There was widespread outrage at President Donald Trump’s comments earlier this year that Immigration and Customs Enforcement shouldn’t enforce the law against farms employing illegal aliens. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins did damage control by saying that the administration’s goal remains that farms should have “a 100% American workforce” and that “ultimately, the answer on this is automation.”
So why is the Trump administration doing the exact opposite, encouraging farmers to import more foreign workers and to slow harvest mechanization? That’s what a recent Department of Labor regulation would do.
The rule reduces the minimum wage that farmers must pay to agricultural guest workers imported under the H-2A visa. The Department estimates that the wage cut will save farmers nearly 25% next year compared to what they paid visa workers this year. The savings could be even greater if farmers also take the opportunity to cut the wages of non-visa farmworkers, U.S. citizens, legal residents, and undocumented immigrants, who make up 80% of the agricultural workforce.
Farmers would undoubtedly be pleased with cheaper visa workers, but the new rule would inevitably have two consequences that are contrary to the administration’s stated objectives.
First, if importing foreign workers is cheaper, farmers will import more foreign workers. The H-2A program has already been growing rapidly; the State Department issued more than 300,000 visas in 2023, a 50% increase in just five years. And the Labor Department estimates that with the new rule, the number could exceed half a million by 2030, meaning it would be bigger than the 1950s peak of the old Bracero farmworker program that primed the pump for the mass illegal immigration of subsequent decades. That isn’t getting us any closer to a “100% American workforce.”
Second, reducing the wages of farmworkers will result in less automation in the fields. “When farm wages and labor costs rise, farmers substitute machines for workers,” according to Philip Martin of the University of California, Davis, and the nation’s leading economist studying immigration and farm labor. The reverse is also true: When farm wages fall, farmers don’t substitute machines for workers.
Two contrasting videos drive home this point. Every year in the run-up to Thanksgiving, the United Farm Workers union posts videos, using the hashtag #WeFeedYou, showing its members harvesting the food that Americans will put on their tables for the holiday.
One such video a few years ago showed a farmworker kneeling in the dirt pulling radishes out of the ground with her hands. Her dexterity and speed were remarkable, but it’s no reflection on her work ethic to ask why in 21st-century America we still have such medieval work practices.
It doesn’t have to be that way. The other video is from Japan, where the government doesn’t facilitate the mass importation of foreign labor. So instead, farmers use a machine to harvest radishes, making the operator of the machine significantly more productive and undoubtedly better paid than the hapless UFW member.
The planned wage cut may never take effect due to a lawsuit filed by the United Farm Workers, which quite plausibly claims that the regulation would undercut the wages of American workers. The public comment period for the Labor Department regulation ends Dec. 1. A similar attempt during the first Trump administration to cut farmworker wages was held up in court.
But if the rule does survive legal challenge, it could have the effect, Martin writes elsewhere, of “expanding the number of guestworkers rather than promoting the mechanization necessary for long-term competitiveness.”
The choice, as it has been put to policymakers, is either to pursue the current policy of making it cheaper to import foreign farmworkers, rather than hassling farmers who employ illegal immigrants, or to cause an abrupt shift that could bankrupt some farms and disrupt the supply of certain fruits and vegetables.
There’s a third option: a transition package of policies that would make it harder and more expensive for farmers to use foreign labor, while at the same time making it easier to mechanize.
As to the first point: Rather than cutting the wages farmers have to pay to H-2A workers, the Labor Department should announce that it will raise them by, say, 10% a year for the next five years. This would make it increasingly uneconomical to import these workers, while also making the cost increases predictable, allowing farmers to plan accordingly.
To avoid a mass shift to even more illegal labor, which is now about 40% of the farm workforce, Congress should mandate the use of E-Verify, the online system allowing employers to check if their new hires are legal, for all employers, but give farmers a more extended phase-in period than non-farm employers, to allow for planning. This has been a standard feature of most E-Verify bills introduced over the years.
The second part of the package would also have two parts. First, the federal government should launch a major push for research into harvest mechanization. Unbelievably, a 1979 lawsuit by the UFW succeeded in stopping most government funding for research into labor-saving machines because of fears that automation would cost union members jobs. Although privately funded research has continued, and even yielded some successes, the Luddite policy has hindered most advances in farm mechanization, which have primarily occurred in Europe and Japan. New USDA funding for mechanization research, maybe even prizes for reaching certain economic benchmarks for certain crops, would change the terms of the whole debate, from “How can we possibly harvest green peppers without foreign labor?” to “Here are three promising avenues of research on how to harvest green peppers without foreign labor.”
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But machines cost money. So there should be a role for federal loan guarantees for individual farmers or cooperatives seeking to buy, say, a radish-harvesting machine, so that smaller or less well-capitalized farmers aren’t put at a disadvantage by the new policies.
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. 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.
Mark Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.