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The Guardian
28-05-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Trump has no plan for who will grow US food: ‘There is just flat out nobody to work'
Last spring, Carmelo Mendez was pruning peach trees in Colorado on a temporary visa, missing his children and wife back home, but excited about how his $17.70 hourly wage would improve their lives. This spring, he's back in the Mexican state of Tlaxcala frantically searching Facebook for a job on one of the thousands of farms across the US that primarily employ guest workers like him. Mendez is one of the more than 300,000 foreign agricultural workers who comes to the US every year on an H-2A visa, which allows him to temporarily work plowing fields, pruning trees and harvesting crops in states from Washington to Georgia, Florida to New York, Texas to California. But as federal immigration policies change rapidly, farmers and workers alike are uncertain about their future. 'Without [this guest worker program], I believe agriculture in the US would decline a lot because people there don't want to do the work,' Mendez said. As the fate of the hundreds of thousands of undocumented farm workers remains in limbo amid Donald Trump's mass deportation threats, and the administration's H-2A policies are undecided, the future of these guest workers remains unclear. Their numbers grow each year – and they are increasingly central to an industry historically dominated by undocumented workers. The industry isn't creating new jobs either. Farmers agree with farm workers like Mendez. They say they cannot attract other workers to their rural fields. The debate over guest workers is dividing Republican support. Jonathan Berry, who was nominated to be the solicitor at the Department of Labor, wrote the labor chapter for Project 2025, the rightwing proposal to overhaul the government from the Heritage Foundation thinktank. That section advocates for replacing H-2A workers with local workers and automation. While technology could replace some specific farm tasks, many crops still depend primarily on human labor, and small farmers say they can't afford to invest in equipment that could take more than a decade to pay off. Other co-authors of the chapter, such as economist Oren Cass, do not think the jobs should be eliminated, but that farmers should improve working conditions to attract citizens to them instead. On the other hand, Trump's power depends on a coalition that includes agricultural communities, who voted for him at almost 80% in 2024, according to Investigate Midwest, a journalism non-profit. Agribusiness also donated more than $24m to his re-election. Farm groups insist US citizens are unwilling to do the arduous labor and that eliminating H-2A workers could collapse the food system. They generally advocate for loosening regulations for H-2A workers, like reducing wage and housing requirements. Trump heeded their calls before. In 2019, his Department of Labor unsuccessfully proposed removing some regulations on the H-2A. As seasonal harvests begin, farmers nationwide are bringing over workers. At Crist Bros Orchards in Walden, New York, H-2A workers diligently prune back apple tree branches covered with white flowers freshly burst from pink buds so that each future apple will get the same access to the sun. At the packing house, some load last season's apples out of refrigerators on to conveyor belts while others check for irregularities before packaging. The orchard has been in the Crist family since 1883, and Jenny Crist now runs it alongside her brother and parents. She said their first wave of workers came this past March and are preparing the orchards for harvest, when more workers come to pluck apples off the trees. By the end of the year, more than 150 H-2A workers will have passed through the compound to help produce the apples sold at supermarkets down the east coast. '[H-2A is] providing labor that allows us to have a farm 70 miles north of New York City, and provide food in the United States, and employ people year-round,' Crist said. 'Without it, we would certainly not be farming apples. My guess is that this would probably be houses.' The H-2A visa was created by the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, a huge measure that simultaneously cracked down on employers hiring immigrants without work authorization and provided 'amnesty' to close to 3 million immigrants without legal status. The law says that farmers must demonstrate an attempt to hire locally first and pay H-2A workers above the minimum wage. Unlike local workers, H-2A workers must also be provided transportation to and from their homes, housing for the season and daily transportation. Labor leaders argue farmers prefer H-2A workers, despite their costs, because they are easily exploitable. Since the visa is connected to their employment, workers cannot find a job elsewhere, making their ability to be in the country completely dependent on an employer who can revoke it at any moment, and sometimes holds on to their passports, against DOL requirements. This reluctance to leave an abusive worksite can be compounded by the fact that many H-2A workers arrive with debt they have accrued from paying recruiters to get here. Employers are required to pay all recruitment costs, but recruiters' practices go largely unregulated since they operate internationally. The situation of agriculture workers in the US is really bad already, but what they're going to do is legalize this oppression. The DC-based Economic Policy Institute, a liberal thinktank, has said this amounts to a program that exploits and silences migrant workers, replacing year-round workers in the process. In some cases, US prosecutors have accused farmers and recruiters of using the H-2A program to engage in forced labor trafficking. 