Congress should expand the agricultural guestworker program, now limited to seasonal jobs, to include employment at year-round processing plants, said a working group composed of House Agriculture Committee members on Thursday. “One thing that has become clear is the need for dairy producers, meat processors, sugar processors, forestry, ranchers, and others to have access to a steady and legal workforce,” said the lawmakers in a report.
Farmers have turned increasingly to the H-2A program because of the difficulty of recruiting farmworkers. Half of farmworkers are believed to be undocumented, and many are reaching retirement age. Farm labor “is the biggest limiting factor that American agriculture has,” said Zippy Duvall, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, early this year while calling for reform of the H-2A guestworker visa.
The Labor Department certified 378,513 H-2A positions in agriculture in fiscal 2023, up by more than 100,000 positions from fiscal 2020. While half of the positions were in five states — Florida, California, Georgia, Washington, and North Carolina — there were H-2A positions in every state, said the Farm Bureau.
Members of the bipartisan working group unanimously recommended reform of the H-2A visa program “to include agricultural labor or services (including cooperatively owned employers) that involve the initial preparation, processing, or manufacturing of agricultural commodities, such as livestock, poultry, dairy, peanuts, sugar beets, and sugarcane. These commodities require processing before going to consumers,” said the report.
“These industries are not eligible for H-2A status because of the way that the federal agencies interpret current law,” it continued.
The Labor and Homeland Security departments say seasonal work is tied to the time required for agricultural production because of weather or other considerations. The Labor Department will not certify an H-2A position if it believes the work would continue for more than a year.
“This ignores the statutory criteria of ‘temporary’ and has resulted in the exclusion of a large portion of agriculture production from access to the program,” said the working group. By statute, H-2A visas are issued for agricultural labor or services that are “temporary or seasonal,” it said. “The bottom line is we need a migrant worker program that respects and enforces our immigration laws while providing these industries with the workforce they need.”
Action is also needed to “reform the H-2A wage system to reflect real-world wages better, while protecting against sudden wage increases that disrupt employer planning and operations,” said the working group. It suggested a wage freeze for 2025 and increases of no more than 3.25 percent through 2029, similar to language in an agricultural labor bill that passed the House in March 2021 and died in the Senate in 2022. That bill had provisions to give legal status to undocumented farmworkers and reform the H-2A visa program.
Immigration is under the purview of the House and Senate Judiciary committees. “It is our hope that our work on this report will be used by the committees of jurisdiction to develop legislation that will positively impact the agricultural labor community,” said the working group.
The final report by the Agricultural Labor Working Group is available here.