Summary

Roughly 30,000 farmworkers in Colorado, including 4,400 migrant workers recruited by Colorado employers through the H-2A visa program, are treated unfairly under federal and state law. While Colorado took an important step when the state’s overtime law was reformed to make farmworkers eligible—acknowledging the racist policy enshrined in the federal Fair Labor Standards Act that excluded farmworkers from overtime pay—the law nevertheless continues to treat farmworkers unfairly with limited overtime protections compared to those provided to other workers in Colorado.

Farmworkers are some of the lowest-paid employees in the entire U.S. labor market and suffer from high rates of occupational injuries and death. As discussed in this commentary, growth in farmworkers’ very low wages has tracked very similarly to wage growth of other low-wage workers in recent decades. Yet farmworkers must work dramatically more hours than workers out side of agriculture before they can receive any premium for working long hours. There is no economic justification for this unequal treatment. Further evidence for this is the fact that according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), labor costs as a share of farm income have not increased in two decades.1

This commentary explains and shows that:

• Overtime pay for farmworkers increases productivity and protects employees from being overworked.
• Farmworkers nationwide earned some of the lowest wage rates in the entire U.S. labor market and only three-fifths of what non-farm workers earn.
• Farmworkers in Colorado earn very low wages—half the average wage earned by all workers in Colorado.
• Wage growth over the past 20 years for farmworkers nationwide has been almost identical to wage growth for other low-wage workers outside of agriculture.
• Real wage growth for farmworkers in Colorado has averaged only 1.5% per year between 2010 and 2024.
• The number of Colorado farms has increased significantly over the past 15 years, suggesting a successful and growing industry in the state.
• California overtime pay standards cover more farmworkers than in Colorado, and outcomes there have shown that providing farmworkers with overtime pay protections on par with those applicable to workers outside of agriculture can be achieved without negatively impacting the farm industry.

If SB 26-121 becomes law, the resulting overtime threshold would further degrade standards for some of the lowest-paid and most vulnerable workers in the U.S. labor market, without improving productivity or benefitting the state’s economy. Farmworkers deserve better: they deserve equal rights and equal pay. While there is some cost to paying workers overtime, keeping the threshold where it is or taking it to 40 hours per week will be partially offset with productivity gains and will benefit farmworkers—most of whom are not employed year-round—by relieving some of the pressure they feel to work as many additional hours as possible, to the detriment of their health, safety, and family life—and possibly to the quality of the nation’s food supply.

Introduction

Farm labor is hard work that sometimes requires very long hours. When it does, workers deserve to be paid fairly for their time. The reason a 40-hour overtime threshold for farmworkers is not already the law should make us wince: When the federal law that governs overtime pay was written in the 1930s, it excluded two job categories that were overwhelmingly held by African Americans—farm laborers and domestic workers. States now have an opportunity to right this historic wrong and level the playing field for all workers

Overtime pay for farmworkers increases productivity and protects employees from being overworked

How do farm owners accommodate paying higher weekly wages when they ask their employees to work overtime? There is of course, some expense associated with overtime pay for farmworkers. But it’s not a dollar-for-dollar cost, so the impact is ultimately modest. The reason is increased productivity.

As we have seen in many other instances, when employers are required to pay higher wages, they make a bigger effort to increase the efficiency of the workplace. We’ve seen this when the minimum wage has been increased. We’ve seen it in unionized businesses. And we’ve seen it already on farms in states like New York and California, when farm owners were required to pay overtime.

What does an increase in productivity on farms look like?

Farm owners may invest in equipment that makes work easier and faster for workers. They may also find ways to organize work that is more effective. Paying overtime provides a real incentive for that. And, overtime pay will reduce the cost of recruitment and training, because it will reduce turnover. That’s something farm operators should value since most claim there are too few farmworkers available to fill open positions.

But importantly, it will also ensure that farmworkers do not work excessive hours just to make enough to survive. Farmworkers in Colorado earn wages that are not much above the state minimum wage, and because of the seasonality of farm work, most are not even able to earn those low wages year-round, reducing their earnings even further. Since farmworkers are not able to earn a living wage year-round, they will feel pressure to work additional hours, to the detriment of their health, safety, and family life—and possibly to the quality of the nation’s food supply.

Colorado’s current overtime threshold is also very different than the one in a state like California. In California, farmworkers earn time-and-a-half overtime after 8 hours in a day or 40 hours in a week.2 They also earn double their regular rate of pay after working 12 hours in a day. Colorado’s overtime threshold has no daily limit, only a weekly one. Even with the additional coverage of overtime for California farmworkers, the number of farm establishments has held steady in the state: going from 16,408 in 2015, the year before the California overtime law was passed, to 16,416 in 2024—suggesting that farms have not been negatively impacted and are still able to operate successfully in the nation’s largest agricultural state.3 

Farmworkers earned some of the lowest wage rates in the entire U.S. labor market in 2024 and only three-fifths of what non-farm workers earn

It is important to discuss and contextualize the wages of the 2.2 million farmworkers in the United States,4 roughly 350,000 of whom are crop farmworkers employed through the H-2A visa program.5 DOL’s National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) shows that two-thirds of non-H-2A crop farmworkers are foreign-born, and that one-third are U.S.-born citizens.6

The agricultural industry has made numerous claims about skyrocketing and unsustainable wage growth for farmworkers, and the industry has lobbied at the state and federal level, pushing for federal actions by the executive branch and legislation to artificially restrain wage growth in the industry. As this letter discusses, many of the major claims made by the industry are not supported by the available evidence.

The most reliable data on farmworker earnings comes from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), which conducts the Farm Labor Survey (FLS), the results of which were, until recently, published twice a year in USDA’s Farm Labor report series, with data reported for reference weeks in January, April, July, and October.7 On August 28, 2025, USDA announced that it would discontinue its data collection program and reports, including the FLS,8 thus making 2024 the final full year for which FLS data are available. Before October 2025, FLS data was used by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) to set the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR) for most migrant farmworkers hired in the H-2A program. DOL based the AEWR on the average hourly earnings of nonsupervisory field and livestock workers, as reported by farm operators and by region in the FLS. DOL used the FLS data to set H-2A wages so they reflect current real-world trends in the farm labor market.

The FLS data up to 2024 data show that while there have been some documented real increases over the past three decades, they have not been unreasonably large increases, and they have occurred in a broader context where the wages of farmworkers are extremely low by any measure, even when compared with the hourly earnings of comparable non-farm workers, as well as when compared with average wages for all workers in the United States, and workers with the lowest levels of education (see Figure A).

