About 40% of farmworkers in the U.S. are undocumented immigrants, and they’ve become a focus of the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown. Terrorized farmworkers have been forced into hiding, and farms have been left empty because of a dearth of workers.
Experts have long warned that Trump’s promise of mass deportations would threaten industries that rely on undocumented workers—like agriculture—and that it could lead to mass disruptions in our food system.
Now the Trump administration’s Labor Department seems to be admitting that itself.
In a document explaining the administration’s new rule cutting farmworker wages, the Department of Labor writes that the labor shortage, in part due to “increased [immigration] enforcement,” presents “a sufficient risk of supply shock-induced food shortages . . . There is ample data showing immediate dangers to the American food supply.”
“The near total cessation of the inflow of illegal aliens combined with the lack of an available legal workforce, results in significant disruptions to production costs and threatening the stability of domestic food production and prices for U.S consumers,” per the document.
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which includes additional funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), means that threat will grow, it adds.
‘A win for corporate greed’
The Trump administration is using this risk to justify cuts to farmworker wages—and says more foreign workers are needed to alleviate the threat.
Because of this crisis, employers will need to rely even more on the H-2A visa program, which allows farms to bring on temporary foreign workers when there’s a shortage of U.S. workers. (Under this visa, workers also lack basic labor protections and have reported issues with worker safety; they also do not have bargaining rights.)
And the Department of Labor does not believe American workers “will make themselves readily available in sufficient numbers to replace the departing illegal aliens.”
In theory, a worker shortage should lead to higher wages. But the visa program comes with high costs that have become “burdensome,” per the DOL, and so additional labor costs, it says, “threatens the viability of farming operations.”
The department’s new rule says the program needs reform, and that guest farm worker wages need to be cut to avoid agriculture disruptions.
Under H2-A rules, the Department of Labor must advertise agricultural jobs, but it says this hasn’t led to more applications from domestic workers. The American Prospect, which reported on the DOL document, says that’s not entirely accurate.
“Workers who apply often do not receive jobs, and nobody is really checking to see if applications are coming in,” it writes. “The system isn’t set up to prove that there’s a labor shortage of U.S. workers,” Daniel Costa, an attorney with the Economic Policy Institute who tracks the H-2A program, told the outlet.
The move could reduce wages for all farm workers, no matter their legal status. The United Farm Workers, which represents nearly 7,000 agricultural workers, condemns the wage cuts, which it says would mean a loss of $2.46 billion annually in farmworker wages.
“Farm workers should be paid more, not less. This regulation is a win for corporate greed; a money grab for big agribusiness that transfers millions of dollars through wage cuts and housing deductions from workers to employers,” Erica Lomeli Corcoran, UFW Foundation chief executive officer, said in a statement. “The farm workers who feed us every day deserve so much more and we remain committed to ensuring that their labor and dignity is respected.”