the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR), which is set for H-2A agricultural workers. H-2A gives one-year visas to foreign nationals to work in agriculture. They must work for the grower who sponsors the visa, and they lack basic worker protections that domestic workers have, like the ability to get overtime pay. The program has been called a form of slavery by critics in the past.

H-2A, which was established in the 1980s, has evolved from an occasional program to fill gaps in the workforce to one increasingly relied on by employers. [...] There is no cap on the program, so agribusiness can bring in an unlimited number of foreign workers.

Because H-2A workers don’t have bargaining rights, federal guidelines effectively set their wages.

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In addition, the new rule allows farm employers to charge H-2A workers for their housing, which was not allowed before.

Sounds very on brand for Trump and today's GOP.

[T]he Labor Department definitively rejects the idea of Americans replacing the missing workers. “The Department does not believe American workers currently unemployed or marginally employed will make themselves readily available in sufficient numbers to replace large numbers of aliens,” the filing states, adding that agricultural work involves “a distinct set of skills and is among the most physically demanding and hazardous occupations in the U.S. labor market.”

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The Labor Department even claims that broadly advertising agricultural jobs, which is required under the H2-A rules, has not led to a boost in applications from U.S. workers. This is a bit of a fiction; workers who apply often do not receive jobs, and nobody is really checking to see if applications are coming in. “The system isn’t set up to prove that there’s a labor shortage of U.S. workers,” said Costa, of EPI.

In the end, the Labor Department concludes, the only way to protect agricultural employers from disaster and consumers from rising prices and food shortages is to slash wages in the H-2A program to make it more viable to bring in workers. This is an odd response to a workforce crisis, since cutting wages across the sector will likely drive existing workers to look elsewhere for jobs. In fact, farm employers in Florida fear that H-2A foreign workers won’t apply for these jobs anymore because the wages are so low.

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[I]mmigration enforcement is working hand in hand with the H-2A program. Farm employers do not fear losing their immigrant workforce because they can import them, now at lower wages, from abroad. Farmworkers trying to organize have said they’ve been told explicitly that they will be replaced with H-2A workers, in fact.

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That’s certainly not the way MAGA sells immigration enforcement. For years they have said that Americans should benefit from open jobs in the United States. But instead, their favorite administration is enabling the mass importation of exploitable workers, and blaming their own immigration enforcement actions for giving them no alternative.

Agribusinesses “are very capitalist except when it comes to hiring and paying workers, then they become the most left-wing central planners I’ve ever seen,” Costa said. “They want the free market to prevail except when it comes to paying the workers. In that case we need government intervention immediately.”

So despicable.