Figure A

In 2024, the average earnings of all nonsupervisory farmworkers (i.e., combined field and livestock workers in the FLS) was $18.12 per hour. The average farmworker hourly wage in 2024 was just half (52%) of the average hourly wage for all workers in the United States in 2024, which was $34.27 per hour.9 The average farmworker hourly wage in Colorado was less than the national farmworker average, at just $17.84 per hour.

The average hourly wage for production and nonsupervisory non-farm workers—the most appropriate cohort of nonagricultural workers to compare with farmworkers—was $27.56, according to the Current Employment Statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In other words, farmworkers earning the national average earned just under 60% of what production and nonsupervisory workers outside of agriculture earned, or three-fifths. In 2024, the farmworker wage gap remained substantial and virtually unchanged from the previous three years. USDA’s ERS shows that between 1990 and 2023, the gap slowly narrowed from 50% to 60% and has described the wage gap between farmworker and nonfarm worker wages as “still substantial, but it is slowly shrinking.”10 

Farmworkers have very low levels of educational attainment and their wages are comparable to workers in other industries with similar educational attainment. According to the NAWS, 27% completed the 10th, 11th, or 12th grade, and only 16% completed some education beyond high school.11 Farmworkers earn the same or less than the two groups of non-farm workers with the lowest levels of education in the United States: Farmworkers earned 10 cents an hour more than the average wage earned by workers without a high school diploma ($18.02), but earned $5.61 less per hour than the average wage earned by workers with only a high school diploma ($23.73). Farmworkers in Colorado earned less than workers without a high school diploma ($17.84 vs $18.02).

Farmworkers in Colorado earn very low wages—half the average wage earned by all workers in Colorado

There are roughly 30,000 farmworkers in Colorado, including 4,400 migrant workers recruited by Colorado employers through the H-2A visa program. As noted above, in 2024, at the state level in Colorado, USDA’s FLS shows that the average hourly wage for farmworkers in Colorado (the combined average wage for field and livestock workers) was $17.84. Figure A also shows that the average wage for all workers in Colorado in 2024 was $33.63, according to the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.12 In other words, farmworkers just earned 53%, roughly half, of the average wage that all Colorado workers earned.13 And as noted above, most farmworkers are not employed year-round. Despite these extremely low wages, farmworkers in Colorado work in some of the most difficult and dangerous conditions while providing an essential function for the economy and state. Thus they deserve more protections under the overtime law, not fewer.

Industry claims about the increases in farmworker wages ignore the fact that wage growth over the past 20 years has been almost identical to wage growth for other low wage workers

The value and the rate of increase of the Adverse Effect Wage Rage (AEWR) for H-2A farmworkers has become a hot-button issue and many claims about its impact have been made over the years by representatives of industry. These are relevant to examine because the AEWR wages up until 2025 represented the wages that farm operators reported they were paying to their farmworkers in response to the USDA’s Farm Labor Survey. Thus, they represent the best data available on average farm wages at the national and regional level.

Many of the claims about wage growth for farmworkers made by industry advocates and even the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) about year-to-year increases often do not adjust for inflation, which overstates the actual increase in terms of its dollar value. This is a basic mistake that misleads—and it misleads particularly during times of relatively rapid inflation, like the post-pandemic period. DOL echoes these misleading claims from industry advocates and makes their own false claim in the preamble to the October 2025 AEWR Interim Final Rule, making the year-over-year increases in farmworker wages seem greater than they truly are. DOL notes that the national average AEWR—i.e., the average combined field and livestock worker wage reported by farm operators nationwide—has more than doubled in nominal terms over 20 years from $8.56 in 2005 to $17.74 in 2025.14 But DOL’s own CPI Inflation Calculator adjusts the value of $8.56 in September 2005 to $13.99 in September 2025, resulting in a real increase of just over one-quarter over two decades, at 26.8%, which over that period averages out to just 1.2% per year.

If we examine the same period for other low-wage workers in nominal terms, we also see that wage growth for farmworkers as represented by the AEWR, is in line with—nearly identical to—nominal wage growth for other low wage workers in the United States. Figure B below shows annualized wage growth for workers paid at the 20^th percentile wage, as well as the median wage for workers with less than a high school education—both of which are good measures for typical low-wage workers. Both saw annual nominal wage growth that was at 3.5% between 2005-2025, the period that DOL identifies. Farmworkers earning the national average farmworker wage—over that same period saw annualized wage growth of 3.7%, nearly identical to other typical low-wage workers. Thus, DOL’s main example in its H-2A wage regulation of runaway wage growth for farmworkers does not hold water.

Figure B

Real wage growth for farmworkers in Colorado has averaged only 1.5% per year between 2010 and 2024

While Figure B looked at nominal wage growth over the past 20 years, EPI has previously calculated the total real wage growth for farmworkers (i.e., after adjusting for inflation) in every state between 2010 and 2024.15 We found that in Colorado, the average farmworker wage in 2010 was $14.51 (adjusted to 2024 dollars), growing to $17.84 fifteen years later in 2024. This amounts to a total increase of $3.33 over 15 years (in 2024 dollars), or 22.9%. Farmworkers in Colorado averaged a real wage increase of 1.5% per year over the 15-year period.

The number of Colorado farms has increased significantly over the past 15 years, suggesting a successful agricultural industry in the state

One common argument from farm operators is that if the wages of farmworkers are too high, those high wages will put them out of business. But according to the BLS’s Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW), the number of agricultural establishments in Colorado has increased significantly over the past 15 years. QCEW data show that the number of agricultural establishments in Colorado averaged 1,412 between 2010 and 2012. By 2024, the number of agricultural establishments had increased to 1,812, an increase of 28.3%. The 2022-2024 average number of agricultural establishments was 1,856.16

Agribusiness representatives may claim that agricultural establishments in Colorado will be forced to close or will decide to move their operations to other U.S. states because of higher labor costs associated with farmworkers being entitled to overtime pay, but the reality is that the number of agricultural establishments has been increasing steadily, even as farmworker wages have risen modestly, suggesting that both farm owners and farmworkers can mutually benefit from a growing industry.

Conclusion: The Colorado legislature should not further degrade standards on farms by expanding the 56-hour overtime threshold—and should instead provide farmworkers with equal rights in the workplace by providing them overtime after 40 hours

The annual average real wage growth of 1.5% per year over 15 years represents moderate wage growth for farmworkers and suggests a relatively tight labor market for farmworkers. However, it represents little improvement in job quality for workers that have been exempted from key labor laws and wage and hour standards, who frequently toil for long hours in difficult conditions without any pay premium, and who consequently still earn only 50% to 60% of the wage earned by comparable nonsupervisory workers outside of agriculture (see Figure A and discussion above). It would take many more years of comparatively faster wage growth for farmworkers to begin to approach even three-fourths of what nonsupervisory workers earn outside of agriculture.

