Make Food Great Again by Making Farmers Hire American Again

A Restoration News Investigation

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An America First labor policy should aim to Americanize every aspect of the labor market—including agriculture. This means providing farm work opportunities to American citizens first and legal permanent residents second. Visas for seasonal farm workers should be capped and gradually reduced until they fall to a level that prioritizes American labor.

The U.S. is in the middle of an epoch-defining political realignment. Thanks to President Donald Trump’s policies, polling from the conservative League of American Workers consistently shows most voters see the Republican Party as the “party for workers.”

But whether the Republican Party takes advantage of the Trump bump remains to be seen. Doing so will require sacrificing short-term political capital with big business and big agriculture for long-term moral and political victories to transform American labor just as Trump has transformed workers’ perception of the GOP.

Restoration News has already exposed the threats posed by illegal aliens, sanctuary cities, and foreign tech workers—H-1B visa holders. But seasonal farm workers and the jobs they take from Americans remains a seldom-discussed aspect of mass immigration.

The H-2A seasonal visa for agricultural workers originally aimed to address labor shortages but instead created a permanent dependency that reduces incentives for farmers to innovate in 3 key ways:

1. Recruiting American workers
2. Investing in mechanization
3. Switching to less labor-intensive land use.

Many mistakenly view seasonal foreign visas as indispensable to the agricultural industry and the country’s food supply. But like all jobs, farm work hinges on supply and demand. If the supply of cheap, experienced foreign farm labor remains high, farmers will have no incentive to hire Americans. 

Meanwhile, millions of undereducated American adults and hundreds of thousands of rural teenagers are unemployed or have given up trying to find work. Others remain stuck in jobs that pay less than what farmers spend on seasonal foreign workers. These and other cohorts of Americans form a pool of millions of working-age Americans, untapped labor that farmers would have to recruit if the option of hiring experienced foreign workers were permanently reduced.

There is a way to fix this problem in 7 years, less than two presidential terms. Doing so would strengthen rural Americans’ communities and culture and help cement the America First platform as the dominant worldview for generations.

Why We Should Replace Seasonal Immigrant Workers with Americans

Crop agriculture is one of the few industries in which immigrants outnumber Americans. Although many immigrants do work with livestock, it requires fewer workers and only constitutes roughly 4% of H-2A workers. 

The Moral Case 

Proponents of mass immigration argue that falling birthrates and retiring Baby Boomers require importing foreigners to pay for entitlement obligations. But unlike the non-agricultural seasonal worker visa—the H-2B—the H-2A allows employers to cheat future retirees by not paying into the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. 

But even if that weren’t the case, America doesn’t lack working-age citizens. It lacks working-age citizens in the workforce. 

The San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank recently observed that since mid-2023, more Americans are remaining unemployed for longer periods of time. The unemployment rate, meanwhile, has barely budged. This shows jobs are being filled with immigrants despite unemployed Americans failing to find new work. For example, from May 2019–May 2024, three quarters of all jobs created went to immigrants, both legal and illegal.

Americans without any college attendance, the most likely to engage in crop labor, have fared the poorest. 

In 2023, men with only a high school diploma had a 7% unemployment rate, while those without a high school diploma had an 8% unemployment rate.

The labor force participation (LFP) rate paints an even bleaker picture. If American-born men alone participated in the labor force at the same rate as in 1960, it would add 9 million workers to the economy. 

The LFP rate for men in their prime years of 25–54 without a bachelor’s degree bottomed out in 2019 and has maintained that historic low. Women without a bachelor’s degree have experienced a 15 percent decline in their LFP rate since 2000, despite a nearly 20 percent decline in the birthrate over that same period.

America’s deindustrialization drove much of the opioid crisis, which now kills over 100,000 Americans per year. Coupled with the globalist economy’s gentrification of cities, homelessness has reached an all-time high—surpassing Great Depression levels. 

At least during the Great Depression, however, many laid-off factory workers found seasonal relief in farm jobs. Even that is no longer an option thanks to the foreign replacement of American farm labor.

