The Senate is reviewing bipartisan legislation that would overhaul and expand the nation’s H-2A program, which provides temporary work visas to hundreds of thousands of agricultural workers. Legislators who support the bill argue it would provide farmers with a more stable workforce and lower food prices for consumers. But some Republican lawmakers are concerned that the legislation would grant farmworkers too many rights.
“It’s sitting over on the Senate side waiting to move,” said a frustrated Rep. Doug LaMalfa, a California Republican, at a GOP-led press conference last week. “Do people want to eat in this country or not?”
As it stands now, many of the estimated 2 million U.S. agricultural workers are foreign born, undocumented and poorly paid. At least one in five farmworkers earn below-poverty-level wages, and less than half of them have health insurance, according to the Department of Labor’s latest National Agricultural Workers Survey.
At the same time, U.S. farmers have, for many years, struggled to hire and retain farmworkers. The domestic labor force is aging, and there aren’t enough foreign workers arriving to replace them.
As a result, farmers are increasingly turning to the H-2A program, which issued 258,000 visas in fiscal 2021. But the program is not without problems. H-2A workers are allowed to work only seasonally, which doesn’t help livestock and dairy farms that need labor year-round. And in a 2014 study by the American Farm Bureau Federation, 72 percent of polled growers said that their H-2A workers arrived later than scheduled, which can create critical delays in agricultural work.
To address the issue, the House passed the Farm Workforce Modernization Act in March to modify the H-2A program — the second time it has done so. The act would allow farmers to hire H-2A workers year-round, and it would provide a pathway to legalization for farmworkers who have worked in agriculture for years. It would also allow H-2A workers to sue their employers in federal court if they believe they’ve violated labor laws, a right they don’t currently have. The measure is strongly opposed by the American Farm Bureau Federation, the largest U.S. farm group.
Although senators pledged to take up the legislation, it is still facing headwinds. Last year, Senate Republicans opposed a similar House-passed bill that would have given legal status to undocumented farmworkers and streamlined the H-2A guestworker program. In the current bill, the right to sue has been the major sticking point.
For farmworker advocates, the reform would provide essential protection for workers who have sometimes faced rampant labor violations. “This is the bare minimum we’re asking from our employers when we’re doing a lot to make sure that this economy continues,” said Reyna Lopez, executive director of the Oregon-based Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste, in a recent interview with NPR. But despite bipartisan support in the House, some GOP senators are reluctant to support the bill as currently written.