More than 300,000 foreign agricultural workers come to the US every year on an H-2A visa, which allows them 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, one of the workers 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 Labour, 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 non-profit journalism. 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.
