U.S. farms increasingly depend on foreign workers, but ICE raids have exacerbated the agriculture labor crisis. But some farmers want to make it easier to hire people from abroad using a visa program.
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
American farmers can't hire enough people. They depend on foreign workers, many undocumented, who are being scared away by ICE raids. Labor costs are way up and some farms are going under. But while President Trump is putting up barriers for companies to hire foreign software engineers and medical professionals, Trump officials want to make it easier and less expensive for farms to hire foreign workers. Here's Harvest Public Media's Frank Morris.
FRANK MORRIS, BYLINE: American agriculture is very diverse, but the whole industry has one common problem.
BRANDON BATTEN: Labor is my biggest challenge. Every year, it seems to become more and more of a headache.
MORRIS: That's Brandon Batten. He grows tobacco, corn and soybeans south of Raleigh, North Carolina. A thousand miles away near Ripon, Wisconsin, organic farmer Tracy Vinz says most native-born Americans just can't seem to handle farmwork.
TRACY VINZ: People in our community around us, let me say, just do not want to farm. We get an applicant here or there. And they come out in loafers and khaki pants and think, oh, my gosh, you mean I'm going to get dirty?
MORRIS: So producing food in America depends on workers from overseas. About 70% of U.S. farmworkers were born elsewhere. More than 40% of them are in the country illegally, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Since Trump's immigration crackdown, the farm labor force has shrunk by at least 155,000 workers. The crisis set off alarms and sparked a new advocacy group, Grow It Here. Batten and Vinz were speaking on a Grow It Here webinar. The organization's spokesperson, Kristi Boswell, says farmers need help now.
KRISTIE BOSWELL: Because farmers have reached a crisis point. We have farms that are going out of business. We have food prices at an all-time high.
MORRIS: Farmers want to make it easier to hire people from abroad using the H-2A visa program. That's a process employers use to set up temporary visas for foreign farmworkers. The use of H-2A visas has already tripled over the last decade, but Boswell says the system's a pain for employers.
BOSWELL: The challenge with the H-2A program is that it is incredibly bureaucratic. There are four agencies that touch every single application. It is also very expensive.
MORRIS: By covering housing and transportation, as required by the program, employers can end up spending upwards of $30 an hour. And farmers hate all the red tape. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins says the Trump administration wants to help loosen up the H-2A visa system.
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BROOKE ROLLINS: We're doing everything we can right now within statute to make it better, easier, more efficient and cheaper for our producers to use that program.
MORRIS: In October, the Trump administration issued a federal regulation lowering the wage rate for H-2A visa holders and allowing employers to charge them for housing. But most of the work fixing the H-2A system falls to Congress, where immigration hard-liners have blocked reforms for decades. Matt Teagarden, who runs the Kansas Livestock Association, says Trump's immigration clampdown may assuage the holdouts.
MATT TEAGARDEN: I think that border security is really key and will allow some members of Congress, who previously would not be part of the discussion about a more comprehensive solution that we've needed for, you know, 30 years or - I don't know how long. Way too long.
MORRIS: Several bills have been introduced allowing the ag industry to bring in more temporary foreign workers under the H-2A visa program at lower costs to employers. Teagarden says Washington may be coming to the realization that the U.S. will either import workers or import food.
For NPR News, I'm Frank Morris in Kansas City.
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