'The situation of agriculture workers in the US is really bad already, but what they're going to do is legalize this oppression,' said Carlos Marentes, executive director of the El Paso-based Centro de Los Trabajadores Agrícolas Fronterizos. 'In the H-2A program, the way they're proposing to get rid of the regulations and any guarantees that workers get is going to look like legalized slavery. The industry understands that they need a labor force, but they [want] a labor force that is going to be afraid, that is going to be grateful because the employer is providing you a job.' If mass deportations go forward as promised, growers and ranchers will be even more desperate for these workers. Undocumented workers compose about 40% of the agricultural workforce, according to the US Department of Agriculture. These longtime farm workers say that the system is designed to replace them with this more vulnerable group, limiting their work opportunities and decreasing their union's power by giving farmers an alternative labor pool. 'It's very clear to us that the deportation of undocumented workers is to clear the field for bringing in H-2A workers instead of having these farm worker families that are part of our community now for over 20 years and providing them [legal] status to continue being productive community members,' said Rosalinda Guillen, a farm union leader in Washington state who grew up in the fields and founded Community to Community, a local non-profit. 'Everybody in this country is an immigrant and has had the opportunity to build community and root themselves and all of a sudden the families that came here from Mexico don't?' In 2023, a bipartisan coalition in the House of Representatives introduced the Dignity Act, which aimed to address this by extending legal status to long-term farm workers while at the same time expanding the H-2A visa. The proposal eventually failed, though, after Republicans reversed course on it. In Minnesota's Red River valley, Scott Field runs Field Brothers Farm with his brother John, growing grains, beans and sugar beets on the same land his family has worked for five generations. His local community has shrunk as younger generations moved to cities, leaving the Field brothers dependent on H-2A workers. 'There is just flat out nobody out here available to work,' Scott Field said. With housing and transportation factored in, Field says they spend more than $30 an hour on H-2A workers. It would be easier if they could just employ them as US citizens, he said as he detailed why. 'These are people who are working, making money, spending money in our communities, and paying taxes. Talk about a revitalization of Rural America if they made it easier for them to come here and stay with their families,' Field said. Changes to the H-2A visa would also probably be felt in Mexico, where over 91% of the H-2A workers come from. Some have small subsistence farms, or are part of the 2 million people who became landless with the 1994 onset of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and depend on their seasonal incomes to provide their families with basic necessities. Flavio Vázquez has worked at Crist Bros Orchards for the last five years, earning more than double in an hour packing apples than what he could in a day in his home in the Mexican state of Morelos. According to 2020 estimates, more than half of Morelos's population lives in poverty despite unemployment being below 2%. The fact that the visa allows him to escape poverty doesn't mean that it is ideal for him, though. Vázquez must spend eight months a year living between a warehouse and a dorm 2,500 miles away from his loved ones, relieved to be earning a higher income, but at a cost. While he enjoys his job in New York's Hudson valley, he wishes he could bring his family and build a permanent life. 'In Morelos, the situation is difficult, so I come here to stabilize the community there economically and to have resources for my family,' Vázquez said, looking resigned as apple-scanning machinery roared in the background. 'In Mexico, you leave your children, your wife, your parents, who support you emotionally. I would feel a lot more comfortable with my family here.' This story was co-published with Puente News Collaborative in partnership with Palabra and the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University at the City of New York (Cuny). Puente News Collaborative is a bilingual non-profit newsroom, convener and funder dedicated to high-quality, fact-based news and information from the US-Mexico border.
