By Frank Morris
Farmers across the country have the same complaint: they don’t have enough workers.
John Rosenow and his wife Nettie run a mid-sized dairy farm in western Wisconsin, where 18 employees milk 700 cows, three times a day.
“We cannot operate with fewer people,” said Rosenow. “Once one person is short, it seems like we don’t get the work done.”
Keeping the farm staffed is a constant challenge, according to Rosenow. He says Americans just don’t want to do farm work.
“Over the last 10 to 15 years, I've probably had 150 people apply for a job here,” he said. “Two of them have been Americans, and those two are just fulfilling a need for their unemployment to apply for a job.”
In fact, about 70% of American farmworkers were born somewhere else. More than 40% of that workforce is in the country illegally, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“Without these immigrants, we would struggle,” Rosenow said. “We wouldn’t exist basically, and we wouldn’t want to exist either.”
President Donald Trump ran for reelection on a pledge to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, to carry out what he called “the largest mass deportation in history.” The administration set a quota of 3,000 deportations a day and set its sights on industries employing higher concentrations of undocumented immigrants, including construction, hospitality and agriculture.
In the first few months of Trump’s second administration, ICE raided dairy farms in New York and Vermont, produce farms in California and a meatpacking facility in Nebraska. In June, the president indicated ICE would hold off on immigration enforcement in the agricultural industry, but the ag labor pool lost 155,000 workers between March and July of this year.
The mounting crisis has set off alarms throughout the ag industry. Now, many are hoping this will finally be the moment for reforms in the H-2A visa program, which authorizes foreign workers to take agricultural jobs in the U.S. something the ag industry has sought for decades.
“I think the time is now, and it needs to be now, because farmers have reached a crisis point,” said Kristi Boswell, the spokesperson for Grow It Here, an advocacy group founded earlier this year.
“We have farms that are going out of business,” she said. “We have food prices at an all-time high.”
While the H2-A program has more than tripled in size over the last decade, approaching 400-thousand workers, Boswell says it’s expensive, and it creates too much red tape for employers.
“The challenge with the H-2A program is that it is incredibly bureaucratic," she said. "There are four agencies that touch every single application: DOL (Department of Labor), DHS (Department of Human Services), the State Department, and a state workforce agency."
First, employers have to prove that they can’t hire an American citizen for the position. Then they have to pay to transport the foreign worker from their home country to the farm, as well as supply housing once they’re on the job.
While the pay rates vary widely from state to state, the average hourly wage is about $17.75. Total it all up, and some farmers report spending more than $30 an hour on H-2A visa workers.
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