In addition to foregoing entitlement contributions, most seasonal immigrant farm workers extract their earnings through remittances. Meanwhile, local American taxpayers have to pay for their social services like schooling for their children and emergency medical expenses.

The Historic Case

Proponents of mass immigration argue that we have always relied on foreign workers on farms.

But the government mostly implemented guestworker programs during wartime. Despite their continuance after World War II, American farm workers did not go extinct. 

The H-2 seasonal foreign worker visa, introduced in 1952, admitted 69,000 immigrants at its peak, in 1969, and 30,000 in the year of its elimination. But even that sparked calls from American farm worker advocates for the its elimination.

Congress split the H-2 into the H-2A and H-2B in the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986, also known as the Reagan amnesty bill. The results were devastating to American workers.

Phillip Martin, a member of the Commission on Agriculture—which IRCA created—observed in 1990 that “especially in Oregon, the work force has changed during the 1980s. In the early 1980s, the harvest work force included a significant share of local teens and Texas- and California-based US citizens migrants. Today, most harvest workers are immigrants.” 

In 1990, Congress capped only the H-2B, hoping that by leaving the H-2A uncapped, farmers would play nice and refrain from hiring illegal aliens. But without strict immigration enforcement, farmers increased their proportion of illegal crop workers after IRCA rather than deal with the bureaucracy of the H-2A program. The government, meanwhile, turned a blind eye. In 1996, the Immigration and Naturalization Service directed less than 5 percent of its 4,600 worksite raids at agriculture.

In the decades since IRCA, the wages of Americans who persisted in agriculture have fallen 20% when adjusted for inflation.

The Patriotic Case

Proponents of mass immigration argue that foreign farm workers are necessary because Americans refuse to work in the sun. 

Shay Myers, a third-generation onion farmer and agribusiness leader, told AGDaily:

Why don’t we hire Americans to do these jobs? The simple answer is that we can’t get the workers. . . . We have to run radio ads. We have to run print ads. We have to let Americans know the jobs we have available because we have to make sure the folks we bring from Mexico aren’t taking American jobs. But you know what? No American ever calls, no American ever shows up.

But does the presence of foreign workers in warehouses, retail, construction, and trucking prove Americans won’t work those jobs either?

In 2022, the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a Maine law banning Canadian truck drivers from hauling logs under the auspices of the H-2A visa after the agricultural lobby—which spends more than the defense lobby—expanded the visa’s scope. With enough campaign contributions, farm construction, farmhouse cleaning, mechanic work, plumbing, electrical work—anything conceivably tied to a farm’s operation—can fall under H-2A. 

Despite immigration driving down real wages, American citizens employed as crop workers actually outnumber H-2A visa recipients. Although most Americans prefer steady employment, many live exclusively from seasonal jobs or rely on them to fill employment gaps. 

According to the USDA Economic Research Service, there are 2.6 million jobs from direct on-farm employment, which translates to around 1,716,000 crop jobs. In 2022, there were roughly 350,000 H-2A recipients, including new visas issues and extensions. The Department of Labor’s 2021–2022 National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS), which excludes H-2A workers, shows 32.1 percent of crop workers were born in the U.S., and 6.7 percent were naturalized citizens. That’s over 500,000 Americans willing to work on farms in the sun. As we will see, there are plenty more where they came from and millions who could join them.

It also does not appear all these American workers are miserable souls who would be doing anything else if they could. 

According to the 2021–2022 NAWS, three-fourths said they planned to continue doing farm work for at least 5 years, and 72% said they planned to continue as long as they could—including 58% of those born in the U.S.

So, why do farmers spend an average of $2,000 on recruitment and bureaucratic costs for each H-2A worker when they must also reimburse them for transportation to the U.S. and back, provide free housing, and give them 3 meals a day or kitchen access?

Despite the costs and bureaucracy, the H-2A process allows farmers to shop the global fieldworker market. This disadvantages unemployed Americans, who usually can’t compete with experienced foreign farmers.

