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TRUMP LABOR DEPARTMENT SAYS HIS IMMIGRATION RAIDS ARE CAUSING A FOOD
CRISIS  
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David Dayen
October 8, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ In a filing in the Federal Register, the Labor Department argues
there are “immediate dangers to the American food supply” due to a
lack of migrant agricultural workers. _

,

 

The Department of Labor’s new rule cutting farmworker wages bluntly
states that souped-up immigration enforcement has devastated the
agricultural workforce and created a significant “risk of supply
shock-induced food shortages,” according to a document filed in the
Federal Register
[[link removed]] last
week. The document also indicates that American workers are simply not
interested in and do not have the skills to perform agricultural jobs,
at odds with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’s claim that the
farm workforce will soon be 100 percent American
[[link removed]].

“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,” the document
says, adding that “this threat will grow” given new federal
funding for immigration enforcement under the One Big Beautiful Bill
Act.

The rule seeks to bring in guest workers through the H-2A program at
lower wages, potentially reducing wages across the spectrum for all
farmworkers, regardless of legal status. But in order to do so
quickly, Trump’s Department of Labor is surprisingly citing the
downside risks of its own president’s mass deportation program,
arguing that it is causing “immediate dangers to the American food
supply.”

“They’re sort of, I guess refreshingly, explicit about how this is
going to go down,” said Daniel Costa
[[link removed]], an attorney with the
Economic Policy Institute (EPI) who tracks the H-2A program. But this
claim of mass carnage from immigration has a very particular intent:
the only way out of the crisis, the Labor Department states, is to
hire many more foreign workers to pick U.S. crops at lower wages, a
direct transfer of income from workers in the fields to their
agribusiness employers.

Only one of two things can be true: Either Trump’s Labor Department
actually believes that Trump’s immigration enforcement is destroying
the agricultural sector and threatening food security, or they are
pretending this threat is real in order to crush wages for both
foreign and domestic agricultural workers. Neither look particularly
good.

An email to the Department of Labor’s Employment and Training
Administration, which filed the new rule, could not be answered
because of the ongoing government shutdown, according to the
office’s media contacts. The White House press office did not
respond to a request for comment.

THE RULE IN QUESTION CONCERNS WHAT IS KNOWN as the Adverse Effect
Wage Rate (AEWR), which is set for H-2A agricultural workers. H-2A
gives one-year visas to foreign nationals to work in agriculture. They
must work for the grower who sponsors the visa, and they lack basic
worker protections
[[link removed]] that
domestic workers have, like the ability to get overtime pay. The
program has been called a form of slavery
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critics in the past.

H-2A, which was established in the 1980s, has evolved from an
occasional program to fill gaps in the workforce to one increasingly
relied on
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employers. About one in five agricultural workers
[[link removed]] is on an H-2A
visa, nearly a ten-fold increase from 20 years ago. While employers
are supposed to advertise for U.S. workers to fill jobs first, this
expansion of H-2A has continued virtually unabated. There is no cap on
the program, so agribusiness can bring in an unlimited number of
foreign workers.

Because H-2A workers don’t have bargaining rights, federal
guidelines effectively set their wages. The AEWR is essentially a
minimum wage for these foreign workers, which is supposed to be at a
level that doesn’t create an “adverse effect” for U.S. workers
in the industry. It is published every year (with different rates for
each state) using a methodology that previously was derived by the
Farm Labor Survey, an initiative of the Department of Agriculture that
was discontinued by the Trump administration
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August.

The new interim final rule changes the methodology for determining the
AEWR in the absence of the Farm Labor Survey. It’s complicated, but
the rule proposes that the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics
(OEWS) survey operated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics will be the
primary data used to determine wages. As Costa points out, this survey
does not actually talk to farm employers but farm labor contractors,
who offer wages at lower levels than direct farm hiring does. “It
naturally means the wages are lower,” Costa said.

In addition, the new rule allows farm employers to charge H-2A workers
for their housing, which was not allowed before. “It’s a way for
employers to continue to house workers and also charge them, and bring
down effective wages,” said Marcos Lopez of the Labor and Community
Center at the University of California, Davis.

The result, a replay of cuts to H-2A minimum wages that the Trump
administration enacted at the end of his first term
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will be aggregate wage cuts of $2.46 billion annually, as the United
Farm Workers
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out. American agricultural workers, who must compete in the same
marketplace for jobs, will also likely see significant cuts to their
own pay, experts said. In some states like California, Washington, New
York, and Arizona, the resulting wages for H-2A workers will be well
below state minimum wages.

“The Trump wage cut is a catastrophe for American workers in
agriculture who growers intend to replace with cheap and exploitable
foreign guest workers,” said Teresa Romero
[[link removed]], president of the United
Farm Workers.

Employers have been pushing for the lower wages
[[link removed]],
claiming the AEWR was too high even as they increasingly turned to
H-2A workers to fill open positions.

But what’s really interesting are the justifications made for this
change, which explicitly blame Trump’s immigration enforcement for
creating massive labor shortages in agriculture.

