Editor’s note: This is part of an ongoing series exploring the current state of labor in the fresh produce industry.
Nisei Farmers League members met May 30 to discuss the development of federal immigration policy language for potential inclusion in a comprehensive immigration bill. What’s different is that this meeting brought together diverse industries to discuss the need for immigration reform and what to do about workers currently in the country, said Manuel Cunha, president of the Nisei Farmers League, which specializes in labor, immigration, housing, transportation and environmental issues.
“We put together a meeting with the restaurants, the hotels, construction, manufacturing, trucking, agriculture and others to talk about how we make this happen, because Congress has failed for the last 35 years,” he said. “They’ve used [immigration] as a method to get reelected, and they never get it done. They blame each side.”
This is a similar conversation to what’s going on in other industry organizations, with the general consensus being that it’s time for action. Growers are hurting, and immigration and H-2A reforms are desperately needed.
“Unfortunately, Congress typically fails to act until there’s a crisis, and they’ve kicked this can down the road long enough,” said James O’Neill, director of legislative affairs for the American Business Immigration coalition. “There is a breaking point being reached. There is a crisis.”
Diane Kurrle, senior vice president of the U.S. Apple Association (USApple), agrees, noting that with labor costs inflating the cost of farming, it’s become a challenge for growers to keep family farms going.
“We’re definitely at the point where things have gotten so bad, and there are growers of every size and every state and region who are literally on the verge of going bankrupt, mainly due to the increasing input costs, which are mainly due to labor costs and the fact that growers are not price setters, they’re price takers,” Kurrle said. “And while these input costs have increased, grower returns on many varieties have actually decreased.”
Kurrle said USApple and other organizations representing specialty crop growers see two paths to relief for growers: short-term changes to rules that impact H-2A and the Adverse Effect Wage Rate and long-term immigration reform.
“We are leaving no stone unturned in terms of trying every single avenue and every option possible in terms of finding some kind of relief,” she said.
Impact in the Existing Workforce
National Council of Agricultural Employers President and CEO Michael Marsh said data from the Department of Labor’s National Agricultural Workers Survey shows that while there’s a significant number of ag workers employed through the H-2A program, there’s also a significant portion of ag workers with unauthorized status, roughly 40% to 50%.
“That means you’ve got 950,000 workers thereabouts that may be here in unauthorized status,” he said. “So, what do you do with them?”
This is a challenge both the industry and those in Washington, D.C., have faced.
O’Neill said it’s not as though farmers who employ these workers want to break the law. Farmers fill out the necessary I-9 forms with whatever information the worker presents.
“No farmer is going to say, ‘Somebody came onto my farm and said I’m undocumented and I hired them anyway,’” he said. “That’s not happening. Folks are bringing false documents. Folks are getting jobs in any way that they can, and farmers are hiring anybody who comes because they don’t have another choice.”
O’Neill points to the costliness of the H-2A program and the number of steps growers must take to participate.
“H-2A was designed to be a program of last resort. However, this year, there’s going to be nearly 386,000 H-2A visas issued,” he said. “If this is the program of last resort, and if we don’t reform this system, if we don’t reform the way we do ag labor, then the last resort stops being sufficient, and then what are we left with? There is no next safety net after this. H-2A is the last resort.”
This is what motivated attendees of the event organized by the Nisei Farmers League, which gathered participants to discuss these needed reforms. Though 33 congressional offices were invited, only seven took part Cunha said.
These industries have a common interest in seeing immigration reform legislation become a reality, Cunha said, as hospitality, restaurants, construction and agriculture have a serious need for workers.
Cunha said some of the suggestions that came out of the meeting include a temporary work authorization permit for any unauthorized workers and employer safeguards for those employers that might have hired unauthorized workers. Another suggestion is to turn Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals into a path for permanent residency through guest worker programs for industries or general legalization.
