The United States has to make an important decision regarding agriculture.
You can import more people to collect crops and perform other types of agricultural work, you can increase salaries enough to attract more US citizens and immigrants with legal status to take these jobs, or you can import more food. The three options contradict the key priorities of the Trump administration: reduce immigration, keep low prices and import less goods and services.
The large tax and expenses bill that President Donald Trump promulgated on July 4, 2025 included 170 billion dollars to finance the detention and deportation of those who live in the United States without authorization. And about 1 million of them work in agriculture, which represents more than 40% of all agricultural workers.
As the arrest and deportation of undocumented immigrants increases, an emerging solution is to replace at least some agricultural workers deported with foreigners who are granted special visas that allow them to help with the harvest, but they demand that they return home after their visas expire.
Such “guest workers” programs have existed for decades, which has led to today’s H-2a visa program. As of 2023, more than 310,000 foreigners, around 13% of the 2.4 million agricultural workers in the Nation, were used through this program. About 90% of foreign workers with these visas come from Mexico, and almost all are men. The states to which the greatest number of them are California, Florida, Georgia and Washington.
As a professor of Latin American politics and relations between the United States and Latin America, I teach my students to consider the difficult compensation faced by governments. If the Trump administration expels a significant part of immigrants living in the US without legal permission of the agricultural workforce to try to meet their deportation objectives, farm owners will have few options.
Few options available
First, farm owners could increase wages and improve working conditions enough to attract American and immigrants who are permanent legal residents or who are in the United States with legal status.
But many agricultural employers say that they cannot find enough people to hire that they can work legally, at least without higher wages and much better labor requirements. Without undocumented immigrant agricultural workers, crops prices and other agricultural products of American origin would increase, creating an incentive for more foods to import.
Second, farm owners could use less people. That would require cultivating different crops that require less labor or depending more on machinery to plant and harvest. But that would mean that the United States could have to import more food. And automation for some crops is very expensive. For others, as for berries, it is currently impossible.
It is also possible that some farm owners can allocate their land to other uses, ceasing production, but that would also require more imported foods.
The solutions suggested by the Trump administration
The US Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, has predicted that farm owners will soon find many US citizens to use.
She declared on July 8 that the new Medicaid work requirements included in the same legislative package as the application funds of the Immigration Law would encourage a large number of US citizens to start working in the fields instead of losing their medical insurance through that governmental program.
Agricultural commercial groups say that this scenario is crazy.
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On the one hand, most adults enrolled in the Medicaid program who can work already. Many others cannot do it due to disabilities or care obligations.
Few people registered in Medicaid live enough close to a farm to work in one, and even those who do are not able to do agricultural work. When farm owners tried to put people registered in a social assistance program to work in the fields in the 1990s, he failed. Another experiment in the 1960s, which deployed teenagers, did not work because adolescents found the job too hard.
It seems more likely that farm owners try to hire many more foreign agricultural workers to perform temporary but legal work through the H-2A program.
Although it has not turned it into an official policy, Trump seems to be moving towards this same conclusion.
In June, for example, Trump said his administration was working on “some type of temporary pass” for immigrants who lack authorization to be in the United States and are working on farms and hotels.
Established in 1952, the number now increases rapidly
The guest workers system, established in 1952 and reviewed significantly in 1986, has become a pillar of American agriculture because it offers important benefits to both farm owners who need workers and foreign workers who hire.
There is no limit in the number of potential workers. The number of H-2a visas issued is based solely on how many employers request them. Farm owners can request visas after verifying that they cannot locate enough workers who are US citizens or are present in the US with authorization.
To protect US workers, the Government demands that H-2a workers win a “adverse-effect salary rate”. The Labor Department establishes that hourly salary, which ranges between $ 10.36 in Puerto Rico and around $ 15 in several southern states, up to more than $ 20 in California, Alaska and Hawaii. These salaries are established in relatively high levels to avoid exerting down pressure on what is paid to other US workers for the same works.
After certification, farm owners recruit workers in a foreign country who are offered a contract that includes transport from their country of origin and a return trip, assuming that they complete the contract.
The program provides farm owners a short -term workforce. It guarantees foreign workers who obtain Visas H-2A relatively high wages, as well as housing in the US. This combination has proven to be increasingly popular in recent years: the annual number of H-2A visas increased to 310,700 in 2023, an increase of more than five times since 2010.
Possible disadvantages
Increasing the number of invited agricultural workers would help fill some gaps in the agricultural workforce and reduce the risk that crops will not be harvested. But it seems clear to me that a sudden change would raise risks for both workers and farm owners.
The workers would be at risk because the supervision of the H-2A program has been historically weak. Despite this lax history, some unscrupulous farmers have been fined or have been forbidden to participate in the H-2A program due to unpaid wages and other abuses.
Depending even more on invited agricultural workers than the United States does today would also change workers who have built lives and families north of the border with people who are in the United States temporarily. It is unlikely that immigration opponents oppose this compensation, but for immigrant rights groups, this agreement would be cruel and unfair for workers with years of service behind them.
In addition, workers with guest visas can run the risk of exploitation and abuse. In 2022, the federal prosecutor of the Southern District of Georgia described the conditions of H-2a workers in an onion farm that the Government had investigated as “modern slavery.”
For farm owners, the disadvantage of increasing the programs of guest workers is that it could increase costs and make production less efficient and more expensive. This is because transporting Mexican agricultural workers from one place to another every year is complicated and expensive. Agricultural groups say that compliance with the requirements of the H-2A visa is cumbersome. It can be particularly difficult for small farms to participate in this program.
Some farm owners have opposed the costs of using H-2A workers. Rollins has said that the Trump administration believes that mandatory wages are too high.
Without a doubt, these problems are not limited to agriculture. Hotels, restaurants and other hospitality businesses, which depend largely on undocumented workers, can also temporarily use some foreigners through the H-2B visa program, which is smaller than the H-2A program, limits the number of visas issued and is available only for work considered seasonal.
Home medical care providers and many other types of employers who depend on people who cannot legally work for them could also have difficulties. But so far, there is no temporary visa program available to help them fill those gaps.
If the United States sports millions of workers, the price of tomatoes, the care of the elderly, the foods in restaurants and the roof repairs would probably increase substantially. A great increase in the number of guest workers is a potential but partial solution, but would multiply the problems inherent in these temporary visa programs.
*Scott Morgenstern is a professor of political science at Pittsburgh University.
This article was originally published in The Conversation/Reuters
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