Interview with an expert: Who are the Workers Harvesting Our Food?

Guestworkers and their benefits for the country

This is a lightly edited Q&A with Alejandro Gutiérrez-Li, an economist at North Carolina State University. Dr. Gutiérrez-Li works on agricultural economics. 

The big idea is that immigration is vital for agriculture, not because Americans can’t or won’t work there, but because Americans have much better options for work. So immigrants are filling a gap, not taking jobs. Immigration gives Americans the ability to concentrate on what they do best, which makes us all better off.

Dr. Gutiérrez-Li will be able to respond to questions—so please leave comments and questions!

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Source: H-2A Adverse Effect Wage Rates: 2020 - 2021 (Gutiérrez-Li Calculations)

Josh: What is the agricultural labor supply problem?

Gutiérrez-Li: The problem is, in simple words, that there is a diminishing number of workers willing to do physical tasks in agriculture. As a result of pandemic disruptions, many industries experienced (and continue to experience) labor shortages. Finding and retaining workers has never been as difficult as it is today, as we have historically low unemployment rates. However, labor shortages in agriculture have been a challenge for many decades now, and farmers are facing major challenges finding workers.

Josh: Looking back at our recent history, who has worked on farms in the US?

Gutiérrez-Li: Since the 1900s, the US has increasingly relied on foreign-born farmworkers. In the first half of the last century, the country had in place the so-called Bracero program, which allowed large numbers of Mexican citizens to come to the country’s farms. When this program ended, the US started relying more and more on undocumented workers mostly coming from Mexico too. With the increase in border enforcement, the growth of the Mexican economy, and the tightening of immigration laws, the flow of undocumented workers started to decline, which led in part to labor shortages in agriculture. As a result, a legal avenue to bring farmworkers from abroad, the H-2A visa program, started to gain traction in the early 90s.  

Josh: So, why don’t farmers just hire Americans?

Gutiérrez-Li: Agriculture is usually seen as a job of last resort. For many people, field work is a job, not a career. The reason for this is that work on farms, particularly harvesting, weeding, and sorting and packing are very physically demanding. Most Americans see farm work as low paid, dangerous (agriculture is one of the occupations with the highest number of accidents), not socially prestigious, and risky given the exposure to pesticides, heat waves, fires, and long hours. For most Americans, working in other sectors (or taking advantage of unemployment and other benefits) is a better option than working on farms or meatpacking plants. As a matter of fact, one of the regulations of the H-2A program is that farmers have to show credible efforts that the tried to recruit American workers first, before they can request a visa to bring a foreign worker. In many cases farmers advertise positions and do not get a single applicant. In the few cases they do, domestic workers leave the farms very quickly as soon as they realize how grueling the job tasks can be.

Source: NC State

Josh: How does the H-2A program work? How many people can come? Is it unlimited?

Gutiérrez-Li: The H-2A program which allows American agricultural employers to bring people from other countries to work in the U.S. in compliance with immigration law. The program traces its origins to the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, which created the H-2 visa category for unskilled workers (ones that do not require college education or specialized training) coming from abroad to perform temporary jobs. In 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act split this category in two: H-2A and H-2B. The H-2A program allows farmers to bring non-U.S. citizens to work in agriculture with no cap on the number of individuals allowed to enter through the program. The H-2B category is for non-agricultural work like landscaping and groundskeeping and is capped. Since the first H-2A visas were issued around 1992, the number of H-2A workers coming every year has increased steadily, especially to states in the South where many labor-intensive crops (hard to mechanize) are grown. In 2022 nearly 300,000 H-2A visas were issued.

Josh: What proposals, if any, have been put forward to change the program?

Gutiérrez-Li: The H-2A program has major limitations, including a lot of paperwork, high processing costs, and a cap to the number of months workers can be in the US. In this context, the Farm Work Force Modernization Bill has been introduced to Congress multiple times to address some of the negative aspects of the program. The bill has three main objectives. First, it creates a pathway to citizenship for unauthorized farmworkers. Second, it substantially modifies and expands the H-2A program by allowing some workers to stay year-round and grants overtime payments. Third, the bill requires all agricultural employers to use E-Verify to check that newly hired individuals are legally authorized to work in the United States.

Josh: What are the risks of ignoring the problem of labor shortages in agriculture? 

Gutiérrez-Li: If the United States does not deal with farm labor shortages, more farms will go out of business, the farming community will shrink and become more concentrated in larger operations, the economies of rural communities will continue to decline, and we will end up having to import more food. This gives room to geopolitical tensions to affect the supply of agricultural commodities to enter the country (like trade wars), which can put the food security of the nation at risk. Moreover, the livelihoods of both farmers and farmworkers (mostly Hispanics) are at risk, which has implications for income inequality and social mobility.

For more:

Back in 2019, we wrote about the tension between automation and hiring workers. In short, when we’ve restricted guest workers, we haven’t helped natives. Instead, we encouraged automation.

I wrote about how to help immigrant farmworkers for The Salt Lake Tribune earlier this year.