Want a job picking fruit? There are thousands available right now on the US Department of Labor’s Seasonal Jobs website. Orchard work paying $19.82 an hour in Washington, $17.96 in Pennsylvania and $15.87 in West Virginia. Berry planting and picking jobs at $19.97 an hour in California, $16.23 in Florida and $16.08 in Georgia.
Employers have to offer these jobs to US workers before bringing in foreigners on H-2A visas for temporary agricultural work. The sharp rise in H-2A issuance the past decade indicates that they haven’t been getting many takers.
These statistics offer some context for Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ recent remarks that the agricultural workforce was headed “towards automation and 100% American participation,” and that “with 34 million people, able-bodied adults on Medicaid, we should be able to do that fairly quickly.” I’m confident that Rollins doesn’t believe any of this. But after trying to get President Donald Trump to back off on deportations of farmworkers, briefly succeeding, then being overruled by guy-who-seems-to-be-in-charge-at-the-White-House-at-the-moment Stephen Miller, she had to come up with something to say. So let’s unpack it.
First, the Medicaid recipients. Almost two-thirds of the working-age adults on Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program for the poor, already have jobs. Most of those who don’t are busy with school or unpaid caregiving, or suffer from an illness or disability. A recent KFF (formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation) analysis of Census Bureau survey data found this left about 2.1 million Medicaid recipients aged 19 to 64 who were not working for some other reason in 2023.
Given that there’s no real justification for restricting the view to Medicaid recipients, while sending 60-year-old newbies into the fields would be crazy, I looked at numbers from the same survey (the 2024 Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey, available at the University of Minnesota’s IPUMS-CPS) and found an estimated 2.1 million 18-to-44-year-olds — 59% of them men — who did not work in 2023 and did not name disability, caregiving or school as the reason.
Meanwhile, according to the most recent jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2.3 million people were working for pay in agriculture and related industries in June. The number who are not US citizens is some fraction of that. So it’ll be an easy swap, right? Well, no, unless the Trump administration plans to resort to forced labor. There may be some combination of technological innovation and higher wages that could lure more US citizens into farm work (want to operate berry-picking drones from your home computer for $50 an hour?), but it’s certainly not going to happen quickly or cheaply.
Few Americans want to labor on farms because this is an affluent, urbanized (suburbanized, really) nation with ample less-grueling work on offer, and a prime-age (25-54) employment-population ratio that’s near an all-time high. If government policy really were to shift to zero tolerance for not just undocumented immigrants but all noncitizens on US farms — which is what Rollins seemed to say — the short- and possibly longer-term outcome would be the collapse of American agricultural production. Already, the crackdowns have paralyzed farm work in some California counties.
These statistics showing 42% of crop farmworkers to be undocumented come from an annual survey of just 1,500 to 3,600 workers, and may not be entirely reliable. One has to imagine that some farmworkers are wary of telling government survey-takers that they’re here illegally. Plus, there’s no sign in the survey results of the big growth that we know has happened in foreign farmworkers here legally on temporary visas. The survey also covers only crop farmworkers, who according to the USDA’s quarterly farm labor survey make up about half of an overall hired-worker farm labor force that tops out in the summer at around 800,000.
That in turn is a lot less than the aforementioned 2.3 million agriculture and related industries workers estimated by the BLS from the Census Bureau’s monthly Current Population Survey, with the difference partly definitional but also an indication that the available numbers on agricultural employment aren’t ultra-reliable. The Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages compiled by the BLS from state unemployment-insurance records doesn’t count workers not covered by unemployment insurance, and reported an average of 1.2 million farm jobs last year. It offers what may be the best breakdown, though, of where those jobs are located.
In these numbers, California has 34% of the nation’s paid farm jobs. A 2022 analysis by the Center for Migration Studies of New York based on pre-pandemic Census data estimated that the Golden State accounted for 49% of the 283,000 undocumented agricultural workers in the US. The analysis also found that 70% of undocumented farmworkers had arrived in the US in the 1990s and 2000s — after the Immigration Act of 1986 had provided a path to legalization for an earlier generation and before increased border security made it much harder to cross over to the US and back undetected — and 88% were Mexican. The immigration wave of 2022-2024 appears to have been light on both Mexicans and wannabe farmworkers, so those numbers may not have changed all that much since.
California’s undocumented farmworkers are thus an experienced, aging bunch — in many cases quite skilled and hard to replace, but also facing bleak retirement prospects because while most have been paying into Social Security for decades, they’ve been doing so using fake IDs and won’t be eligible for any benefits. For this and a lot of other reasons, widespread employment of undocumented workers is a bad thing. But I’ve heard many times from people in California’s agricultural sector that they simply can’t persuade US citizens or noncitizens with all-purpose work authorizations to take jobs in the fields.
This sounds like a copout, but the evidence from H-2A visas does offer some support. To hire seasonal foreign workers, farmers not only have to offer the jobs domestically first, but also pay visa-holders prevailing local wages as calculated by the Department of Labor and provide transportation, housing and food. After decades of slow growth and complaints from farmers about the onerous requirements, the number of visas issued has tripled in the past decade, with Mexicans getting the overwhelming majority (other countries with significant numbers of H-2A recipients include South Africa, Jamaica and Guatemala).
All in all the program, while not free of abuse, seems to be a successful effort to steer agricultural employment into legal channels, and so far there’s no sign in the monthly visa numbers that Trump — whose own businesses are frequent users of H-2A and the smaller H-2B visa program for non-agricultural seasonal workers — is trying to slow it down. Immigration crackdown or no, a “100% American” farm workforce almost certainly isn’t in our future.