Yahoo
18-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Our View: Reforming US immigration system is long overdue
It's a long shot. But it's a shot worth taking. House Republicans, including Kern's Republican Rep. David Valadao, and Democrats have introduced the Farm Workforce Modernization Act for the fourth time in as many Congresses. Earlier bills passed the House on a bipartisan vote only to be defeated in the Senate. With the goal of stabilizing the agricultural workforce by reforming the H2A agricultural worker visa program, the FWMA also would provide a path to legalization for undocumented workers currently living in the United States. It would allow farmworkers to seek 'certified agricultural status' — a temporary status for those who have worked at least 180 days in agriculture over the last two years. That would allow workers to apply for a green card contingent on additional years of work in agriculture. People with 10 years of agricultural work prior to the date of enactment would be required to complete four additional years of such work. Workers with less than 10 years would have to complete eight additional years. After completion of those requirements and with a green card in hand, workers could apply for the naturalization process. Acknowledging the bill has a long-shot chance at passing, Valadao told The Californian, 'I just want something that works for agriculture and that works for the people who work in agriculture.' Repeatedly, immigration reform has been derailed by raw politics. One party wants reforms, while the other wants to use the nation's failed immigration system as a hammer. Last year, the U.S. came close to reforming immigration policy with a bipartisan bill negotiated by conservative Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma and Independent Sen. Krysten Sinema of Arizona. Before the bill's release, it faced strong opposition from then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who had made immigration a top campaign issue. Republican support quickly disappeared. Only four Republican senators, including Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, who had delegated Lankford to negotiate the bill, voted for it. A group of about 100 Oklahoma GOP leaders condemned Lankford for his efforts and a popular conservative political commentator threatened to destroy him if immigration reformed passed during the presidential election. Although the bill contained many provisions desired by Republicans — such as building more border wall, hiring more Border Patrol agents, expanding detention capacity and speeding deportation — it was 'dead on arrival' in the Republican-controlled Senate. Conceding the political climate remains 'complicated,' Valadao said about this year's bill, 'One of the things I've heard for a long time is when the border is secure, we can then have the conversation about resolving programs like the guest worker program. So, I do believe there's an opportunity.' Legalization and an option for citizenship has earned the FWMA the endorsement of the United Farmworkers union, which in the past has opposed expansion of the H2A program. 'Across the country, immigrant farmworkers are going to work every day to feed America,' UFW President Teresa Romero said in a news release. 'Yet these same workers are all too often afraid of getting deported simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.' A UFW spokesman noted that it is the height of hypocrisy that during the COVID-19 pandemic, farmworkers were designated 'essential,' while they were denied the ability to just exist legally in our society. 'We have failed as a federal government, Congress and the White House. For decades, we haven't been able to have a system that worked,' said Valadao. 'We've created a system that has helped people, or encouraged people to essentially break our laws and live here for 20 years in the shadows. And now we're just supposed to tell them never, ever can they come back?' Adoption of a reasonable and fair immigration policy is long overdue. The first step begins with setting aside xenophobic political posturing and passing the Farm Workforce Modernization Act.