Marsh said he heard during a cabinet meeting earlier this year, President Donald Trump was interested in doing something for unauthorized workers working on farms, but Marsh hasn’t heard more than that.
“When we look at our workforce and we recognize that more than 40% of the domestic workforce is here on unauthorized status, if we were to lose those folks due to deportation or something, there’s no infrastructure in the government that could accommodate that surge of additional folks that you’d have to recruit in under the H-2A program to put them to work. We would be, overnight, at such a labor deficit that we could not feed America if that happens.”
Legislative Opportunities
USApple’s Kurrle said there are several efforts in the works in the House, including a letter by U.S. Rep. Bill Huizenga, R-Mich., co-signed by more than 100 of his colleagues, to the House Appropriations Committee requesting an H-2A visa guestworker wage freeze, the Adverse Effect Wage Rate, in the upcoming fiscal year 2026 appropriations legislation.
“The national average AEWR has already more than doubled over the past two decades, making agricultural guest labor unaffordable for farm employers and resulting in higher consumer costs,” the letter stated. “The 2025 national average AEWR is $18.12, which is upwards of a mean 3% increase over 2024. With the AEWR varying by region, some states have seen a nearly 10% increase. Meanwhile, producers in Canada pay closer to $12 per hour for fieldworkers or approximately $1-[$]2 per hour in Mexico. This uneven playing field greatly disadvantages our domestic producers.”
Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Mich., also reintroduced a bill that would freeze the AEWR for H-2A migrant farm workers at the 2023 rate through the end of 2026.
“Our farmers have made it clear that continued increases in their labor costs are unsustainable and would bankrupt them,” he said. “My legislation will provide them with relief and help them stay in business.”
Kurrle said both the bill and the letter have bipartisan support, which she said is a testament to the work USApple members do to advocate for the need for these reforms and changes.
“With everything being so partisan right now, and everybody kind of being in their camps, that there is this recognition that something like AEWR and other reform that need to happen can actually be addressed in a bipartisan basis,” she said. “And folks can agree with some common sense, that these things don’t make sense, and if they’re not fixed and addressed, we’re not going to have a domestic apple industry anymore.”
U.S. Reps. Dan Newhouse, R-Wash., and Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., recently reintroduced the Farm Workforce Modernization Act. Kurrle said while the legislation has some of the most important aspects of reform, including work authorization for the current workforce and H-2A reforms, there are still elements the specialty crop industry would likely want to weigh in on.
“For us, USApple, and for the other grower groups that have supported it in the past, we would want changes to it if it were actually to be brought up and considered,” she said. “I don’t think in this environment right now, with the Republicans in control of both houses and President Trump in the White House, that that’s going to be the vehicle that’s ultimately going to move.”
Kurrle points to recommendations from the Agricultural Labor Working Group, a bipartisan group created by House Committee on Agriculture Chairman Glenn “GT” Thompson, R-Pa., and ranking member David Scott, D-Ga. These include streamlining the H-2A application process, expanding reviews of delayed applications and more.
“One of the unanimous recommendations was to have wage stability with limits on increases or decreases if the AEWR in a given year, kind of like a similar model to the Farm Workforce Modernization Act,” Kurrle said. “Also in the majority recommendations, there were also recommendations for more permanent solutions in terms of the AEWR increases and more permanent reforms that were recommended on the wage side of things.”
Kurrle said Thompson has been considering taking up those recommendations to turn them into bipartisan legislation he would introduce. There’s also appropriations efforts, as suggested in the letter from Huizenga, that would be a form of short-term relief for growers.
Other Avenues
A U.S. District Court judge for the Middle District of Florida recently set July 1 as the date for oral arguments in the National Council of Agricultural Employers motion for summary judgment challenging the legality of the Department of Labor’s AEWR.
“Our challenge is unique from the other challenges that were brought against the Adverse [Effect] Wage Rate because we not only challenge the disaggregated wages for individual tasks on a farm, but we also challenge the USDA’s Agricultural (Farm) Labor Survey data,” Marsh said.