Without the H-2A program, farmers would have to draw workers from among high schoolers with little if any work experience and workers with little if any farm experience. 59% of American-born crop workers said their parents had never done farm work, and only 14% said their parents were engaged in farm work at the time. Most came from similar-paying industries like retail, food service, construction, and landscaping. 

Without government coercion, farmers will never willingly put in the work to train Americans from these backgrounds if they can fall back on experienced foreign labor. For example, Mississippi catfish farmers recently got caught hiring South African farmers at a higher wage rate than they previously paid locals. 

What Myers describes is a recruitment failure—and possibly an intentional one. 

The Raleigh, North Carolina-based News & Observer showed how newspapers’ classified ads for jobs “actually explain part of the U.S. immigration system.” Employers place these ads, hoping they won’t receive any applicants. Rishi Oza, an attorney at Brown Immigration Law in Durham, called it “a dance.” These jobs “don’t sound attractive, and that’s by design.”

For example, they often omit the salary and the job’s location, giving only a vague warning of the need to “travel and/or relocate to work in unanticipated locations throughout US.” One staffing firm didn’t provide a website or email address, instead telling applicants to mail printed resumes.

These ads are known as “PERM” advertisements for the permanent labor certification motions employers must go through to receive H-2A workers. The process requires them to advertise jobs in a “newspaper of general circulation in the area of intended employment most appropriate to the occupation.” The rule was last updated in 2004 when most people still read newspapers.

Additionally, limiting advertising to locals limits the pool of potential workers. As Commissioner Martin noted, most of Oregon’s American seasonal harvesters came from California and Texas. If Oregon farmers didn’t hire from out-of-state, they too could have claimed they couldn’t find Americans to pick apples.

But even if all farmers advertised in good faith, job applicants are unlikely to respond to any seasonal position for which they have no experience. Most have to be convinced or recruited.

The 2021–2022 NAWS showed only 30 percent of crop workers found their jobs on their own. Sixty-one percent said they found their jobs by recommendations from friends or relatives, with the remainder being recruited by farms or an employment service.

The view that Americans will not do difficult work is harmful and will continue to increase economic inequality between Americans who benefit from globalism and those getting crushed by the alliance of big business and cheap foreign labor. If farmers spent what they pay for recruitment, compliance, and housing costs for H-2A workers on recruiting and paying American workers, it would bring crop wages to a competitive level with other jobs that Americans already fill. 

Who Are the Americans Who Will Pick the Crops?

Some would argue America will never return to the pre-World War II ratio of American to immigrant crop workers, when likely no more than 20% were foreign-born. But half of the American workforce worked in agriculture then. Today, less than 1.6% of the American workforce is employed in agriculture. Filling the labor needs of American crop agriculture no longer requires tens of millions of workers—it only requires 1.7 million. 

There are already around 530,000 American citizens and 260,000 legal non-H-2A immigrants employed in crop agriculture. Is one to believe that among the millions of unemployed, underemployed, and seasonal workers in a country of 330 million, farmers couldn’t find another 930,000 workers if they had to? 

But even this number is inflated, because it stems from the unrealistic assumption that massively reducing available H-2A visas would not spur increased mechanization and a switch to less labor-intensive crops. 

So, where are these Americans and permanent legal residents who could take the place of H-2A workers? 

Understandably, most come from the lower end of the economic spectrum. According to the 2021–2022 NAWS, crop workers had median personal incomes the previous year of between $20,000 and $24,999 and median family incomes from $30,000 to $34,999. 

53% had at least one year of non-crop work experience in the U.S. Among the American-born, one-third held a non-crop job during the previous year. The most common were mechanic, repair, maintenance, sales, and food industry jobs. 

To find other professions farms could poach from if the availability of foreign workers dried up, let’s look at those involving manual labor with a similar pay scale.

In 2022, H-2A crop workers started at an average of $15.56 per hour, and non-H-2A crop workers averaged $14.53. Comparatively, these are the average starting, hourly wage rates for the following positions. Except where indicated, rates are for 2025.

