Nearly two years have passed since I began reporting on domestic laborers ‘ crimes in Georgia. Despite safeguards that the federal government was supposed to provide, some of the workers I found were legal H-2A card recipients and were harmed and exploited by workers contractors.
I spent a lot of time thinking about how the president’s duty to protect foreign workers collided with another goal, helping U.S. farmers stay in business, over the course of those two decades.
Producers have long advocated for fewer H-2A requirements. The programme, which mandates farmers pay for their housing and transportation costs and sets minimum hourly wages, is a major contributor to that cost. It seemed to me like every policy that was made regarding the H2A program was focused entirely on the immigrant worker’s benefit, according to a Georgia farmer who wrote about it last year in a letter to the U.S. Department of Labor.
All of that brings to mind a freezing cold weekend in January 2025 when I first arrived in Savannah, Georgia, at a farmers ‘ conference. What the producers sought at that meeting and in the months that followed illustrates the conflict between keeping farmland solvent and keeping workers healthy.
After making my way through a brightly lit convention house, where I passed the booth for the tractor salesman, the booth for the labor regulator, and tables of dried blueberries and peach preserves, I arrived in a room full of farmers curious to learn what President Donald Trump’s next term would mean for an industry that is reliant on foreign labor and is experiencing a rising trend of bankruptcies.
A small cluster of activists and attorneys gave the producers a number of presentations. One of them vowed that Trump had “profoundly” alter the programme, in part by lowering the cost of hiring and paying H-2A employees. And farmers may save even more money by getting fewer workers protections from workers if the activists ‘ programs were successful.
” Everything is on the table,” said Braden Boucek, an attorney who has challenged the H-2A agency’s requirements.
Trump’s immigration laws will significantly lower the number of people entering the country without legal status and speed up persecution of those who do so in the coming year. However, the H-2A card program, which is one significant pathway, would continue to be very available. And the presidency would be quick to accept the modifications the lobbyists told the farmers about on that chilly January weekends, under the pressure of the farm industry.
Three crucial things had to change with the H-2A program in order for the farmers to receive the monetary relief they were seeking, the farmers were told by the doctors and lobbyists at the event.
The first was to reject portions of a law passed by the Biden administration. Workers were able to do union protections that would protect them from unfair treatment by their companies as a result of the law. The law was opposed by some people because they thought it would make it more difficult to run their businesses.
Previous U.S. Labor Department assistant director Leon Sequeira explained to farmers how many ongoing lawsuits could “invalidate” portions of the rule at the conference. A Georgia berry land and 17 other states filed a lawsuit against the administration in June 2015, alleging that the rule violated the law that was permitted by Congress. Prohibitions that temporarily halted a portion of the law had resulted from that petition, along with two others.
In one of the three circumstances, Sequeira, who represents clients, later said the legal fight “isn’t on denying more protection to workers.” Instead, it’s intended to shield producers from the U.S. Labor Department’s excessive pressure.
” Citizens can truly decide whether or not employees should be given more protection under the law,” he said. However, as numerous authorities have argued, Congress must make that choice when passing rules, not the agency.
Five decades after Trump took office, his presidency suspended the administration’s ability to carry out President Joe Biden’s rule. Finally, it made the proposal to rescind some of it. That request is pending.
The next change was to stop or slow H-2A employees ‘ pay increases, which had already soared under both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration. The Trump administration last year cut the hourly pay rate, which it anticipates will save farmers more than$ 2 billion annually after months of industry pressure. According to the Economic Policy Institute, those discounts are expected to cost H-2A employees up to 32 % of their monthly wages.
An optimistic legal method to advance producers ‘ interests even further was the last thing I heard at the event.
Ann Margaret Pointer, one of the attorneys, explained that the federal government’s authority had been harmed by three new U.S. Supreme Court decisions. The ability of governmental agencies to develop new regulations is limited by one choice. Another makes fines for businesses that violate certain governmental regulations more difficult. And a second makes it simpler for businesses to issue long-standing federal laws.
Pointer claimed that those decisions may help open the door for more recent lawsuits challenging the card program and increase the likelihood of farmers winning those lawsuits.
She explained to the farmers at the event that all three of those attempts were crucial in “preventing some of the costs to cooperate with the H-2A system from falling on your arms.”
I recently emailed the attorneys and activists who attended the conference to let them know how they felt about the plan’s development.
Boucek, a former U.S. lawyer in Tennessee, declined to comment on this account.
Both Pointer and Sequeira claimed that the program’s first adjustments to the software improved farmer relations with the Trump administration. Sequeira added that the adjustments are only the start of the wish list for the agricultural sector.
The larger changes the business is requesting from the H-2A program, according to Pointer and Sequeira, may require Congress’s approval. They cited a lately passed bill that proposes to lower wage increases, reduce red tape for producers, and allow more branches of the gardening industry to join in H-2A. The bill is opposed by labor- and expat advocacy groups, who claim it would violate farm workers and amount to professional overreach.
The Labor Department” is only fiddling around the ends” until the statute is changed, according to Sequeira.
The first article on ProPublica titled” How the Government’s Obligation to Keep European Workers Safe Collided With Its Efforts to Keep Fields Afloat” appeared first.