Yahoo
10-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
In America's 'salad bowl,' farmers invest in guest worker housing, hoping to stabilize workforce
Every year, farmers in this fertile valley dubbed the 'salad bowl of the world" rely on tens of thousands of workers to harvest leafy greens and juicy strawberries. But with local farmworkers aging — and the Trump administration's determined crackdown on the illegal workers who have long been the backbone of California's agricultural workforce — more growers have been looking to legal channels to import foreign workers. Under the federal H-2A visa program, agricultural employers can hire workers from other countries on a temporary basis, so long as they show that they were unable to hire sufficient numbers of domestic workers. Employers are required to provide the guest workers with housing, food and transportation. But in Monterey County, one of the more expensive regions in the nation, the obligation to provide an exploding number of guest workers with suitable housing was exacerbating a regional affordable housing crisis. Growers and labor contractors were buying up single-family homes and motels — often the residence of last resort for people on the verge of homelessness — making housing even more scarce for low-wage workers living in the region year-round. For some large farming companies in the county, the solution has been to privately fund the construction of new housing facilities for H-2A workers. Since 2015, local growers have invested their own capital and often their own land to build at least eight housing complexes for thousands of guest workers. These are not akin to the crude barracks used to house the Mexican guest workers known as braceros decades ago, nor are they the broken-down trailers associated with abuses of the H-2A program. Rather, many of the new housing developments here are built along the lines of modern multi-family townhomes, outfitted with recreational areas and laundry facilities. County leaders, eager to support the agricultural industry and increase the overall housing supply, have thrown their support behind the effort, expediting the permitting processes for such developments. Some community members are skeptical of this approach. Neighbors have raised concerns about the impacts of building large housing developments primarily for single men. Some advocates say it is a grave injustice that growers are building housing for foreign guest workers, while farmworkers who settled in the region years ago often persist in substandard and overcrowded buildings. 'The growers are building housing for H-2A workers, because they have the power, because they have the land, and because they have the money,' said Nidia Soto, an organizer with Building Healthy Communities Monterey County. Domestic farmworkers — many of whom emigrated decades ago, started families and put down roots — don't directly benefit from that development, she said: 'Even though they are breaking their backs every day to bring food to the table, they are not worthy of housing.' County Supervisor Luis Alejo agreed there is a dire need for more affordable housing for local farmworkers, but called the grower-funded H-2A housing developments a 'win-win for the community.' 'When we're providing housing for H-2A workers, it is not exacerbating the housing crisis elsewhere in our community,' he said. A key issue in the discussion is that many of the longtime farmworkers who live in Monterey County are in the U.S. without authorization, as is true across California. At least half of the estimated 255,700 farmworkers in California are undocumented, according to UC Merced research. Read more: More immigrants opt to self-deport rather than risk being marched out like criminals With the Trump administration's focus on upending America's immigration system and deporting undocumented immigrants, California growers are scrambling to stabilize their labor supply through legal avenues such as the H-2A visa program. For years, farmworker advocates have voiced concerns about the H-2A program, saying it is ripe for exploitation because a worker's permission to be in the country is tied to the employer. And, as long as their labor supply was sufficient, many growers were reluctant to scale up the program, because it requires them to invest in federally compliant housing and, in many cases, to pay higher wages to meet a federal requirement of nearly $20 an hour. But with the Trump administration vowing mass deportations — and a growing number of undocumented immigrants considering "self-deportation" — the sufficiency of the workforce is suddenly in question. 'If we get immigration enforcement, there's going to be crops rotting in the field,' said Steve Scaroni, founder of Imperial County-based Fresh Harvest, one of the largest enterprises in the country for importing guest workers. Could Monterey County offer a solution for the rest of the state? In 2015, Tanimura & Antle, one of the region's largest agricultural companies, recruited Avila Construction Co. to build housing for 800 H-2A workers in the community of Spreckels outside Salinas. The grower wanted the project built within one year, which was 'kind of unheard of,' because getting housing approved that quickly was nearly impossible, according to Mike Avila, the construction company owner. But Tanimura & Antle faced a dire situation: They couldn't hire a stable domestic workforce, and risked having crops go unharvested if they didn't invest in a plan to hire guest workers. Some local residents opposed the proposed development, citing the dangers of having hundreds more men living in the area and raising concerns about road congestion. But the Board of Supervisors ultimately pushed the project forward. 