Immigrants make up about two-thirds of the nation’s crop farmworkers, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, and roughly 2 in 5 of them are not legally authorized to work in the United States.
Agricultural industries such as meatpacking, dairy farms, and poultry and livestock farms also rely heavily on immigrants.
“We have five to six employees that do the work that nobody else will do. We wouldn’t survive without them,” said Bruce Lampman, who owns Lampman Dairy Farm, in Bruneau, Idaho. His farm, which has been in the family three decades, has 350 cows producing some 26,000 pounds of milk a day.
“My business and every agriculture business in the U.S. will be crippled if they want to get rid of everybody who does the work,” said Lampman, adding that his workers are worried about what’s to come.
Anita Alves Pena, a Colorado State University professor of economics who studies immigration, noted that many agricultural employers already can’t find enough laborers. Without farm subsidies or other protections to make up for the loss of immigrant workers, she said, the harm to state economies could be significant.
“Farmers across the country, producers in a lot of different parts, are often talking about labor shortages – and that’s even with the current status quo of having a fairly high percentage of unauthorized individuals in the workforce,” Pena said. “A policy like this, if it was not coupled with something else, would exacerbate that.”
Employers have a hard time hiring enough farm laborers because such workers generally are paid low wages for arduous work.
In addition to hiring immigrant laborers who are in the country illegally, agricultural employers rely on the federal H-2A visa program. H-2A visas usually are for seasonal work, often for about six to 10 months. However, they can be extended for up to three years before a worker must return to their home country.
Employers must pay H-2A workers a state-specific minimum wage and provide no-cost transportation and housing. Still, employers’ applications for H-2A visas have soared in the past 18 years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a trend reflecting the shortage of U.S.-born laborers willing to do the work. The number of H-2A positions has surged from just over 48,000 in 2005 to more than 378,000 in 2023.
But agricultural employers that operate year-round, such as poultry, dairy, and livestock producers, can’t use the seasonal visa to fill gaps, according to the USDA.
Farmers also employ foreign nationals who have “temporary protected status” under a 1990 law that allows immigrants to remain if the U.S. has determined their home countries are unsafe because of violence or other reasons. There are about 1.2 million people in the U.S. under the program or eligible for it, from countries including El Salvador, Ethiopia, Haiti, Honduras, Lebanon, and Ukraine. Many have been here for decades, and Trump has threatened to end the program.