Further degrading standards for some of the lowest-paid and most vulnerable workers in the U.S. labor market will not improve productivity or benefit the state’s economy; it will do the opposite, taking money out the pockets of workers who live paycheck to paycheck and spend those earnings on necessary goods and services. All while making a minimal impact on the overall share of farm income that farm operators spend on workers’ wages.

Instead of passing SB 26-121, the state legislature should set a reasonable minimum standard for the wages paid to farmworkers, and that standard should be no different than the standard set for most other workers in Colorado, which is a 40-hour overtime threshold.

Endnotes 

1. Economic Research Service, “Labor Cost Share of Total Gross Revenues,” in “Farm Labor,” U.S. Department of Agriculture, Updated November 18, 2025.

2. See Department of Industrial Relations, “Overtime for Agricultural Workers,” State of California, last updated October 2023.

3. See Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Series Id: ENU5100020511, Series Title: Number of Establishments in Private NAICS 11 Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting, for all establishment sizes in California – Statewide; Owner: Private, for 2010-24.

4. As counted by the latest Census of Agriculture from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2022.

5. See Daniel Costa and Ben Zipperer, “Trump’s new H-2A wage rule will radically cut the wages of all farmworkers: New estimates show farmworkers stand to lose $4.4 to $5.4 billion annually under DOL’s updated Adverse Effect Wage Rate,” Working Economics blog (Economic Policy Institute), November 26, 2025.

6. Wenson Fung, Kimberly Prado, Amanda Gold, Andrew Padovani, Daniel Carroll, and Emily Finchum-Mason, Findings from the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) 2021–2022: A Demographic and Employment Profile of United States Crop Workers, Research Report no. 17, JBS International for the Employment and Training Administration, U.S. Department of Labor. September 2023.

7. See National Agricultural Statistics Service, “Agricultural (Farm) Labor,” for more background and to access Farm Labor Reports, U.S. Department of Agriculture.

8. Federal Policy Watch, “USDA ends the Agricultural (Farm) Labor Survey, the U.S.’s only survey of agricultural employers,” Economic Policy Institute, September 3, 2025.

9. Economic Policy Institute, State of Working America Data Library, “Hourly wage, average – Average real hourly wage (2024$),” 2025.

10. Economic Research Service, “Wages of Hired Farmworkers” in “Farm Labor,” U.S. Department of Agriculture, Updated November 18, 2025.

11. Wenson Fung, Kimberly Prado, Amanda Gold, Andrew Padovani, Daniel Carroll, and Emily Finchum-Mason, Findings from the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) 2021–2022: A Demographic and Employment Profile of United States Crop Workers, Research Report no. 17, JBS International for the Employment and Training Administration, U.S. Department of Labor. September 2023.

12. https://data.bls.gov/oes/#/area/0800000

13. A note about the data: The wage cited is for Colorado farmworkers in USDA’s FLS represents the wage reported for the Mountain II region, which surveys farm operators in Colorado, Nevada, Utah. USDA’s FLS conducts wage surveys by multistate region, except for California which USDA surveys as its own individual region.

14. Employment and Training Administration, Adverse Effect Wage Rate Methodology for the Temporary Employment of H-2A Nonimmigrants in Non-Range Occupations in the United States, U.S. Department of Labor, Interim Final Rule, 90 Fed. Reg. 47914, at 47923 (October 2, 2025).

15. See Table 1 in Daniel Costa, EPI comment on DOL’s 2025 Interim Final Rule modifying the AEWR methodology for H-2A farmworkers, Economic Policy Institute, December 1, 2025.

16. See Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Series Id: ENU5100020511, Series Title: Number of Establishments in Private NAICS 11 Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting, for all establishment sizes in Colorado – Statewide; Owner: Private, for 2010-24.

For well over a decade now—time and time and time and time again—Congress has been making policy changes to temporary work visa programs not through the normal process of debating and passing legislation, but through a backdoor process. This involves amendments to annual appropriations legislation (known as “riders”) that fund the U.S. government. Riders that make policy changes are much more likely to pass without much public notice, debate, or pushback relative to dedicated legislation, since they are smaller parts of larger, must-pass legislation to fund the whole U.S. government. The significant changes proposed or passed in riders over the past decade have all pushed temporary work visa programs in the same direction: expanding and deregulating the H-2A and H-2B visa programs, which benefits employers at the expense of U.S. workers and hundreds of thousands of migrant workers who will continue to see reduced wages and poorer working conditions. It’s already clear that low-wage work visa programs won’t be improved during the Trump administration; instead, they’ll be made much worse.

This fiscal year, there is a particular urgency around the riders to expand and deregulate the H-2A and H-2B visa programs, in light of the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort that is arresting and deporting workers at a breakneck pace, as well as canceling temporary immigration protections that provided work authorization to millions. The Trump administration got the ball rolling on this effort with a new proposed H-2A wage regulation issued by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) on October 2, 2025. This proposed regulation contains a stunning admission: The administration’s mass deportation effort is likely to raise food prices. DOL’s solution to this problem of the administration’s own creation is an irrational and anti-worker solution. Instead of pushing the administration from within to stop their campaign of mass deportation, DOL proposes to lower farmworker wages by $24 billion over the next 10 years.

Having seen this proposed rule, employers who are heavily reliant on migrant laborers—especially those in the hospitality, construction, and agricultural industries—can now be confident they have a friendly administration willing to dismantle labor standards and are lobbying furiously for more work visas that allow them to employ a vulnerable workforce. Employers are making the case that H-2 visas are “a workforce issue, not immigration,” as well as an essential service that must continue to function even during the recent government shutdown. A number of lawmakers and the Trump administration seem to agree.

The latest legislative vehicle that has a chance at furthering these goals is a rider that the Homeland Security subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee proposed and passed. It was originally known as Amendment #1 but was later dubbed the Bipartisan Visa En Bloc amendment. As Politico Pro reported, “House appropriators from both parties came together…to back big changes to visa policies that would boost the number of seasonal workers who can come to the United States.” The rider was cosponsored by three Republicans and one Democrat (but the Democrat was Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), the recent recipient of a pardon from Trump for federal bribery charges). However, it’s worth noting that because rider passed by a voice vote, there is no on-the-record vote tally showing who voted for it.

