Photo by Tim Mossholder

The nation’s 2.6 million-plus farm workers – an estimated 1 million of them foreign-born– are a natural target of Donald Trump’s ever-escalating mass deportation campaign. About 45% of the total workforce is estimated to be in the country illegally, and their presence laboring openly in fruit and vegetable farms makes them relatively easy to detect and apprehend. But agribusiness loves its farm workers, and Trump is loath to disrupt their operations and undermine an industry responsible for so much of the nation’s basic food supply. Fewer workers and damaged harvests translates into higher food prices at grocery stores – a potential source of consumer – and voter – unrest, the last thing Trump needs.

So, despite his tough border and enforcement rhetoric, the President, until recently, had largely laid off the ag sector. During his first term, ICE completely ignored “illegals” working in the fields in farm worker-rich states like California and Texas. But now, in what appears to be a significant policy reversal, the White House has just authorized ICE to go after undocumented farm workers in southern California, creating a fresh wave of fear and outrage among worker advocates. Last week, an ICE raid on a cannabis farm in California resulted in the first known fatality from the enforcement agency’s operations, dramatizing their potential stakes should these operations continue to escalate.

In fact, they may well not. Behind the scenes Trump’s White House is preparing legislation that would allow undocumented workers in agriculture to obtain temporary work permits – but only if they first agree to leave the country, and then return as short-term contract laborers – in other words as “guest workers.”  The idea has been floated in the past, on both sides of the aisle; in fact, the US already administers a small guest worker visa program known as H-2A that theoretically brings in about 370,000 foreign born workers (quadrupling the number “certified” as eligible in 2012), mainly Mexican, to work the fields during peak planting and harvest times –  just a small – but rapidly growing – share (about 17%) of the nation’s total farm labor force, of course. A counterpart visa program, known as H-2B, does much the same for non-farm labor, but at somewhat higher levels, in industries like shrimping, construction and landscaping as well as hospitality. But a large-scale guest worker program that might apply far more broadly – much like the controversial postwar Bracero Program (1942-1964), which resulted in widespread labor abuses – has continually been voted down.

For the left, H2-A and H-2B, and guest worker programs generally, smack of slave labor systems – and indeed, they largely started that way generations ago. Farm worker advocates have fought with agribusiness lobbyists for years over the design and implementation of these two relatively small programs.  Agribusiness wants contract workers under their strict control, recruiting them at will, at low wages, with a minimum of support services, and tied to a single farm for the picking season, undermining worker’s ability to organize and resist super-exploitation. Advocates have pushed back, and periodic reforms to the program – actively resisted by growers – have resulted in housing and medical support services and something of a floor on wages– in part, to keep native-born farm labor competitive. As a result, many growers avoid the H-2A and H-2B programs altogether and insist on continuing to rely on illegal labor.

Trump’s proposed new legislation, according to policy insiders, would essentially loosen the current strict visa requirements – both the numbers of visas available, as well as the terms under which workers would labor.  And Trump’s Department of Labor might not have to demonstrate that US workers aren’t available to perform the same jobs, one of H2-A’s key “certification” requirements. That’s likely to find enormous favor with agribusiness and the hotel industry reps who have expressed growing alarm over the ICE farm raids which first got underway in early May, only to be halted last month, after pressure on the White House began escalating. Trump’s Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins as well as his Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer both called for the raids to be suspended, which caught some of the administration’s leading deportation advocates, especially White House special advisor Stephen Miller,  flat-footed. The dispute broke out into the open, and soon the president’s MAGA supporters raised fears that Trump was preparing an “amnesty” program – a mass legalization, including opportunities for illegal farm workers to obtain green cards and eventual citizenship – anathema to the right.

Trump has since publicly denied the idea and his proposed legislation would not allow for it. The bill would grant new H-2A work visas but at a volume that is likely to be unprecedented, and with fewer restrictions. Instead of limiting the program to 300,000 or more, the program might issue work permits to as many as 500,000 or even a million workers annually. Despite its boon to ag farmers, who would welcome a stable – and captive – low-paid labor force free of the threat of ICE raids, the idea is unlikely to sit well with many House conservatives. Besides fearing an eventual amnesty, conservatives see guest worker programs as a potential spur to additional illegal immigration.  Under H-2A, the workers are closely monitored and supposed to return home after their contract expires, with 10% of their wages withheld until they actually do – and the vast majority indeed do, unless rewarded with a fresh contract. But conservatives fear that a much larger guest worker program, with workers laboring all over the country in far-flung rural areas, won’t be closely managed, and many workers will choose to stay beyond their contract terms. It’s a red herring –  based largely on fear – but yet another reason why elements of the right may well balk at Trump’s proposed new plan.

Amazingly, some right-wingers also seem to think that undocumented farm workers – like immigrants generally – are “stealing” jobs that native-born workers could perform. While it’s true there is some real job competition between undocumented workers and native-born (primarily) African-Americans in the service sector in urban areas, the idea that there’s a pool of native-born Americans eager to perform back-breaking and dangerous work planting and picking fruit in the blazing sun is pure folly.  Some in the Trump White House, in support of the president’s declared “100% American hire” policy are even suggesting that dislodged Medicaid recipients should be required to perform farm work to qualify for future benefits. It’s not only absurd – it’s another indication of how cruel and inhumane America’s new champion of working class “populism” actually is when you get down to the actual details of some of his proposed policies

For the left, including farm worker advocates at organizations like Farmworker Justice, Trump’s new plan, if he’s serious, might pose something of a quandary, however.  While such groups are strongly in favor of legalizing the status of undocumented farm workers, the workers themselves would likely welcome any new step to regularize their status, including work permits granting them the right to stay in the US free from the threat of deportation, with or without a green card. Will such groups push Congress not to pass any new Trump guest worker bill, or will they weigh in and try to impose new pro-labor and future guaranteed residency conditions on any new program, likely making its bipartisan passage next to impossible?  In past years, proposals to expand guest worker programs have divided immigration advocates as much as conservatives, with some offering conditional support, but these days progressives will likely oppose any new Trump-sponsored bill outright – simply because it’s Trump’s idea.

For the workers, that could well mean escalating enforcement pressure in the fields, with the potential for more hostile confrontations. But it won’t solve the underlying issue:  Immigrant labor, legal or not, is fundamental to the US farm economy. Workers from an ever widening array of foreign nations – and not just Mexico – are performing jobs that the vast majority of native-born Americans will not undertake under virtually any higher wage and better working conditions.  Replacing foreign illegal labor with domestic labor has been tried – for example, in Georgia’s slaughterhouses – and invariably these substitution schemes fail. The fact is, foreign-born workers laboring under grueling poorly-paid conditions are making it possible for American consumers to enjoy a wide range of produce at reasonably low prices –and to do so consistently during peak harvest seasons, like the current one. Without these foreign workers, unpicked fruits and vegetables will succumb to bugs or simply rot on the vine. Insisting on more safety, stability, dignity and respect for farm labor, regardless of its origin or legal status, is the least this nation can do – for exploited workers and for consumers.

As noxious as it might sound, especially given the Bracero precedent, an expanded guest worker program – this time with real labor rights and wage payment guarantee – would likely be preferable to a reckless and self-defeating mass deportation campaign. But don’t expect agribusiness – with its legendary greed and disregard for the undocumented – or MAGA, with its unremitting xenophobic hostility to all things “foreign” – to accede to a potential stopgap, potentially easing current pressures. Even if farm workers, domestic and foreign, and taxpayers footing the bill for forced deportation, with all its inhuman consequences, would clearly benefit.