• Amazon Warehouse Jobs in 2022: $16
• Construction: $15.29
• Fast Food: $10.74
• Retail: $12.38
• Landscaping: $12.94

It must be remembered that H-2A workers also receive free housing and transportation to and from the jobsite; whereas, only 10% of non-H-2A crop workers receive free housing from their employer, and 2%  receive free transportation.

In addition to competing with similar workforces, there are other cohorts of possible crop workers most farmers would likely never consider unless forced.

Many college students don’t come from wealthy or middle-class backgrounds, and 3 summers earning $10,000 with free boarding would cover four years of tuition at some universities. One major whose in-state public tuition this would cover is agriculture, in which over 40,000 undergraduates major. 

Although they wouldn’t constitute a large number, some college-educated Americans are willing to work temporarily on farms or in greenhouses whether from burnout, wanting a lifestyle change, or environmentalist reasons. In fact, there would probably be fewer leftist environmentalists if farmers recruited them.

But these small pools of potential farm labor don’t account for the millions of Americans who are unemployed or who don’t participate at all in the labor force.

Two cohorts of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents who are among the likeliest to fill seasonal crop jobs are those 25–34 without a high school diploma not in the labor force and teenagers 16–19 not in the labor force during the summer. We exclude those aged 20–25, because many without high school diplomas at that age pursue GEDs or technical degrees.

25–34-Year-Olds Without a High School Diploma

According to the 2021–2022 NAWS, 78% of crop workers without a high school diploma plan to do farm work as long as they are able with little difference between male and female respondents.

In 2023, roughly half of Americans aged 25–34 without a high school diploma were unemployed or had dropped out of the labor force. Men in this cohort without a high school diploma had an LFP rate of 73%, while women that age without a high school diploma had a LFP rate of a paltry 42%. The latter is barely higher than the LFP rate in the 2010s of Americans with a physical or mental disability. 

The low LFP rate of women in this cohort does not owe to motherhood. In 2020, the birthrate among women 25–34 averaged only 9.3%. In 2022, 60% of women 25–29 and 38% of women 30–34 were childless. 

So, how many of these young, non-working Americans would be available if farmers had to either recruit them or sell their farms?

As of 2021, roughly 8.9% of Americans aged 25 and older lacked a high school diploma.

We’ll scale that down a generous 2 percentage points because Americans 25–34 have a higher rate of graduation than the national average. So, of the 46 million Americans 25–34, this comes to 3.17 million. 

The U.S. Sentencing Commission found 28 percent of federal inmates had never completed high school. Most studies show this tends to be higher in state prisons, and, overall, Americans without a high school diploma constitute a third to a half of the incarcerated population. 

There are nearly 2 million people incarcerated in the U.S. Taking the high estimate of one million inmates who lack a high school diploma, then assuming a third of this cohort falls between 25–34, that brings us down to 2.84 million free 25–34-year olds without a high school diploma. 

Since the LFP rate does not count the incarcerated, and the LFP rate among this age group is 60%, this leaves 1.14 million free 25–34-year-olds who do not participate in the labor force. 

In 2021, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis reported that 26% of 25–54-year-olds out of the labor force cited caregiving as their primary reason. It notes younger Americans are less likely to cite this as a reason, and only 16% of younger women with children are full-time caregivers. But even taking the 26% rate at face value, this leaves 840,000 people.

Further subtracting the 6% of adults 34 and under with a disability from the 2.84 million—which, as shown, does not automatically preclude one from the labor force—leaves 670,000 able-bodied Americans without a high school diploma, aged 25–34, who do not participate in the workforce and lack work-prohibitive caregiving obligations.

Again, this does not include the millions of Americans out of the labor force who only have a high school diploma or those outside this narrow age range of 25–34 who didn’t complete high school.

Teenagers

For decades, seasonal jobs offered a financial boost to American teenagers, allowing them to start adulthood with accumulated cash from summers working full-time jobs. The teenage LFP rate for 16–19-year-olds peaked in 1979 at 59.3% but remained above 50% during the remainder of the 20th century. 

