According to the 2022 Census of Agriculture, 437,310 farming operations used hired labor in that year, a nearly 15 percent decline from the number of farms using such workers in 2017. The number of farms using contract labor also declined between Census years, although by a lesser percentage, down about 1 percent from 195,754 to 193, 614. Interestingly, outlays in these two categories to pay these workers increased by 32 percent and 33 percent respectively, over the five-year period, despite the reduction in workers deployed.
Over recent decades, the share of the agricultural workforce that consists of hired workers has steadily risen, although the absolute numbers of both hired workers and family workers has fallen steadily. According to data collected in USDA’s Farm Labor Survey, hired workers accounted for about 23 percent of the roughly 10-million member agricultural workforce in 1950, while that group accounted for 35 percent of the 3-million member agricultural workforce in the year 2000. USDA stopped collecting data in this format as of 2001.
As of 2021, an estimated 47 percent of all U.S. agricultural workers were of Hispanic (including Mexican) origin, and 39 percent were not born in the United States (including Puerto Rico). However, by all reports the supply of migrant workers, both documented and undocumented, has declined in recent years for the agricultural sector. Overall, the Department of Homeland Security estimates that the population of undocumented persons in the United States fell by nearly 600,000 between 2018 and 2022. During that period, the under 18 years of age and over 55 years of age cohorts both increased, while the numbers of undocumented persons in their prime working years fell.
In 2019, 56% of California farmers reported being unable to find all the workers they had needed over the previous five years, according to a survey conducted by the California Farm Bureau Federation. The labor shortfall for farming operations in many states worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic, as the U.S. government invoked Section 265 of Title 42 beginning in March 2020, allowing border officials to suspend asylum proceedings and refuse entry to undocumented persons seeking to cross the border in order to safeguard public health in the United States. The enforcement of Title 42 ended in May 2023 as federal courts determined that the public health emergency no longer existed. Over 1.8 million expulsions occurred during that three-year period, but a substantial share of that figure were expulsions of the same people attempting to cross the border more than one time.
Under U.S. law, farmers can legally hire documented workers on a seasonal basis under the H2-A guest worker visa program. In recent years, use of this program has exploded. In 2022, 370,000 jobs were certified as eligible to be filled by H2-A workers, a nearly 400 percent increase over the total positions certified in 2010. These workers are employed predominantly on farms raising fresh fruits and vegetables, with 35 percent of the total hired under this program in 2022 found in three states that lead in the production of such crops, California, Florida, and Georgia.
Despite its increased use by farmers in recent years, both farm groups and groups advocating for farm workers remain highly critical of how the H2A program is structured. A particular concern for farm groups is its limitation for use only in filling seasonal positions makes it unusable by livestock and dairy producers, who need year-round employees. Farmworker advocates strongly criticize the requirement that such visas are issued to farming operations rather than to the workers themselves, which ties the workers to those locations and creates opportunities for wage theft and other abuses of workers.
There have been several efforts in recent decades to reform the H2-A program, most recently during the last two sessions of Congress, when the House of Representatives passed the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, the bipartisan legislation having been developed with input from farmers, agricultural stakeholders, labor organizations, and farmworker advocates. Key provisions of that bill include:
• Reforming the H-2A program to provide more flexibility for employers, while insuring critical protections for workers.
• Establishing a program for agricultural workers in the United States to choose to earn legal status through continued agricultural employment and contribution to the U.S. agricultural economy.
• Focusing on modifications to make the program more responsive and user-friendly for employers and provides access to the program for industries with year-round labor needs.
Unfortunately, the Senate did not consider the bill either time it passed in the 116th and 117th Congress. It was reintroduced in the House in June 2023.
In fact, Congress has failed to act on a number of immigration reform bills, both broad-based and narrowly tailored like the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, for some time. The last time that a comprehensive immigration bill was enacted in this country was in 1986, during the second term of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Unfortunately, some individual states have taken steps which appear to have made the farm labor situation worse, not better. The state of Florida passed a law in 2022, S.B. 1718, which required all employers in the state with 25 or more workers to use the federal E-Verify system to vet their workers. The new law affected agricultural operations for the first time. That law took effect on July 1, 2023, and since that time, thousands of undocumented immigrants have reportedly left the state, affecting the labor force for both the agriculture and construction sectors. Research published in 2014 found that when certain immigration regulations are enforced vigorously at the county level, farms in those counties experience declines in the number of workers hired, the numbers of vegetable acres harvested, and overall farm income, compared to both non-enforcing and adjacent counties.
