Portside

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.”

“They’re sort of, I guess refreshingly, explicit about how this is going to go down,” said Daniel Costa, an attorney with the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) who tracks the H-2A program. But this claim of mass carnage from immigration has a very particular intent: the only way out of the crisis, the Labor Department states, is to hire many more foreign workers to pick U.S. crops at lower wages, a direct transfer of income from workers in the fields to their agribusiness employers.

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.

An email to the Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration, which filed the new rule, could not be answered because of the ongoing government shutdown, according to the office’s media contacts. The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment.

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. About one in five agricultural workers is on an H-2A visa, nearly a ten-fold increase from 20 years ago. While employers are supposed to advertise for U.S. workers to fill jobs first, this expansion of H-2A has continued virtually unabated. 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. The AEWR is essentially a minimum wage for these foreign workers, which is supposed to be at a level that doesn’t create an “adverse effect” for U.S. workers in the industry. It is published every year (with different rates for each state) using a methodology that previously was derived by the Farm Labor Survey, an initiative of the Department of Agriculture that was discontinued by the Trump administration in August.

The new interim final rule changes the methodology for determining the AEWR in the absence of the Farm Labor Survey. It’s complicated, but the rule proposes that the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) survey operated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics will be the primary data used to determine wages. As Costa points out, this survey does not actually talk to farm employers but farm labor contractors, who offer wages at lower levels than direct farm hiring does. “It naturally means the wages are lower,” Costa said.

In addition, the new rule allows farm employers to charge H-2A workers for their housing, which was not allowed before. “It’s a way for employers to continue to house workers and also charge them, and bring down effective wages,” said Marcos Lopez of the Labor and Community Center at the University of California, Davis.

The result, a replay of cuts to H-2A minimum wages that the Trump administration enacted at the end of his first term, will be aggregate wage cuts of $2.46 billion annually, as the United Farm Workers point out. American agricultural workers, who must compete in the same marketplace for jobs, will also likely see significant cuts to their own pay, experts said. In some states like California, Washington, New York, and Arizona, the resulting wages for H-2A workers will be well below state minimum wages.

“The Trump wage cut is a catastrophe for American workers in agriculture who growers intend to replace with cheap and exploitable foreign guest workers,” said Teresa Romero, president of the United Farm Workers.

Employers have been pushing for the lower wages, claiming the AEWR was too high even as they increasingly turned to H-2A workers to fill open positions.

But what’s really interesting are the justifications made for this change, which explicitly blame Trump’s immigration enforcement for creating massive labor shortages in agriculture.

THE INTERIM FINAL RULE PUBLISHED IN THE FEDERAL REGISTER includes a “good cause notification,” which is required to waive the typical notice and comment period that slows down the regulatory process. These notifications typically are given because of an imminent emergency, necessitating a quick change to the rules. To Trump’s Department of Labor, that emergency is Trump’s immigration program.

“Employers are facing a structural, not cyclical, workforce crisis,” the filing says. It cites a dramatic 93 percent drop in U.S. border crossings that denies agricultural employers much of their workforce, something that will only intensify as raids continue. As the filing says, “The Department anticipates an imminent and significant decline in the number of available illegal aliens who had, in significant part, previously worked unlawfully in the U.S. agricultural sector.” This cannot be compensated for with a boost to imports, the Department claims, and will lead to shortages in fresh produce and other crops requiring human workers.

Specifically, the Department says that 42 percent of all agricultural workers “lacked authorization to work” in the U.S. in 2021 and 2022. Moreover, the remaining workforce is aging, relatively “immobile” (meaning they don’t follow crops throughout the season), and looking to get out of the industry; only 20 percent of crop workers plan to be in the job for the next five years, according to a survey cited in the filing.

As a result, employers are facing significant economic harms, the filing claims. And incredibly, given the administration’s unceasing rhetoric to the contrary, the 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.”

(For what it’s worth, nearly half of all agricultural workers are native-born, and significantly more than half are U.S. citizens, according to Department of Agriculture data. That data is for all “farm laborers graders and sorters,” but if you narrow down to crop farmworkers, just 32 percent are U.S.-born, according to the Department of Labor’s National Agricultural Workers Survey, and 38 percent are U.S. citizens. More than half of all crop workers, 58 percent, are authorized to work in the U.S. in some fashion.)

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. (There were 384,900 H-2A applications last year.)

But the filing states, “Without swift action, agricultural employers will be unable to maintain operations, and the nation's food supply will be at risk.”

It's not clear that there is an imminent workforce crisis in agriculture. While there were fears earlier this year that tighter immigration enforcement would lead to unharvested crops, the harvest went off relatively smoothly, as my colleague Bob Kuttner explained. Some commodity crops like grains are looking at a record harvest, in fact.

“What we see every day is that farm workers of all immigration statuses are continuing to go to work,” said Antonio De Loera-Brust of the United Farm Workers. “To be blunt, this is not a workforce that can afford to stay home for days on end, let alone four years.” Raids only disrupt the workforce for a couple days, De Loera-Brust said.

In this sense, immigration 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.

“We call it the ‘Deport and Replace’ strategy,” De Loera-Brust said, “which is defined above all to make it easier for corporate agribusiness to exploit its workers, whether terrified undocumented residents or an unlimited pool of cheap foreign guest workers … The Trump administration would rather expand the abusive H-2A program than do right by the workers who are already here, feeding America for decades.”

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. It’s hard to see how this aligns with the America First ideology.

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.”

David Dayen is the Prospect’s executive editor. His work has appeared in The Intercept, The New Republic, HuffPost, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and more. His most recent book is ‘Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power.’