The rider still has a long way to go before becoming law and will also depend on whether an omnibus government spending bill is ultimately passed for fiscal year 2026. As of the time of publication, the Senate has not yet released their version of a Homeland Security appropriations bill. To become law, the Senate would also have to adopt the same rider provision for it to become part of the broader omnibus appropriations legislation. Nevertheless, the rider is a statement of intent from legislators who are willing to go to bat for employers seeking new exploitable and underpaid migrant workers to replace their long-term immigrant workers who have been deported or lost status.

Below is a summary of the four major changes that the Bipartisan Visa En Bloc rider amendment would make to the H-2A and H-2B visa programs. Only the first major change is discussed in this explainer, but a follow-up to this blog post will discuss the other three changes. Under the rider:

• Employers would be permitted to hire H-2A farmworkers to fill year-round jobs.
• The H-2B visa program would be expanded by at least 100,000 workers relative to its size in 2024.
• H-2B workers employed at carnivals, traveling fairs, and circuses would be moved to the P visa program, a program that has no wage rules or worker protections and over which DOL has no formal oversight role.
• DHS would not be permitted to spend funds to implement the January 2024 regulation that incrementally improves rights and protections for H-2A and H-2B workers. This regulation allows them to be eligible for green cards through existing pathways and helps them more easily change employers, reducing the indentured nature of the visa programs, and requires additional scrutiny on employer applications if they’ve committed certain violations.

The H-2A program has expanded rapidly and is rife with abuse

Employers use the H-2A visa program to fill seasonal and temporary jobs in agriculture, after employers go through a (mostly pro forma) process to prove that they could not find an available U.S. worker to hire. There is no annual limit on the number of H-2A workers that can be hired, and H-2A has in recent years been the fastest-growing U.S. work visa program, tripling over the past decade. Figure A shows the three available data sets on H-2A job certifications, petitions, and visas, as well as an estimate of the total number of H-2A workers between 2015 and 2024, with 352,682 H-2A workers estimated to have been employed in the United States last year. The vast majority of H-2A workers are employed on crop farms, picking fruits and vegetables, and the average duration of an H-2A job is roughly six months.

Figure A

There have been countless exposés from journalists and advocates that reveal how H-2A farmworkers are indentured to their employers, frequently robbed, exploited, victimized, and trafficked, and how the main source of wage and hour violations on farms comes from employers breaking H-2A rules.

The rider adopted in the House would allow H-2A workers to be employed in year-round jobs—which is currently prohibited—expanding the scope of the program and allowing H-2A workers to fill jobs on dairy, livestock, and poultry and egg farms, as well as in nurseries and greenhouses and other nonseasonal agricultural occupations. This would be a major change to H-2A, and it has long been a demand of agribusiness.

Making H-2A year-round raises three key questions:

• How many permanent, year-round jobs might be impacted?
• How will farmworker wages be impacted?
• How much will the H-2A program expand?

There are 410,000 year-round jobs in agriculture

For an answer to the first question, see Table 1, which lists four of the major agricultural industries employing farmworkers year-round, the largest of which are greenhouse and dairy jobs. Together they total nearly 410,000 full-time equivalent jobs. The industries listed do not include the many year-round (or nearly year-round) jobs that can be found on crop farms, including equipment operators and supervisors. In total, it’s possible that up to one-third of the total 1.6 million full-time equivalent jobs in agriculture could be year-round.

Table 1

DOL’s new Adverse Effect Wage Rate will result in a pay cut for H-2A workers and U.S. workers that will line the pockets of employers by billions

Next, let’s consider what would happen to the wages of farmworkers in year-round occupations if the H-2A visa program were expanded to include them.

The wages of nearly all H-2A farmworkers are set by the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR), unless the federal, state, or local hourly minimum wages are higher, or if there is an applicable local prevailing wage or collective bargaining agreement in place. The purpose of the AEWR is to ensure that H-2A workers are paid a wage that is consistent with U.S. wage standards and prevent adverse impacts of H-2A employment on the wages of farmworkers in the United States.

On October 2, 2025, DOL issued an interim final rule laying out a new AEWR methodology. A recent EPI post describes in detail how the new Trump AEWR will cut wage rates dramatically by using an inferior data set for agriculture and creating two artificial “skill levels,” which set H-2A wages at the 17th percentile of wages surveyed for farm occupations (skill level 1) and at the 50th percentile, which is the median of wages surveyed (skill level 2). EPI has also submitted a detailed comment to DOL critiquing the new Trump AEWR methodology. 

In the new AEWR, the Trump DOL also removes the previous H-2A program requirement that employers pay for 100% of housing costs for H-2A workers. In its stead, the new AEWR deducts a set amount out of every hour of an H-2A worker’s pay, to compensate the employer for H-2A housing costs. This shifts housing costs to H-2A workers who will have the added burden of paying for housing costs out of the already-low wages they earn. The housing deduction is subtracted from the AEWR—lowering a low wage even further—so low that in many states, the state minimum wage will be higher and become the de facto AEWR.

In total, DOL estimates that over $1.7 billion will be transferred from H-2A workers’ pockets back to farm employers under the new wage rule in 2026, amounting to $24 billion over the next 10 years as the program grows to over 500,000 jobs. EPI’s own estimates are that H-2A workers will see a wage cut of between $1.7 billion and $2.1 billion in 2026, depending on how state minimum wage laws are enforced. Reducing the AEWR for H-2A workers will also lower wages for U.S. farmworkers—one-third of whom are U.S.-born citizens, according to the latest DOL survey. A fall in the H-2A wage will increase demand for H-2A workers, since employers can save significantly on labor costs if they hire them. As a result, it will become relatively more expensive to hire non-H-2A U.S. farmworkers. Employers will therefore reduce demand for U.S. farmworkers, putting downward pressure on their wages, with U.S. farmworkers seeing wage reduction of $2.7 to $3.3 billion in annual pay.

This would represent a shocking upward redistribution of income away from some of the country’s most underpaid and essential workers for the food system.

Under the new AEWR, H-2A farmworkers in year-round jobs would be paid tens of thousands of dollars less annually compared with what U.S. farmworkers earn now

The wage cuts from the AEWR described above currently apply only to H-2A farmworkers, who can only be employed in seasonal jobs. However, if the rider to make H-2A year-round goes into effect, farmworkers in year-round jobs will see the biggest pay cuts.

