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While the Trump administration’s recent $100,000 fee for H1-B visas have received the lion’s share of the attention due to potential effects in the tech and healthcare fields, there was a recent policy change for lowly agricultural guest workers that shows how the administration’s immigrant worker plan is coming full circle.
As we predicted, after targeting humanitarian parole, temporary protected status, and other immigrant workers, the administration is now relaxing rules for H2-A “guest workers,” a program which has been called “close to slavery.”
Back in July, the administration put in place stringent in-person interview requirements for a wide range of visa holders and applicants. Only two months later, they are lifting the requirement for guest agricultural workers.
Now, this could simply be an admission of error by the administration which is getting complaints about crops rotting and realizing it made a mistake. It’s more likely this was the plan as it’s what workers have been warning against and such a move fits with Trump’s priors.
Are H2-B workers—those “guest” laborers in non-agricultural fields that Trump’s businesses rely on—next to be waved on in by the administration? That, too, looks increasingly likely.
Key to understanding this mega project of workforce engineering by the administration is understanding who is being targeted by ICE, deported, and who is being waved into the US while others encounter roadblocks. Let’s take a look.
Who Among the Immigrant Workforce Is Being Targeted for Removal
About 40 percent of U.S. farmworkers are undocumented. Here’s how the makeup looks:
As of 2020 there were more than 406,000 individuals with Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which allows them to reside and work legally in the US due to unsafe conditions in their home country—usually with an assist from US interference ala regime change efforts or direct military involvement.
The similar humanitarian parole covered another 530,000-plus. According to FERN:
Another 1.7 million people work in food processing plants, per the USDA. Many are refugees, and approximately 19% are in the country without authorization, according to the New American Economy research group. In the largest food processing segment, meatpacking, the American Immigration Council estimates that 45% of all workers are immigrants and around 23% are unauthorized.
While the administration goes after the unauthorized, It is also trying to get rid of TPS and humanitarian parole.
Trump suspended all refugee resettlement programs via executive order save for white South African “refugees.” The Department of Homeland Security also removed Afghanistan and Venezuela from the TPS list and is trying to axe Haiti as well. That means more than 9,000 Afghan, 300,000 Venezuelan, and 200,000 Haitians in the US can be legally deported.
There is a heavy concentration of TPS holders in the meatpacking industry. As of 2020, roughly 15,600 worked on farms or in food processing.The United Food & Commercial Workers union warned months ago that deportations or threats of deporation could lead to the meat shortages and price increases that we currently seeing (although there are other factors). From Investigate Midwest:
Increased immigration enforcement has scared many immigrants—legal or not– into staying home after the Supreme Court allowed ICE to target people based on skin color
For example, in Beardstown, Illinois, many workers at the meat processing plant were legally in the U.S. under humanitarian parole programs, but the Trump administration revoked their status.
At first the administration said it was going after people with criminal records rather than conduct mass workplace raids. But there was no way that path was going to get to the stated goal of 1 million deportations by the end of the year.
And so food production sites became a prime target. Yes, these raids target unauthorized immigrants. They also set back the country’s food system.
Designed to Fail
Recall that the administration’s plan was based not only on getting rid of workers who had built lives in the US, many of whom were trying to improve their lot through unionization efforts, but also snatching Medicaid away from all the loafers out there. This was going to somehow magically get Americans out into the fields and into the slaughterhouses despite all the evidence to the contrary. Here’s Scott Morgenstern, a professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh:
U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has predicted that farm owners will soon find plenty of U.S. citizens to employ.
She declared on July 8 that the new Medicaid work requirements included in the same legislative package as the immigration enforcement funds would encourage huge numbers of U.S. citizens to start working in the fields instead of losing their health insurance through that government program.
Farm trade groups say this scenario is far-fetched. For one thing, most adults enrolled in the Medicaid program who can work already do. Many others are unable to do so due to disabilities or caregiving obligations.
Few people enrolled in Medicaid live close enough to a farm to work at one, and even those who do aren’t capable of doing farmwork. When farm owners tried putting people enrolled in a welfare program to work in the fields in the 1990s, it failed. Another experiment in the 1960s, which deployed teenagers, didn’t pan out either because the teens found the work too hard.
Notably one strategy not employed by the administration is requiring higher wages and improved worker conditions. And so unsurprisingly federal labor data shows a 7% drop in the US agriculture workforce between March and July, equal to roughly 155,000 workers.
Predictably, the Trump administration is turning to H2-A guest workers.
In June, the U.S. Department of Labor announced the creation of the Office of Immigration Policy, which the labor secretary said will be a “one-stop shop” to help employers meet their labor needs..
