Trump administration says immigration enforcement threatens higher food prices
Story by Lauren Kaori Gurley
The Trump administration said that its immigration crackdown is hurting farmers and risking higher food prices for Americans by cutting off agriculture’s labor supply.
The Labor Department warned in an obscure document filed with the Federal Register last week that “the near total cessation of the inflow of illegal aliens” is threatening “the stability of domestic food production and prices for U.S. consumers.”
“Unless the Department acts immediately to provide a source of stable and lawful labor, this threat will grow,” with increased funding for immigration enforcement from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the Labor Department said in the Federal Register, which is the place where all proposed rules are recorded for the public to view and comment.
Also, contradicting comments made by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins that the U.S. farm workforce will become “100 percent American” as a result of mass deportations, the Labor Department noted that Americans are not willing to step into farm work and lack the skills to fill agricultural jobs that undocumented immigrants are abandoning.
“The Department concludes that qualified and eligible U.S. workers will not make themselves available in sufficient numbers,” the agency said.
The American Prospect first reported on the Labor Department’s comments that immigration policies are endangering the food supply and that American workers are unwilling to take agricultural jobs.
The Labor Department’s comments appear to be the first time that the Trump administration has publicly acknowledged that its hallmark immigration policy — sealing the border and deporting undocumented immigrants — threatens labor shortages and higher food prices. However, economists have been sounding the alarm since Trump campaigned on the issue during last year’s presidential election.
The Labor Department made this case in paperwork documenting a new rule that took effect Oct. 2 that effectively lowers pay for seasonal migrants working in agriculture under the H-2A visa program. The move is aimed at giving farmers easier and legal access to foreign workers “to avoid imminent widespread disruption across the U.S. agricultural sector,” the agency said, and is expected to cut farmers’ labor costs by $24 billion over the next 10 years.
President Donald Trump is “strengthening the farm workforce and improving H-2A and H-2B visa programs — such as through the Department of Labor’s new Office of Immigration Policy, which will help farmers have the legal workforce they need to succeed,” a senior administration official said in an emailed statement, adding that the president “is enforcing the law and prioritizing fixing programs farmers and ranchers rely on to produce the safest and most productive food supply in the world.”
The Labor Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment, citing delays connected to the government shutdown. In the document the department filed, it said farmers are facing “unreasonably high price floors on labor” that have exacerbated labor shortages.
The Trump administration has prioritized deportations this year, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement so far deporting about 150,000 people from the country through increased enforcement at the borders as well as in large cities including D.C., Chicago and Los Angeles.
The new Labor Department policy exposes tensions within Trump’s coalition. The changes to the seasonal guest-worker program offer farmers a reprieve that it says will create a bigger pipeline to migrant workers, while other industries lack such a pathway.
At the same time, the agricultural industry is getting squeezed by Trump’s tariff policy. China, which has traditionally purchased agricultural crops like soybeans, corn and wheat, has stopped buying soybeans and some other crops, hurting U.S. farmers. The New York Times reported recently that the White House is considering a bailout for farmers.
The combination of Trump’s economic policies, including higher tariffs and fewer immigrant workers, is starting to weigh on prices overall, including food. The consumer price index was up 2.9 percent in August, the most recent month for which there is data.
The new rule changes how the Labor Department calculates pay for farm workers on H-2A visas, the federal program for seasonal migrant workers in agriculture, allowing farmers to pay migrant laborers less. It also shifts the burden for paying for worker housing from employer sponsors to migrant workers, with some exceptions.
“This responds to the economic situation that the wages have gotten too high, and it’s contributing to some of the inflation at the grocery store that was big in the last campaign,” said Chris Schulte, a lawyer at Fisher Phillips who represents employers in agriculture.
The H-2A visa program was created by Congress in 1986 for agriculture visas issued for up to one year. The program is heavily used by farmers, with the Department of Labor certifying about 391,000 positions in fiscal year 2024. Farmers in California, Florida, Georgia, Washington and North Carolina are among the top users of the program, according USDA data.
Some immigration opponents in Trump’s coalition decried the Labor Department’s move, saying the policy would lead farmers to invest more heavily in foreign labor than in U.S. workers or automation.
Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for strict immigration restrictions, called the Labor Department’s move to lower pay for seasonal migrant farmworkers “a mistake.”
“I think the administration has been doing good work on immigration, but in this instance what they’re doing is reducing the incentive for farmers to move away from relying on cheap immigrant labor,” Krikorian said.
Meanwhile, labor advocates are pointing out what they say is hypocrisy in the Trump administration’s actions. They say the new rule will drive down wages for all farmworkers, contradicting the stated goals of helping U.S. workers in the labor market. Teresa Romero, president of the United Farm Workers union, called the policy a “catastrophe for American workers in agriculture who growers intend to replace with cheap and exploitable foreign guest workers.”
“The Trump administration previously said there are all these U.S. workers who are going to take these [agriculture] jobs,” said Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “Now they’re saying it’s such a crisis because we’re deporting everybody and there’s not going to be any U.S. workers available, so we’re going to lower wages drastically and make it harder to recruit U.S. workers.”
In July, Rollins, the agriculture secretary, said that Medicaid participants who face new work requirements under Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill should replace undocumented farmworkers.
“The mass deportations continue, but in a strategic way, as we move the workforce toward automation and 100 percent American participation,” Rollins said at the time.
But last week, in its justification for lowering the barriers for employers to access more migrant farmworkers, the Labor Department described “a persistent and systemic lack of sufficient numbers of qualified, eligible and interested American workers to perform the kinds of work that agricultural employers demand,” and called the work “among the most physically demanding and hazardous occupations in the U.S. labor market.”
More than 40 percent of all agricultural workers were undocumented between 2020 and 2022, according to the Agriculture Department, and roughly one-third were U.S.-born.
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