How the Government’s Obligation to Keep Foreign Workers Safe Collided With Its Efforts to Keep Farms Afloat
by Max Blau, ProPublica
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It’s been nearly two years since I started reporting on abuses of foreign farmworkers in Georgia. Some of the workers I tracked down had come to the U.S. legally through the H-2A visa program and were harmed and exploited by labor contractors despite protections that were supposed to be guaranteed by the federal government.
During those two years, I’ve thought a lot about how the government’s obligation to keep foreign workers safe has collided with another priority: to help U.S. farmers stay in business.
All of that brings to mind a freezing cold weekend in January 2025, early on in my reporting, when I showed up at a farmers’ conference in Savannah, Georgia. What the farmers sought at that gathering, and what happened in the months that followed, exemplifies the tension between keeping workers safe and keeping farms solvent.
Farmers have long pushed for fewer H-2A regulations. That’s in part because of the skyrocketing costs of the program, which sets minimum hourly wages and requires that farmers pay for workers’ housing and transportation. As one Georgia farmer wrote last year in a letter to the U.S. Department of Labor, it has felt like every policy that pertained to the H-2A program was made focusing solely on the benefit of the migrant worker.
At the Savannah conference, lawyers and lobbyists laid out an agenda for overhauling the program under the Trump administration. Braden Boucek, a lawyer who has represented agricultural interests, told the crowd that when it comes to H-2A rules, everything is on the table.
Three changes are at the center of that agenda: overturning a Biden-era rule that expanded H-2A workers’ rights to organize and protest unsafe conditions; slowing scheduled wage increases, which the Economic Policy Institute has projected could cut some workers’ pay by as much as 32%; and leaning on three recent Supreme Court rulings that curtailed federal agencies’ regulatory power to challenge the program’s rules in court.
Leon Sequeira, a former U.S. Department of Labor official who now represents agricultural employers, and Ann Margaret Pointer, an employment lawyer, both told the audience that the Trump administration was likely to be far more receptive to industry input than its predecessor. In follow-up interviews, Sequeira, Pointer and Boucek each said the Labor Department has limited ability to rewrite the program’s rules on its own.
As Boucek put it, Congress will ultimately need to act, since the Labor Department can only fiddle around the edges.