As more immigrants took low-skilled and seasonal jobs, American teens were increasingly crowded out of the labor market, hampering the development of their human capital. During the Great Recession, the teen LFP rate fell below 40 percent for the first time in recorded history and has yet to recover, averaging around 35% since 2009.

Teen labor availability to farmers is lower than 25–34-year-olds because teens are less likely to work far enough away from home to require boarding, which limits their availability to nearby farms. They are also mostly limited to summer jobs because of school schedules.

To gain a rough estimate of the pool of available teen crop labor, we will look only at 16–19-year-olds in rural areas not in the labor force. We choose this age range because 16 is the age that individuals may engage in unrestricted farm labor, including during school hours. 

It’s worth noting, however, that the Fair Labor Standards Act places no hourly limit on 14 and 15-year-olds outside school hours, and teens this young may operate tractors and other machinery with certificates of completion of the 4-H Federal Extension Training Program. 

Approximately 17.3 million 16–19-year-olds live in the U.S. The incarcerated population for this cohort in juvenile detention facilities and prisons drop this number, at most, to 17.2 million.

Around 13.5% of America’s youth live in non-metropolitan areas—statistical areas containing less than 50,000 residents—giving us a rough estimate of 2.32 million rural 16–19-year-olds.

With a current LFP rate of 37.6%, this leaves 1.45 million in this cohort out of the workforce.

Considering curricular obligations and previously noted mobility limitations, only boosting this cohort’s LFP rate to its all-time high of 59.3% would still provide an additional 500,000 rural teen workers.

This is not unrealistic. In fact, many Midwestern states maintain teen LFP rates over 50%, largely due to that region’s low use of H-2A visa workers.

Again, this does not include 14 and 15-year-olds who are legally allowed to work unlimited hours on farms outside of school hours.

The two cohorts examined here would provide farmers with a pool of over 1.1 million potential workers. 

Including other available cohorts would add millions to the potential crop labor pool. They include:

• recruitable service and blue-collar workers,
• those out of the labor force who lack a high school diploma and are outside these age ranges,
• those out of the labor force with only a high school diploma, 
• college students willing to do farm work during the summer, and 
• some white-collar workers in need of a seasonal gap job or those just burnt out and wanting to briefly work in fresh air.

Although it’s important the government phase the guestworker program out entirely, it’s equally important it do so gradually to give farmers time to adjust to the reality that they would soon have to mechanize, switch to less labor-intensive crops, or pay U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents.

As we have shown, the potential labor pool far exceeds the number of crop workers who are illegal aliens or H-2A visa holders. If farmers can’t fill their fields from this, they could always recruit the half a million nonviolent parolees, and—if they really get desperate—the over 700,000 homeless. 

A 7-Year Plan to Replace Seasonal Foreign Workers with Americans

Labor Realignment, Not Agricultural Collapse

The America First position on agriculture should entail taking care of our own labor force first and filling gaps only as needed. This is the pragmatic, honorable, and consistent with America’s history and the nation’s traditional worldview.

In an ideal society, American labor would harvest all crops grown on American farms. But at every point in U.S. history, cash crop farming relied on seasonal foreign labor to fill seasonal gaps. Isolated fruit-growing areas in California and Florida, for instance, would have difficulty replacing all their seasonal immigrant workers. Niche crops like sugar cane and tobacco, grown primarily in Florida and North Carolina, require more skilled labor than fruit picking—a skill that cannot be easily transferred to other types of labor and which few low-skilled American workers would see the value in mastering.