Table 2 lists a sample of some of the main year-round agricultural industries in major agricultural states, along with average annual employment, which together accounts for about 15% of the total year-round full-time equivalent jobs in agriculture. Table 2 shows how much farmworkers earned annually, on average in 2024 in those industries and states, and compares the annual earnings of farmworkers in 2024 with what H-2A workers would earn in 2026 if they had worked in the same jobs and had been paid the corresponding 2026 AEWR at skill level 1 for the entire year (40 hours per week for 52 weeks), minus the annualized amount that will be deducted from hourly wages for housing according to the 2026 AEWR.1

The final column in Table 2 shows a few examples that illustrate the difference between what year-round U.S. farmworkers in the selected industries earned in 2024 and what H-2A workers at skill level 1 would earn if they were paid the annualized AEWR in 2026. Table 2 shows that the reduction in wages for H-2A farmworkers in year-round jobs could range from an annual pay cut of nearly $19,000 for farmworkers on dairy farms in Wisconsin to a pay cut of over $44,000 for farmworkers on poultry and egg farms in Texas.

Outcomes such as these—in which farmworkers paid the 2026 AEWR would earn tens of thousands of dollars less than what U.S. farmworkers earned in major year-round jobs in 2024—are egregious and in violation of the spirit and letter of the AEWR and the H-2A statute, but will be the norm and allowed if the year-round H-2A provision in the rider becomes law. This would hurt some of the most vulnerable and lowest-paid workers in the U.S. labor market and create an almost unstoppable incentive for employers to replace their current farmworkers who now fill year-round jobs with H-2A workers who can’t easily switch employers or effectively complain when their wages are stolen and when they’re forced to work in unsafe conditions.

Table 2

The year-round H-2A rider with the new AEWR rule could triple the current size of the H-2A program and cause wages to drop sharply for farmworkers

The ultimate result of the new H-2A wage rule combined with making the H-2A program year-round would be a likely tripling of the size of the H-2A program to about 900,000 workers, which includes the complete decimation of job quality for the 410,000 jobs in agriculture that can provide stable year-round employment and sometimes a living wage for U.S. farmworkers.

How would this occur? The Trump DOL’s new wage rule estimates that the lower pay for farmworkers it institutes will encourage farms to rapidly increase hiring through the H-2A program, estimating that 515,000 H-2A workers will be employed in 2034. If those low wages remain in effect and the year-round H-2A rider becomes law and is renewed yearly (as the H-2B riders have been every year), employers are likely to ramp up hiring for year-round jobs until nearly all are filled by H-2A workers who can be paid extremely low wages and, because of their precarious immigration status, have little bargaining power or the ability to complain in the face of employer lawbreaking.

For context, the 410,000 H-2A workers in year-round jobs plus the estimated 257,500 year-round equivalent jobs done by H-2A workers in seasonal jobs (i.e., 515,000 H-2A workers employed in 2034 for six months out of the year), would equal 667,500 full-time equivalent jobs in agriculture, or roughly 42% of all annual average employment in agriculture.

Instead of ballooning the H-2A program, policymakers should create a pathway to citizenship for farmworkers to ensure their rights on the job

Policymakers and the public must reject the harmful and unjustified proposals coming from Trump and Congress to pay less to farmworkers who already live on the margins of society, and to keep more of them indentured through the H-2A program. This rider is another example that reveals the truth about the Trump administration’s immigration agenda: They have no real interest in protecting jobs or pay for American or “native-born” workers, only in giving employers what they demand.

Using H-2A, a problematic temporary work visa program—in which workers are virtually indentured to their employers and that accounts for most of the wage and hour violations that take place on farms—to fill permanent, year-round jobs should give pause to all members of Congress. It makes no sense, unless the goal is to keep the workers employed in those jobs from having equal rights and fair pay. If migrant workers are filling true labor shortages in permanent, year-round jobs, then those workers should always get lawful permanent residence (i.e., green cards) that puts them on a path to citizenship.

If members of Congress want a reliable, healthy, and stable farm labor force that can continue to produce food domestically for Americans, they should pass legislation that legalizes undocumented farmworkers and reforms the H-2A program so that all migrant farmworkers have equal rights, fair wages, and a quick path to permanent residence and citizenship. That’s the only way to ensure that the workers who sustain the food supply chain will be treated with the dignity and respect they deserve and that honors their contributions to the U.S. economy.

1. The amounts have not been adjusted for inflation. The 2026 AEWR provides two “skill levels” for farmworkers—which are set at specific percentiles along the distribution of OEWS wages surveyed. Skill level 1 is the 17th percentile while skill level 2 is the median of wages surveyed, which is also the 50th percentile. For this calculation, I am only calculating the wage differentials for H-2A workers in year-round jobs who are classified by employers at skill level 1, which DOL estimates will account for 92% of all H-2A workers.

TO: Brian Pasternak, Administrator, Office of Foreign Labor Certification

Employment and Training Administration
Department of Labor
200 Constitution Avenue NW
Room N-5311
Washington, DC 20210

RE: Adverse Effect Wage Rate Methodology for the Temporary Employment of H-2A Nonimmigrants in Non-Range Occupations in the United States, Interim Final Rule, request for comments, Employment and Training Administration, 20 CFR Part 655, DOL Docket No. ETA-2025-0008, RIN 1205-AC24 (October 2, 2025)

Dear Administrator Pasternak:

This document in submitted in response to the Department of Labor’s (DOL) Employment and Training Administration (ETA) request for public comment on its Interim Final Rule (IFR) entitled “Adverse Effect Wage Rate Methodology for the Temporary Employment of H-2A Nonimmigrants in Non-Range Occupations in the United States,” which proposes to amend the methodology for setting the Adverse Effect Wages Rate (AEWR) for the H-2A temporary agricultural worker visa program.

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) strongly opposes the IFR and urges DOL to rescind the IFR and revert back to the previous AEWR methodology, or make amendments to the methodology as described herein. We believe the updated AEWR methodology and the housing deduction in the IFR will negatively impact both U.S. farmworkers and migrant farmworkers recruited through the H-2A program, and worsen conditions in the farm labor market.

EPI fully supports and endorses the written comments and recommendations submitted by Farmworker Justice, on behalf of a multitude of organizations that represent migrant and seasonal farmworkers, including H-2A workers. EPI is a signatory listed on the comments submitted by Farmworker Justice and incorporates those comments and recommendations by reference into this comment. The comments submitted herein should be considered an addendum to those comments, which provide additional analysis to support the opposition of DOL’s updated AEWR methodology.

EPI also supports and endorses the written comments and recommendations submitted by the Migration that Works coalition, which EPI is a founding member of.