And then on September 18, the State Department declared that H2-A visa holders no long must attend an in-person interview to renew their visas within 12 months of the expiration of their old one. It wouldn’t be surprising if H2-B workers are next to be waved in, perhaps based on slaughterhouse worker shortages, but also beneficial for people like Trump who employs the guest workers at his properties.
Industry “stakeholders” are applauding the H2-A move, and they are asking for more—particularly longer term work permits, which are still tied to an individual’s labor and mean the employer has near complete control over the worker.
In effect what’s happening is a trading out of people for exploitable workers. In the tech world, the AI bubble might be an avalanche of slop, but is useful in another way. Take Amazon, which claimed AI was taking jobs when it conducted mass layoffs only to turn around and replace those workers with cheaper H1-B alternatives.
In the case of the agriculture and service sector industries, we have the government doing the heavy lifting removing immigrants and refugeesn who aren’t exploitable enough and replacing them with H2-A and H2-B alternatives.
Why Capital Loves Guest Workers
A crucial difference between the migrant H-2B and H-2A workers and immigrants who live and work in the US under temporary protected status or humanitarian parole is that the latter two categories didn’t have their ability to stay in the country legally tied to their work.
That made them less exploitable. They were free to change jobs and unionize. That’s probably a big reason they’re being targeted for deportation.
Trump has suggested that unauthorized immigrants and refugees who had built lives in the US could potentially return legally, but the administration has not provided specifics. It’s pretty clear what he means.
Edgar Franks, the political director of Familias Unidas, summed it up in April—an assessment that is now shared by the likes of the AFL-CIO’s Department of People Who Work for a Living and other unions:
It was meant to silence the organizing, deport as many people as possible, and to bring in a captive workforce through the H-2A program. We think that might be the ultimate plan: to get rid of all the immigrant workers who are organizing and fighting back for better conditions, and to bring in a workforce that’s under the complete control of their employer with basically no rights.
Franks prediction is steadily being realized. And to back up his claim, it’s pretty remarkable how efficiently ICE and the administration target unauthorized or refugee workers who are unionized or organizing. Some examples:
- An agricultural company in upstate New York was hit in May and then again in August. From Peoples Dispatch:
The United Farm Workers labor union has condemned the raid at the farm that the UFW has been actively organizing in since 2022. Of the 14 workers detained at the May 2 raid, ten were ultimately deported. UFW Secretary Treasurer Armando Elenes labels the raids as “shameful employer complicity in the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate legal protections and lower wages for farm workers.”
“A legally-binding union contract has already been awarded at Lynn-Ette by a NY State-appointed arbitrator, yet Lynn-Ette is defying the law and refusing to implement this union contract,” states Elenes.
- The administration ending work authorizations for two hundred union members who assemble dishwashers, refrigerators, washers, and dryers for GE Appliances-Haier at Appliance Park in Louisville, Kentucky.
- The administration revoked the visas of several members of the Graduate Workers Coalition at the University of Indiana. The union frequently strikes and pickets for better wages for student teachers.
- Mostly lost in the firestorm around Abrego Garcia, the man who was illegally deported to the notorious hellhole prison in El Salvador, is that for the past year he worked as an apprentice with the Sheet Metal Air Rail & Transportation Local 100 union. Perhaps that fact contributed to what the Trump gang calls the “administrative error” that led to his rendition.
- In March, ICE agents smashed the car window of Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez, detained him for months and deported him. Juarez was brought to the US as a guest worker berry picker at the age 14 but didn’t play by the rules. He stayed past the date his labor was required and eventually helped found Familias Unidas Por La Justicia, an independent farmworker union in Washington State. He advocated around issues like overtime pay, heat protections for farmworkers and criticized the exploitative nature of the H-2A program.
As of 2024 there were 384,900 H2-A and 215,217 H2-B workers in the US—numbers that have been steadily increasing for decades and especially over the past 15 years with a more than fivefold increase since 2010.
With the administration’s early moves, this number is set to increase even further.
In theory, the foreign workers who obtain H-2A visas are supposed to be guaranteed relatively high wages, as well as housing in the U.S. In reality, it is not enforced, and they are left to the whims of their employers.
Because they are basically indentured servants they are loved by Trump and many employers. Even the Departments of Labor and Homeland Security “acknowledge that H-2B workers face structural disincentives to reporting or leaving abusive conditions, and often lack power to exercise their rights in the face of exploitative employment situations.”
The Food & Environment Reporting Network with more:
…these visas are notoriously abusive to foreign workers. That’s because they effectively create a captive workforce: In contrast to other immigrant workers in the U.S. — including recipients of certain humanitarian programs, like TPS — H-2 workers’ presence in the country is tied to a particular job and employer. H-2 employees are eligible to work for whoever sponsors their visa, and it can be prohibitively difficult for them to switch jobs even if they’re mistreated. If they quit, they’re sent back to their home countries, which would ruin many H-2 workers and their families financially. (Over half of all H-2A farmworkers enter the country in debt to illegal recruiters, who charge fees for connecting workers with job contracts.)