However, crops that rely almost exclusively on foreign labor should be mechanized or eliminated from U.S. soil

Benefits of this reform plan for farmers, workers, and the economy include:

• Economic Stability: Setting a cap on future seasonal agricultural visas makes farmers less vulnerable to visa policy changes or international disruptions. This will prompt them to adjust their business practices toward increased mechanization and domestic hiring.
• Accelerated Mechanization: With fewer seasonal workers, farmers will invest in technologies like robotic harvesters, boosting productivity. For example, farmers in California and Florida have increased mechanized harvesting of crops like apples and strawberries to counter labor shortages, which has already shown promise in reducing labor costs.
• Increased Opportunities for American Workers: Reducing seasonal agricultural visas will nearly a million jobs for Americans and legal permanent residents. 
• Food Affordability: Americans won’t stop eating fruits and vegetables if they aren’t grown in America. Blueberries, oranges, and apples may even drop in price if more come from Latin America. The same workers would be picking the fruit and spending their wages in the same countries as their current remittances, and American taxpayers wouldn’t have to pay for their social services. The U.S., after all, imports nearly all its tomatoes, cucumbers, and asparagus, because these labor-intensive crops aren’t very economical, even with the bloated immigrant labor force.
• Fairness to Foreign Workers: The 7-year phase-down provides H-2A workers time to plan alternative livelihoods over that period, respecting their having come legally while prioritizing future American workers.
• Simplified Administration: Returning the H-2A and H-2B into a single H-2 visa reduces bureaucratic complexity and lowers costs for employers and the Department of Labor.

Congress could also consider complementary policies, such as tax incentives for mechanization, agricultural workforce development programs, and trade agreements to ensure affordable imports of products that cannot be harvested with mostly American labor.

Transition Plan

This proposal includes four steps to return the seasonal work visa to its original intent.

1. Adjust the original H-2B cap for population growth. 

Congress should allow the H-2B visa cap to adjust with the census. This makes more sense than the current practice of allowing DHS to add supplemental caps, opening the way for foreign interests and employers to abuse the system. For instance, the Fiscal Year 2024 Supplemental Cap more than doubled the 1990 Congressionally mandated cap, bringing total H-2B visas to 142,063. 

In 1990, Congress set the H-2B visa’s original cap at 66,000, which was .0265% of the country’s 248,709,873 residents at the time. Adjusting for 2020’s population of 331,449,281 at that rate would raise the cap to 88,000. After 2030, it would automatically rise to 93,000 if the Congressional Budget Office (CBO)’s expected 2030 population projection proves accurate. This would accompany the removal of DHS’ authority to change the cap, leaving any supplemental adjustments solely to Congressional discretion.

2. Cap the H-2A visa at the number issued in the most recent recorded fiscal year.

To minimize economic disruption to agriculture, Congress should set the first year’s cap at the number of H-2A visas issued in the previous fiscal year, which was around 350,000 for FY 2022.

3. Sunset the H-2A visa over 7 years.

Having capped the H-2A visa at its current level, Congress should set its cap on a yearly reduction plan until it equals the H-2B cap. This would reduce H-2A visas by 375%.

Based on the CBO’s 2030 census projection, the H-2B’s cap would be 93,000 during the 2030s. The goal would then be to eliminate 257,000 H-2A visas over the following 6 years. This would result in a yearly cap reduction of 42,833 as the following table shows.

Merge the H-2A and H-2B visas into a new H-2 visa that will automatically adjust its cap after every census.

After 7 years, the H-2A and H-2B visas would cease to exist, merging back into a unified H-2 visa that encompasses all foreign seasonal workers with a cap of 186,000. This, coupled with the elimination of illegal alien farm workers and the strict enforcement of immigration laws would increase the share of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents in the crop labor force from around 45% to around 95%. 

Building an America First labor policy includes Americanizing all industries where possible. The reliance on foreign farm workers through the H-2A visa has sidelined struggling American citizens and legal permanent residents who could fill these roles. Counting only young adults not in the labor force who lack a high school diploma and rural teenagers not in the labor force provides a large-enough pool to replace H-2A and illegal alien crop workers.

The 7-year transition envisioned here to achieve the Americanization of crop labor would return to a single H-2 visa, capped at a rate consistent with that visa’s original intent, undoing the damage of IRCA. It would also provide farmers time to adapt through increased domestic recruitment, mechanization, and crop adjustment. This would ultimately strengthening rural economies and place agriculture on a sustainable path that relies on mostly American labor.

*PDF version available here*