THE INTERIM FINAL RULE
[[link removed]] PUBLISHED
IN THE FEDERAL REGISTER includes a “good cause notification,”
which is required to waive the typical notice and comment period that
slows down the regulatory process. These notifications typically are
given because of an imminent emergency, necessitating a quick change
to the rules. To Trump’s Department of Labor, that emergency is
Trump’s immigration program.

_“_Employers are facing a structural, not cyclical, workforce
crisis,” the filing says. It cites a dramatic 93 percent drop in
U.S. border crossings that denies agricultural employers much of their
workforce, something that will only intensify as raids continue. As
the filing says, “The Department anticipates an imminent and
significant decline in the number of available illegal aliens who had,
in significant part, previously worked unlawfully in the U.S.
agricultural sector.” This cannot be compensated for with a boost to
imports, the Department claims, and will lead to shortages in fresh
produce and other crops requiring human workers.

Specifically, the Department says that 42 percent of all agricultural
workers “lacked authorization to work” in the U.S. in 2021 and
2022. Moreover, the remaining workforce is aging, relatively
“immobile” (meaning they don’t follow crops throughout the
season), and looking to get out of the industry; only 20 percent of
crop workers plan to be in the job for the next five years, according
to a survey cited in the filing.

As a result, employers are facing significant economic harms, the
filing claims. And incredibly, given the administration’s unceasing
rhetoric to the contrary, the Labor Department definitively rejects
the idea of Americans replacing the missing workers. “The Department
does not believe American workers currently unemployed or marginally
employed will make themselves readily available in sufficient numbers
to replace large numbers of aliens,” the filing states, adding that
agricultural work involves “a distinct set of skills and is among
the most physically demanding and hazardous occupations in the U.S.
labor market.”

(For what it’s worth, nearly half of all agricultural workers are
native-born, and significantly more than half are U.S.
citizens, according to Department of Agriculture data
[[link removed]]. That data
is for all “farm laborers graders and sorters,” but if you narrow
down to crop farmworkers, just 32 percent are U.S.-born, according to
the Department of Labor’s National Agricultural Workers Survey
[[link removed]],
and 38 percent are U.S. citizens. More than half of all crop workers,
58 percent, are authorized to work in the U.S. in some fashion.)

The Labor Department even claims that broadly advertising agricultural
jobs, which is required under the H2-A rules, has not led to a boost
in applications from U.S. workers. This is a bit of a fiction; workers
who apply often do not receive jobs, and nobody is really checking to
see if applications are coming in. “The system isn’t set up to
prove that there’s a labor shortage of U.S. workers,” said Costa,
of EPI.

In the end, the Labor Department concludes, the only way to protect
agricultural employers from disaster and consumers from rising prices
and food shortages is to slash wages in the H-2A program to make it
more viable to bring in workers. This is an odd response to a
workforce crisis, since cutting wages across the sector will likely
drive _existing_ workers to look elsewhere for jobs. In fact, farm
employers in Florida fear that H-2A foreign workers won’t apply for
these jobs anymore
[[link removed]] because
the wages are so low. (There were 384,900 H-2A applications
[[link removed]] last
year.)

But the filing states, “Without swift action, agricultural employers
will be unable to maintain operations, and the nation's food supply
will be at risk.”

It's not clear that there is an imminent workforce crisis in
agriculture. While there were fears earlier this year that tighter
immigration enforcement would lead to unharvested crops
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the harvest went off relatively smoothly, as my colleague Bob
Kuttner explained
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Some commodity crops like grains are looking at a record harvest
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in fact.

“What we see every day is that farm workers of all immigration
statuses are continuing to go to work,” said Antonio De Loera-Brust
of the United Farm Workers. “To be blunt, this is not a workforce
that can afford to stay home for days on end, let alone four years.”
Raids only disrupt the workforce for a couple days, De Loera-Brust
said.

In this sense, immigration enforcement is working hand in hand with
the H-2A program. Farm employers do not fear losing their immigrant
workforce because they can import them, now at lower wages, from
abroad. Farmworkers trying to organize have said they’ve been told
explicitly
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they will be replaced with H-2A workers, in fact.

“We call it the ‘Deport and Replace’ strategy,” De Loera-Brust
said, “which is defined above all to make it easier for corporate
agribusiness to exploit its workers, whether terrified undocumented
residents or an unlimited pool of cheap foreign guest workers … The
Trump administration would rather expand the abusive H-2A program than
do right by the workers who are already here, feeding America for
decades.”

That’s certainly not the way MAGA sells immigration enforcement. For
years they have said that Americans should benefit from open jobs in
the United States. But instead, their favorite administration is
enabling the mass importation of exploitable workers, and blaming
their own immigration enforcement actions for giving them no
alternative. It’s hard to see how this aligns with the America First
ideology.

Agribusinesses “are very capitalist except when it comes to hiring
and paying workers, then they become the most left-wing central
planners I’ve ever seen,” Costa said. “They want the free market
to prevail except when it comes to paying the workers. In that case we
need government intervention immediately.”

_David Dayen is the Prospect’s executive editor. His work has
appeared in The Intercept, The New Republic, HuffPost, The Washington
Post, the Los Angeles Times, and more. His most recent book is
‘Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power.’_

* food
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* immigrant labor
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* Farmworkers
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* ICE Raids
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