'We've been very, very fortunate that these projects have been built and those fears don't end up coming to fruition,' Avila said. He noted that employers are required to provide H-2A workers with transportation by bus or van, reducing the number of cars on the road. Tanimura & Antle's complex pioneered a new model of guest worker housing in the region, and also gave the company an edge. Once Tanimura & Antle built the complex, it was able to recruit migrant farmworkers from other states, Avila said. It wasn't until recently that the company began housing H-2A workers in the facility. Avila, meanwhile, has become the go-to construction company for grower-funded employee housing. The company typically builds dormitory-style townhomes on land owned by growers. Today, the company averages a project a year. The number of H-2A visas certified for Monterey County has ballooned since that first grower-funded housing development went up. The federal Labor Department certified more than 8,100 H-2A visas for the county in 2023, a nearly 60% increase from 2018, according to a report from the UC Davis Labor and Community Center of the Greater Capital Region. Compared with other California counties, Monterey had the highest number of visa certifications by several thousand. Some agricultural employers have had to get creative to meet the housing requirements. Fresh Harvest houses anywhere between 5,000 and 6,000 guest workers across the U.S. But one of Scaroni's favorite projects is in King City in a shuttered tomato packaging plant that sat empty until he asked officials about converting it into farmworker housing in 2016. 'The city thought we were crazy,' he recalled. 'But there was something in me that said, 'I think we can make it work.'' Today, Fresh Harvest's Meyer Farmworker Housing has space for about 360 workers. The company turned the so-called ripening rooms, where tomatoes once were stored, into dorm rooms that hold 14 workers each. The dorm rooms are lined with lockers and bunk beds, which workers decorate with colorful blankets. The shared bathroom features a long row of stainless steel sinks and showers, and workers can relax in a community room lined with couches, laundry machines and a TV. Company officials also tout their impact on King City's downtown. Broadway Street had defunct storefronts when Fresh Harvest began leasing the property. Now, a La Plaza Bakery opens before sunrise and caters to workers headed to the fields, and restaurants line the streets. Cristina Cruz Mendoza recently relocated her store, Cristina's Clothing and More, to Broadway. She sells an array of clothing and gear worn by farmworkers, and says the workers who live nearby have made a big difference to her sales. Julio Cesar, who has worked with Fresh Harvest for six seasons, said he likes the Meyer facility because of its cleanliness and how cool it stays. He and the other workers who live there often head downtown after working in the broccoli fields. 'We're all co-workers, and we all respect each other,' he said. 'We sometimes go to the stores, do some shopping. Sometimes we go for a walk to relax.' Even as Monterey County celebrates its successes in building model housing for H-2A guest workers, housing for the thousands of longtime farm laborers who are not part of the visa program continues to stagnate. A 2018 report from the California Institute for Rural Studies found communities across the Salinas Valley in Monterey County and Pajaro Valley in neighboring Santa Cruz County needed more than 45,000 new units of housing to alleviate critical overcrowding in farmworker households. But building such developments without grower investment requires local governments to cobble together financing, which can be difficult for rural communities. That's left many farmworker families struggling to afford rent while earning minimum wage, $16.50 an hour. The situation is especially acute in Salinas, where the City Council recently voted to repeal a short-lived ordinance that capped annual rent increases on multi-family residences built before February 1995. Amalia Francisco, a 32-year-old immigrant from southern Mexico, shares a three-bedroom house in Salinas with her three brothers and other roommates. It often takes at least three or four families to cover the monthly rent of $5,000, she said. Francisco makes about $800 a week picking strawberries — that is, if she's lucky to get a full 40 hours. Her last paycheck was just $200, she said. She feels like she never has enough money to cover her portion of the rent, along with food and other expenses. Farmworker Aquilino Vasquez pays $2,400 a month to live in a two-bedroom apartment with his wife, three daughters and father-in-law. They have lived there for a decade, but over the past two years Vasquez said he has grown frustrated with the way the property is managed. When black mold appeared on the ceiling, he said, he was told he was responsible for cleaning it. He said he had to complain to the city to get smoke detectors installed, and that rats have chewed through walls in the bathroom and kitchen. Vasquez, an immigrant from Oaxaca, said it is unjust that his family's well-being is at risk, while guest workers are being provided with quality housing. 'They're building, they're always building, but for the contract workers,' he said. This article is part of The Times' equity reporting initiative, funded by the James Irvine Foundation, exploring the challenges facing low-income workers and the efforts being made to address California's economic divide. Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