About EPI

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank established in 1986 to include the needs of low- and middle-income workers in economic policy discussions. EPI conducts research and analysis on the economic status of working America, proposes policies that protect and improve economic conditions and raise labor standards for low- and middle-income workers—regardless of immigration status—and assesses policies with respect to how well they further those goals.

EPI has researched, written, and commented extensively on the U.S. system for labor migration, including in particular the H-2A and H-2B programs and other temporary work visa programs, as well as on farm labor issues, including labor standards enforcement in agriculture. EPI has also provided expert testimony about work visa programs and farm labor to both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, as well as state legislatures.

Given the numerous reports from advocates, news investigations, and even government audits over the years that have revealed how deeply flawed the H-2A program is when it comes to protecting the rights of both migrant farmworkers and U.S. farmworkers, EPI is concerned that DOL would take such an audacious action to lower wages for H-2A farmworkers and U.S. farmworkers, who are already some of the lowest-paid workers in the entire U.S. economy.

Farmworkers earned some of the lowest wage rates in the entire U.S. labor market in 2024

Before discussing the details of DOL’s new AEWR methodology in the IFR, it is important to discuss and contextualize the wages of the 2.2 million farmworkers in the United States—something DOL fails to adequately do.1 Roughly 350,000 of them are crop farmworkers employed through the H-2A visa program.2 DOL’s National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) shows that two-thirds of non-H-2A crop farmworkers are foreign-born, and that one-third are U.S.-born citizens, all of whom have a significant stake in the IFR.3

The agricultural industry has made numerous claims about skyrocketing and unsustainable wage growth for farmworkers, some of which DOL echoes in the IFR, and the industry has lobbied for federal actions by the executive branch and Congress to artificially restrain wage growth in the industry. As this comment will discuss, most of these claims are not supported by the available evidence.

The most reliable data on farmworker earnings comes from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), which conducts the Farm Labor Survey (FLS), the results of which were, until recently, published twice a year in USDA’s Farm Labor report series, with data reported for reference weeks in January, April, July, and October.4 On August 28, 2025, USDA announced that it would discontinue its data collection program and reports, including the FLS,5 thus making 2024 the final full year for which FLS data are available. Before October 2025, FLS data was used by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) to set the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR) for most migrant farmworkers hired in the H-2A program. DOL based the AEWR on the average hourly earnings of nonsupervisory field and livestock workers, as reported by farm operators and by region. DOL used the FLS data to set H-2A wages so they reflect current real-world trends in the farm labor market.

The FLS data up to 2024 data show that while there have been some documented real increases over the past three decades, they have not been unreasonably large increases, and they have occurred in a broader context where the wages of farmworkers are extremely low by any measure, even when compared with the hourly earnings of comparable non-farm workers, as well as when compared with average wages for all workers in the United States, and workers with the lowest levels of education (see Figure A).

Figure A

In 2024, the average earnings of all nonsupervisory farmworkers (i.e., combined field and livestock workers in the FLS) was $18.12 per hour. The average farmworker hourly wage in 2024 was just half (52%) of the average hourly wage for all workers in the United States in 2024, which was $34.27 per hour.6

The average hourly wage for production and nonsupervisory non-farm workers—the most appropriate cohort of nonagricultural workers to compare with farmworkers—was $27.56, according to the Current Employment Statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In other words, farmworkers earned just under 60% of what production and nonsupervisory workers outside of agriculture earned, or three-fifths. In 2024, the farmworker wage gap remained substantial and virtually unchanged from the previous three years. USDA’s ERS shows that between 1990 and 2023, the gap slowly narrowed from 50% to 60% and has described the wage gap between farmworker and nonfarm worker wages as “still substantial, but it is slowly shrinking.”7 

Farmworkers have very low levels of educational attainment and their wages are comparable to workers in other industries with similar educational attainment. According to the NAWS, 27% completed the 10th, 11th, or 12th grade, and only 16% completed some education beyond high school.8 Farmworkers earn the same or less than the two groups of nonfarm workers with the lowest levels of education in the United States: Nonsupervisory farmworkers earned 10 cents an hour more than the average wage earned by workers without a high school diploma ($18.02), but earned $5.61 less per hour than the average wage earned by workers with only a high school diploma ($23.73).

The AEWR paid to H-2A workers varies by state. In 2024, it ranged from $14.53 to $19.75 per hour. That means that for many H-2A workers, including in some of the biggest states for H-2A employment, the wage they earned was even lower than the national average wage for all nonsupervisory farmworkers in 2024—meaning the gap between what many H-2A farmworkers and non-farm workers earn is even wider.

The AEWR was higher than the national average farmworker wage of $18.12 in 14 states, but in the other 35 states for which DOL published an AEWR, it was lower than the national average. In Florida and Georgia—the top two states for H-2A employment, and where nearly a quarter of all H-2A jobs were located in 2024, workers were paid much less than the national average wage. The AEWR in Florida was $14.77 per hour, $3.35 less than the national average farmworker wage. And Georgia was tied with South Carolina for the second-lowest overall state AEWR, at $14.68 per hour, which was $3.44 less than the national average wage.

To reiterate, the nearly one-quarter of all H-2A farmworkers employed in Florida and Georgia in 2024 were paid at least $3.35 less per hour than the national average wage for farmworkers. And H-2A farmworkers in most other states were also paid less than the national average wage for farmworkers. None of the H-2A wages rates, not even those with the highest AEWRs, are exorbitant salaries that can be cut without harming farmworkers and their livelihoods, contrary to what some agribusiness representatives want the public and lawmakers to believe.

DOL’s claim about the increase in the AEWR to justify cutting wages ignores the fact that AEWR wage growth over the past 20 years has been almost identical to wage growth for other low wage workers

The value and the rate of increase of the AEWR has become a hot-button issue and many claims about its impact have been made over the years by representatives of industry. For example, the American Farm Bureau has called the previous AEWR methodology “a blow to growers” and AmericanHort said the AEWRs were “steep.”9

Many of the claims by industry advocates and even DOL about year-to-year AEWR increases often do not adjust for inflation, which overstates the actual increase in terms of its dollar value. This is a basic mistake that misleads—and it misleads particularly during times of relatively rapid inflation, like the post-pandemic period. DOL echoes these misleading claims from industry advocates and makes their own in the preamble to the October 2025 IFR, making the year-over-year increases in the AEWR seem greater than they truly are. DOL notes that the national average AEWR has more than doubled in nominal terms over 20 years from $8.56 in 2005 to $17.74 in 2025.10 But DOL’s own CPI Inflation Calculator adjusts the value of $8.56 in September 2005 to $13.99 in September 2025, resulting in a real increase of just over one quarter over two decades, at 26.8%, which over that period averages out to just 1.2% per year.