H2-A guest workers also faced a major setback in their fight to organize last year when a District Court Judge issued an injunction in August that blocked them from unionizing in 17 states. The guest worker program also features labor trafficking, rampant wage fraud, illegal recruitment fees, wage theft, and illegal threats of retaliation. Abuse is made easy by the fact that it’s almost impossible for workers to quit their jobs since their visas are tied to a single employer. Mike Rios, a DOL regional agricultural enforcement coordinator, describes the H2 program as the “literal purchase of humans.”
But it’s not just the guest workers who suffer.
Pain (Nearly) All Around
The guest worker program might be beneficial for individual employers, but it is drain for American society. From Investigate Midwest:
Undocumented immigrants paid $100 billion in taxes in 2022, without enjoying any of the benefits, such as Social Security or Medicare. Living in communities, they also contribute to local economies. Temporary visa workers, on the other hand, send most of the money they earn to their home countries.
It’s also bad for all workers, including those those Americans who were supposed to take the place of immigrants and refugees. The Food & Environment Reporting Network:
H-2 workers have so little bargaining power that some employers prefer to hire them over U.S. citizens — which ends up disenfranchising the American-born workers Trump and Miller say their deportations will benefit. Under federal law, employers must show they were unable to hire American workers before they’re approved to hire H-2 workers, but some employers circumvent that rule and commit visa fraud to avoid hiring Americans at higher rates. The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) has filed a string of complaints with the DOL, alleging that meatpacking companies have repeatedly requested increased allocations of H-2B workers as a way of undercutting wages.
What about all those workers who have lived and labored here for years and in some cases decades? There’s a reason that immigration question was never settled as described here by Michael Macher:
…the US immigration system runs not on the enforcement of immigration laws, but on their selective nonenforcement. Employers have relied on the state to ignore the exploitation of undocumented labor while holding the credible threat of deportation over workers. This has had the effect of strengthening employer bargaining power generally against all workers—lowering wages, weakening unions, and shifting the politics of work away from collective bargaining and wage-and-hour regulation. The interest in labor that is weak and disorganized has driven US politicians, consciously or not, to adopt the role of petty bosses, threatening the deportation of significant portions of the US workforce.
Trump might be in the process of blowing up that system by turning the role of petty bosses back to the actual bosses, and he’s able to do that now because labor is so weakened after a half century of losses in the class war.
Even the crumbs are now being snatched away. Weak—and in some cases counterproductive from a labor viewpoint—agencies like the National Labor Relations Board, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, the Department of Labor, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration are being further crippled.
And the administration just launched a major new offensive in the class war with Trump’s national security directive labeling certain beliefs—including anti-capitalism— as “terrorism indicators.”
That means that as of now any effort from workers and unions to fight back, such as “illegal” strikes, can now be labeled “anti-capitalist” and the weight of the police state will come crashing down on them.
Public sector unions are already in retreat. Immigrants who were part of communities, and in many cases unions, are being shown the door only to be replaced by indentured servants often housed away from society in squalid prison-like housing.
Trump is dutifully playing his role as an accelerant and looking to make a bad program worse:
The Biden administration changed the methodology for calculating the rate for H-2A workers, which resulted in a larger pay increase for some of them this year. Some farm organizations, including the NCAE and the Farm Bureau, want the Trump administration to roll back that change and expand the H-2A program to cover year-round workers, especially for dairy and livestock farms.
During Trump’s first term the temporary work visa programs steadily grew a total of 13 percent larger, and he used the Covid emergency to help make it happen:
During the pandemic, his administration issued a series of emergency measures that made H-2A and H-2B visas more flexible and employer-friendly. Workers were allowed to stay in the country for longer periods of time, in part because they had been deemed “essential workers,” and wages for H-2A workers were effectively frozen.
Trump 2.0 is using a crisis of its own creation in order to strengthen the guest worker program and hammer all of labor. Rather than better pay and working conditions to entice American workers, we’re getting an increase in guest workers to further drive down wages and worker protections. The house of labor, which has been burning for decades, is now being doused with Trump gasoline.
And the capital-labor arrangement being steadily reinforced looks for Americans a lot like the immigrant experience. All workers must sell their labor for pennies on the dollar, accept unsafe conditions, and any other types of abuse or, in the case of immigrants, face deportation to foreign prisons. For Americans, the risk is becoming homeless and tossed into US (private) prisons. And with “anti-capitalist” beliefs now labeled as terrorism, workers face even more hurdles fighting back.
