Red Tape Is the Biggest Crop on Some Farms

Bureaucrats made the H-2A guest worker visa program costly and onerous. Trump and Congress can fix it.

By Sierra Dawn McClain. Excerpts:

"The Biden administration added more than 3,000 pages of regulations to the H-2A program"

"The Labor Department recently suspended enforcement of a Biden-era rule that guaranteed labor organizers access to farms and gave union rights to foreign farmworkers. The rule dodged the National Labor Relations Act, which exempted farmworkers from certain labor activities because Congress didn’t want them to go on strike, leaving crops to rot during harvest."

"Under most circumstances, an H-2A worker must return to his home country for two months after 10 months of work in the U.S. This makes it difficult for farms that need year-round work"

"Many dairies hire illegal immigrants instead."

"To request guest workers, a farmer must fill out lengthy online and paper forms—often more than 100 pages per contract—with multiple agencies."

"For a single contract, a farmer often spends thousands of dollars in administrative costs"

"The farmer must fill out a separate application for each team he requests"

"farmers must pay the H-2A worker at what’s called the “adverse effect” wage rate to prevent H-2A workers from being employed at lower wages than U.S. workers. This wage rate varies by state and is generally higher than the minimum wage. It’s $19.82 an hour this year in Washington state. Farmers are also required to provide housing, transportation and benefits, totaling another $5 to $10 an hour."