He said data in the farm labor survey sets inflationary wages across a farm, regardless if it’s a domestic worker or an H-2A worker and that can be tough for a farm to handle.
“It inflates all the wages throughout agriculture and in the U.S., and unfortunately, it puts our food security more in peril in the United States, because it continues to push more and more of our food production to our foreign competition,” Marsh said.
And more in the shorter term, Kurrle said the U.S. General Services Administration and the White House Office of Management and Budget sought the public’s help to submit ideas for ending existing rules and regulations through an online form on regulations.gov.
Kurrle said USApple identified the “disaggregation rule,” which reclassified certain farm jobs into higher-paying categories, which is part of NCAE’s argument in federal court. Another is the AEWR regulation that if a worker did a task outside of what was included in the farm labor survey, the worker would be paid a different wage category, even if that task was for a small amount of time.
Kurrle said it is common for one worker to drive everyone in a van or bus from the housing site to the orchard — something that’s on-premises and does not need a commercial driver’s license — or a driver takes everyone to do grocery shopping.
“Under this regulation, the worker who’s doing that driving is now considered a chauffeur,” she said.
And sometimes crews need flexibility when weather impacts tasks on the farm.
“So, the idea that a worker performing a task outside of what they would normally be doing for one day out of the pay period, or one day out of the whole contract, shouldn’t change the whole wage structure,” she said. “What we have advocated for is that it should be a primary duties test where you’re paying the worker for what they’re doing primarily while they’re here.”
Another regulation involves joint employment, Kurrle said, in which a couple of growers share costs associated with bringing H-2A workers. For example, an apple grower might partner with a strawberry and vegetable grower so crews would prune apples in spring, harvest strawberries and vegetables, and come back for apple harvest, and the growers could share the cost.
“This rule said the worker could only work a maximum of 35 hours if they did that at either operation,” she said. “These H-2A workers are coming here to make as much money as they can while they’re here, and when it’s peak harvest, the growers need workers who can work more than 35 hours a week. So, it basically eliminated the ability to do that.”
Outlook
Casey Creamer, president and CEO of California Citrus Mutual, a nonprofit trade association advocating for California’s citrus growers, said it will take a bipartisan effort in the House and Senate to enact real labor reform that goes beyond the growers and also impacts the domestic food supply.
“First is a recognition that we’re all part of the problem and all part of the solution,” he said. “A lot of times, people think that the problem is too big for them to make a difference, and I just don’t agree with that. We’ve got a lot of organizations that work on these types of things, and a lot of times people just want to let the organizations work through it, but if everybody just did a little bit, I think it helps move the needle a lot more.”
Creamer encourages those impacted by ag labor to talk with their elected officials to help respectfully voice concerns and discuss the need for ag labor reform.
“We can’t let perfect be the enemy of good,” he said. “We need to get something done. We need to make progress. And we can always improve on that down the road, but if we’re trying to get something perfect that satisfies everybody’s needs perfectly, we’re going to be at ground zero in the next 30 years. We need to get something positively done, constructive within the environment that we’re in, and then we can continue to make progress beyond that as we move forward.”
National Potato Council CEO Kam Quarles said the benefits would be immense if the administration gets behind immigration and labor reform.
“If you were able to get the White House behind a true ag labor or broader immigration reform effort, it would create a tailwind under the U.S. economy that would propel us forward for decades, and certainly make U.S. agriculture vastly more competitive,” he said.
Your next read in this series:
- What Does the Future Hold for Labor in an Ag Tech World?
- Will Autonomous Harvest Reach the Goal Line?
- What You Need to Know About the DOL’s New H-2A Updates
- What Workers Think of the Dignity Act
- Farmworkers Say Their Role Is Essential ‘All the Time’
- Overtime laws make it almost impossible to farm, growers say
- Growers say the current state of H-2A is untenable
- Much work remains to solve ag labor issues