If we examine the same period for other low-wage workers in nominal terms, we also see that wage growth for farmworkers paid the AEWR is in line with—nearly identical to—nominal wage growth for other low wage workers in the United States. Figure B shows annualized wage growth for workers paid at the 20^th percentile wage, as well as the median wage for workers with less than a high school education—both of which are good measures for typical low-wage workers. Both saw annual nominal wage growth that was at 3.5% between 2005-2025, the period that DOL identifies. Farmworkers earning the AEWR over that same period saw annualized wage growth of 3.7%, nearly identical to other typical low-wage workers. Thus, DOL’s main example of runaway wage growth for farmworkers does not hold water.

Figure B

The 1% to 2% real annual wage growth of the AEWR over the past 15 years is solid but not unsustainable, and still making up for lost ground

This section examines the real value of the AEWR over the past 15 years. We do not suggest that we know exactly what the appropriate AEWR for each state should be or suggest that changes in the AEWR have no impact on farmers, or make any other bold claims about the AEWR. This section is simply an evidence-based look at the value of the AEWR over time, as a response to claims by industry and DOL that the AEWR has risen quickly and too sharply.

As noted in the previous section, alarmist claims about wage growth for the AEWR are numerous. See this comment from Craig Regelbrugge from AmericanHort, who noted that “growers in Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania will take the biggest hit, with a 9.6% increase” in the AEWR from 2021 to 2022, with California’s increasing “more than 8%.”11 Regelbrugge calculates these increases in nominal terms—but what do the increases look like after one adjusts for inflation?

While the percentage increase from 2021 to 2022 was in fact the largest in the states of Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, after adjusting for inflation, the increase was just 2.3% in those states. A year-over-year real hourly average wage increase of 2.3% is not even large enough to be consistent with the wage gains that could be reasonably expected for an occupation where employers have argued that severe labor shortage exist. If there are in fact labor shortages, it is reasonable to expect wages to rise; that’s simply Economics 101. And a shortage means by definition that the wage increase must be significantly more rapid than would be sustainable and expected in the long-run. Over the pandemic business cycle (between 2019 and 2024) economy-wide productivity growth has averaged 2.1% per year—and this should be the benchmark for real wage growth that is sustainable in the long-run. A raise of 2.3% for a given sector is hardly one that unambiguously signals a severe labor shortage, especially considering how low H-2A wages are relative to other occupations, and how underpaid farmworkers have been for decades.

It would take literally decades of AEWR increases exceeding productivity growth by this amount before H-2A workers had made up the amount these wages had lagged economy-wide average wage growth in recent decades. And in California, what did the “more than 8%” AEWR increase that Regelbrugge cites amount to after adjusting for inflation? H-2A farmworkers in California only saw a real increase of less than one percent (0.9%) in 2022.12 Compare this to food inflation, which was 9.95% in 2022.13 Arguably, the food sector generally was seeing potential income gains to easily cover the AEWR increases. Not all of the income gains went to the farm operators that employ farmworkers, of course, but presumably they received enough of a share that would have covered a wage increase of 1% to 2%.

Now let’s turn to the AEWRs in all states over the past 15 years up to 2025. Table 1 shows the Adverse Effect Wage Rates for H-2A farmworkers in all states with an AEWR between 2011 and 2025, in values that have been adjusted to constant 2025 dollars, and shows the calculated total real change in terms of dollar value, as well as the real total percentage change, and the annualized real percentage change per year, from 2011 to 2025. The AEWRs listed are ranked by number of H-2A workers, using the number of workers certified from DOL as a proxy for the number of workers.

Table 1

The top five states for H-2A employment together account for half of all H-2A employment nationwide (49.9%). The table shows that in Florida, the biggest state for H-2A farmworkers—where 12.3% of H-2A farmworkers are employed—the value of the AEWR increased by a total of $3.07 between 2011 and 2025 (in constant 2025 dollars); that’s a total increase in value of 23.4% over 15 years. The average annual growth was 1.5% over the 2011-25 period. In Georgia, the second-biggest state for H-2A employment—where 11.3% of H-2A farmworkers are employed, the value of the AEWR increased by $3.45 over the past 15 years, averaging an increase of 1.7% per year.

The largest increase in the value of the AEWR (in constant 2025 dollars) was in California, which accounts for nearly 10% of H-2A employment. In California, the total real value of the AEWR increased by $5.69 over the past 15 years; a total percentage increase of 39.9%, which amounts to annualized percentage increase of 2.4% per year. 

Washington, the next biggest state for H-2A employment, was one of 10 states that saw wage growth that was above 2% per year for 2011-25, growing at 2.2% per year. The fifth biggest H-2A state, North Carolina, increased by $3.28 over the last 15 years, a total increase of 25.5%, growing annually at an average of just 1.6% per year.

For the increases that occurred in the Pacific states, it is likely that those larger increases were driven by increases in the states’ minimum wage laws, which then fed into the FLS. The state minimum wages in California and Washington are more than double the minimum wage of $7.25 in Georgia and more than $2 more than the state minimum wage in Florida.

In total, as the table shows, there were 39 states where the annual average real increase in the AEWR was less than 2%. There were 10 states where annual real wage growth was 1.6% to 1.9%, 14 states had annual wage growth that was 1.5%, and in 15 states, wage growth was 1.2% to 1.4%. The average yearly real percentage increase for each state over the 15-year period was 1.6%, and if weighted by the number of H-2A workers in the state, 1.7%.

The annual average real wage growth of 1.2% to 2.2%, with a weighted average of 1.7%, as Table 1 shows—as well as the 1.9% annual real wage growth in the national farmworker wage over the past decade according to USDA survey data which DOL cites14 —represents decent wage growth for farmworkers and suggests a relatively tight labor market for farmworkers. However, it represents little progress for farmworkers who are in an occupation where they are exempted from key labor laws and wage and hour standards, and where they have earned 50% to 60% of the wage earned by comparable nonsupervisory workers outside of agriculture (see Figure A and discussion above). It would take many more years of faster wage growth for farmworkers to begin to approach even three-fourths of what nonsupervisory workers earn outside of agriculture.

The IFR violates the APA because there is no emergency and DOL did not consider alternative policies, methodologies, and key stakeholders

DOL has violated the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) with this IFR, both because (1) it has unjustifiably asserted an emergency that necessitates the issuance of an IFR, rather than the usual APA process of issuing a notice of proposed rulemaking, receiving comments from the public, and then considering public input before publishing a final rule; and (2) because DOL did not consider alternative policies and methodologies or assess their impact, or adequately discuss the impact on key stakeholders other than farm employers.