(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this column are that of the writer. The facts and opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of www.economictimes.com.)
Employers have to offer these jobs to US workers before bringing in foreigners on H-2A visas for temporary agricultural work. The sharp rise in H-2A issuance the past decade indicates that they haven’t been getting many takers.
These statistics offer some context for Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ recent remarks that the agricultural workforce was headed “towards automation and 100% American participation,” and that “with 34 million people, able-bodied adults on Medicaid, we should be able to do that fairly quickly.” I’m confident that Rollins doesn’t believe any of this. But after trying to get President Donald Trump to back off on deportations of farmworkers, briefly succeeding, then being overruled by guy-who-seems-to-be-in-charge-at-the-White-House-at-the-moment Stephen Miller, she had to come up with something to say. So let’s unpack it.
First, the Medicaid recipients. Almost two-thirds of the working-age adults on Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program for the poor, already have jobs. Most of those who don’t are busy with school or unpaid caregiving, or suffer from an illness or disability. A recent KFF (formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation) analysis of Census Bureau survey data found this left about 2.1 million Medicaid recipients aged 19 to 64 who were not working for some other reason in 2023.
Given that there’s no real justification for restricting the view to Medicaid recipients, while sending 60-year-old newbies into the fields would be crazy, I looked at numbers from the same survey (the 2024 Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey, available at the University of Minnesota’s IPUMS-CPS) and found an estimated 2.1 million 18-to-44-year-olds — 59% of them men — who did not work in 2023 and did not name disability, caregiving or school as the reason.
Meanwhile, according to the most recent jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2.3 million people were working for pay in agriculture and related industries in June. The number who are not US citizens is some fraction of that. So it’ll be an easy swap, right? Well, no, unless the Trump administration plans to resort to forced labor. There may be some combination of technological innovation and higher wages that could lure more US citizens into farm work (want to operate berry-picking drones from your home computer for $50 an hour?), but it’s certainly not going to happen quickly or cheaply.
Few Americans want to labor on farms because this is an affluent, urbanized (suburbanized, really) nation with ample less-grueling work on offer, and a prime-age (25-54) employment-population ratio that’s near an all-time high. If government policy really were to shift to zero tolerance for not just undocumented immigrants but all noncitizens on US farms — which is what Rollins seemed to say — the short- and possibly longer-term outcome would be the collapse of American agricultural production. Already, the crackdowns have paralyzed farm work in some California counties.
These statistics showing 42% of crop farmworkers to be undocumented come from an annual survey of just 1,500 to 3,600 workers, and may not be entirely reliable. One has to imagine that some farmworkers are wary of telling government survey-takers that they’re here illegally. Plus, there’s no sign in the survey results of the big growth that we know has happened in foreign farmworkers here legally on temporary visas. The survey also covers only crop farmworkers, who according to the USDA’s quarterly farm labor survey make up about half of an overall hired-worker farm labor force that tops out in the summer at around 800,000.
That in turn is a lot less than the aforementioned 2.3 million agriculture and related industries workers estimated by the BLS from the Census Bureau’s monthly Current Population Survey, with the difference partly definitional but also an indication that the available numbers on agricultural employment aren’t ultra-reliable. The Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages compiled by the BLS from state unemployment-insurance records doesn’t count workers not covered by unemployment insurance, and reported an average of 1.2 million farm jobs last year. It offers what may be the best breakdown, though, of where those jobs are located.
In these numbers, California has 34% of the nation’s paid farm jobs. A 2022 analysis by the Center for Migration Studies of New York based on pre-pandemic Census data estimated that the Golden State accounted for 49% of the 283,000 undocumented agricultural workers in the US. The analysis also found that 70% of undocumented farmworkers had arrived in the US in the 1990s and 2000s — after the Immigration Act of 1986 had provided a path to legalization for an earlier generation and before increased border security made it much harder to cross over to the US and back undetected — and 88% were Mexican. The immigration wave of 2022-2024 appears to have been light on both Mexicans and wannabe farmworkers, so those numbers may not have changed all that much since.
California’s undocumented farmworkers are thus an experienced, aging bunch — in many cases quite skilled and hard to replace, but also facing bleak retirement prospects because while most have been paying into Social Security for decades, they’ve been doing so using fake IDs and won’t be eligible for any benefits. For this and a lot of other reasons, widespread employment of undocumented workers is a bad thing. But I’ve heard many times from people in California’s agricultural sector that they simply can’t persuade US citizens or noncitizens with all-purpose work authorizations to take jobs in the fields.
This sounds like a copout, but the evidence from H-2A visas does offer some support. To hire seasonal foreign workers, farmers not only have to offer the jobs domestically first, but also pay visa-holders prevailing local wages as calculated by the Department of Labor and provide transportation, housing and food. After decades of slow growth and complaints from farmers about the onerous requirements, the number of visas issued has tripled in the past decade, with Mexicans getting the overwhelming majority (other countries with significant numbers of H-2A recipients include South Africa, Jamaica and Guatemala).
All in all the program, while not free of abuse, seems to be a successful effort to steer agricultural employment into legal channels, and so far there’s no sign in the monthly visa numbers that Trump — whose own businesses are frequent users of H-2A and the smaller H-2B visa program for non-agricultural seasonal workers — is trying to slow it down. Immigration crackdown or no, a “100% American” farm workforce almost certainly isn’t in our future.
(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this column are that of the writer. The facts and opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of www.economictimes.com.)
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