The Trump Administration’s push to deport millions of people living in the U.S. without legal status is about to surge.
Washington will pump an extra $170 billion into Immigration Customs Enforcement, or ICE, and the Border Patrol between now and September 2029. With a massive budget behind the effort, the goal is to ramp up deportations to at least one million immigrants a year.
That poses a huge threat to immigrant-dependent industries, like agriculture, which has been dealing with an acute labor shortage.
Brandon Raso grows blueberries in New Jersey. Ideally, he would hire 600 workers to harvest the delicate fruit, but this year he could fill only a third of the positions.
“We lost two and a half million pounds of blueberries last year to falling on the ground, just due to the fact that we couldn't harvest,” said Raso, describing what he said amounted to a $5 million loss.
(Raso and other farmers quoted in this story spoke on a webinar hosted by Grow It Here, a non-profit advocating for changes in the H-2A visa program.)
More than 70% of farm workers were born overseas, mostly in Mexico, and more than 40% of them are in the country illegally, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Farmers claim they turn to foreign nationals because native-born Americans just do not want to do farm work.
“Over the last 10 to 15 years, I've probably had 150 people apply for a job here. Two of them have been Americans, and those two were just fulfilling a need for their unemployment to apply for a job,” said John Rosenow, a Wisconsin dairy farmer. “So, we really, really appreciate the immigrants that are working for us. They do a wonderful job.”
The Trump administration is conflicted about agriculture's dependence on immigrant labor. In September, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins set a goal of a “100% American workforce” in agriculture. “With 34 people, able-bodied adults on Medicaid, we should be able to do that fairly quickly,” Rollins said.
Trump contradicted Rollins before and after her statement, saying the farm workforce should be protected, and after a spate of ICE raids in early summer, primarily against farms in California and a meatpacking plant in Omaha, ICE has largely steered clear of farming operations.
“I've heard conflicting reports,” said Zach Rutledge, assistant professor at the Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics at Michigan State University. “And so, I don't know where the current policy stands.”
Rutledge has tracked a small decline in the number of farm workers from last spring, but he believes the farm workforce is currently stable, though vulnerable.
“There's been a crisis in farm labor for some time, and it certainly would be exacerbated by immigration enforcement,” said Rutledge. “It certainly doesn't help.”
It’s unclear if ICE will target farm workers as it ramps up enforcement, but White House Border Czar Tom Homan told Reuters that immigration arrests will “explode greatly next year,” and that enforcement would “absolutely” hit workplaces.
Lowering farm worker wages
As it increases immigration enforcement, the Trump administration has moved to make foreign guest workers cheaper for farmers to hire.
The Department of Labor has lowered wages that farmers must pay workers under the H-2A visa program and allowed employers to subtract housing costs.
Farmers complain that wages, coupled with the transportation and housing costs requirements under the H-2A program, can effectively run pay up as high as $31 an hour. They claim foreign labor costs are causing food grown in America to become more expensive and less competitive with imported fruits and vegetables.
“Higher prices make us less competitive with foreign growers,” said Lisa Tate, a citrus and avocado farmer in California. “Over several seasons, those ongoing losses take a toll, and a farmer may be able to absorb a few tough years, but eventually the operation becomes unsustainable.”
Next, they’d like to see the administration or Congress cap pay increases year to year and open the program to allow visa-holders to work all year round in the U.S. That would mean waiving the current requirement that workers return to their native countries after about 10 months of work.
Members of Congress have introduced several bills aimed at expanding the H-2A visa program and making it easier and cheaper for farmers to use, including the Farm Workforce Modernization Act.
Supporters of the wage rates say the system was designed to protect domestic workers and discourage farmers from hiring from outside the country just to save money. They note that higher wage rates for guest workers translate into more livable wages for native-born laborers.
The United Farm Workers union has sued to reverse the guest worker wage cuts. The suit asks a federal judge in California to stop the wage changes.
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest and Great Plains. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