DOL has bypassed the APA’s requirements by claiming that there is good cause to do so. An agency may only bypass the APA’s procedural requirements only if it “for good cause finds … that notice and public procedure thereon are impracticable, unnecessary, or contrary to the public interest,”15 and “the good-cause inquiry is “meticulous and demanding.”16 Courts have “repeatedly made clear that the good cause exception ‘is to be narrowly construed and only reluctantly countenanced.’”17

DOL claims that there is an emergency labor shortage in agriculture that threatens the American food supply, and that without the IFR, farm operators will be harmed and food prices will spike. However it is clear that DOL could have considered alternative AEWR methodologies that could have been implemented quickly and kept farm wages stable, rather than issuing an IFR that leads to the massive wage cuts for H-2A farmworkers that DOL estimates will result. Even if we accept DOL’s claim that there is good cause for an emergency IFR—to the extent that one might exist—it would be an emergency that is entirely of the administration’s own making. DOL notes that the administration’s immigration enforcement efforts will remove many farmworkers, leaving farm operators with a shortage of available workers, which will cause food prices to spike. Did the administration consider slowing down or ending immigration enforcement efforts on farms, in order to prevent food prices from surging and to avoid reducing the supply of available labor? Did the administration consider providing work authorization to current farmworkers who lack an Employment Authorization Document (EAD), or restoring and expanding temporary immigration protections like parole, Temporary Protected Status, and deferred action, as current law permits, to maintain or even increase the supply of U.S. farmworkers? (While these measures would be the purview of DHS, DOL could consult with DHS and the White House on these measures.)

Another fact DOL has pointed to, to justify the emergency nature of the IFR, is the discontinuation of USDA’s Farm Labor Survey (FLS). Again, this is an emergency of the administration’s own making and could have been avoided. Ending the FLS was abrupt, ill advised, and no legitimate justification was provided for it. But even in the face USDA discontinuing the FLS, DOL could have continued to use the 2025 AEWR rates while it crafted a new AEWR methodology and notice of proposed rulemaking to take input from stakeholders. Or it could have adjusted the 2025 AEWRs upward by the estimated amount that the Congressional Budget Office expects for inflation from 2025 to 2026, or the average AEWR inflation over the last five or ten years.

DOL also fails to adequately consider the true costs of driving down wages and working conditions for U.S. farmworkers standards. Not only will the IFR hurt the ability of U.S. farmworkers to feed themselves and their families, it will hurt rural communities in both Democratic and Republican-controlled states, negatively impact economic activity, and drive down wages and working conditions for low-wage workers in a wide range of occupations. It will also impose costs on labor unions by making it harder to organize and bargain, and make more difficult for advocacy groups to assist both migrant and U.S.-born farmworkers to assert their workplace rights. These costs must be estimated and considered by DOL before implementing the new AEWR methodology and the massive wage cuts it will impose.

The new AEWR methodology violates the H-2A statute because it ignores the adverse impacts that will result for U.S. farmworkers

DOL notes in the IFR, in the section titled “Need for Regulation,” that “With illegal border crossings at record lows—agricultural employers, who have historically been incentivized to rely on [unauthorized immigrant farmworkers] because of high AEWRs mandated to use the H-2A program, will experience economic harm caused by mounting labor shortages.” This is the main justification offered to justify the substance of the updated AEWR methodology.

In the IFR’s introduction, DOL cites 8 U.S.C. §1188(a)(1), the statutory section stating that before the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) can approve a petition for an H-2A workers, DOL must assess and certify that:

(A) there are not sufficient workers who are able, willing, and qualified, and who will be available at the time and place needed, to perform the labor or services involved in the petition, and

(B) the employment of the alien in such labor or services will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of workers in the United States similarly employed.

However, subsection (A) is ignored via DOL’s blanket and evidence-free assertion that not enough U.S. workers will apply for farm jobs, and nowhere in the IFR does DOL discuss subsection (B), by assessing or estimating whether the IFR will “adversely affect the wages and working conditions of workers in the United States similarly employed.” In fact, U.S. farmworkers are not treated as stakeholders in the IFR and the impact on their wages and working conditions are entirely ignored.

These omissions alone invalidate the IFR and justify that it be canceled and rescinded.

DOL does not explain how lowering wages for H-2A workers and significantly expanding the program—as DOL estimates will occur, to the tune of wage transfers of $24 billion from workers to employers and an increase of 132,000 H-2A workers in the H-2A program—will not adversely affect U.S. farmworkers. In fact, it is clear and obvious that lowering wages for 10% to 15% of the crop workforce comprised of H-2A workers to far below current average wage rates will put downward pressure on the wages of all farmworkers, including U.S. farmworkers, and make farm jobs less attractive to available U.S. workers. Instead of grappling with this basic reality, DOL makes a blanket statement that “qualified and eligible U.S. workers will not make themselves available in sufficient numbers.” Perhaps DOL is attempting to discourage U.S. farmworkers from applying for farm jobs by lowering overall wage rates—and that will in fact be the result of the new AEWR methodology in the IFR. However, there is little evidence to support the assertion that there are not sufficient U.S. workers to fill seasonal farm jobs. In fact, the vast majority of the 2.2 million agricultural workers hired by farm operators reside in the United States, and one-third of crop farmworkers are U.S.-born citizens according to DOL’s own estimates in the NAWS.18

Statements from other agencies in the administration also undermine DOL’s claim. In June, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins went so far as to say that despite the “mass deportations” which DOL predicts in the IFR will result in too few U.S. workers available to fill seasonal farm jobs, Rollins said that the administration would “move the [farm] workforce towards automation and 100 percent American participation,”19 adding that:

There’s been a lot of noise in the last few days and a lot of questions about where the president stands and his vision for farm labor… There are plenty of workers in America.20

Congress sought specifically to protect U.S. farmworkers from adverse effects when establishing the H-2A program and DOL cannot ignore them. The H-2A statute does not give DOL flexibility to make a blanket determination that U.S. workers will no longer be interested in farm jobs and therefore disregard the impact that the H-2A program will have on wages of similarly employed U.S. workers. The rule is therefore inconsistent with the law and should be rescinded.

The new AEWR methodology violates the H-2A statute because it will adversely impact the wages and working conditions of farmworkers, including U.S. farmworkers

Between 2010 and September 30, 2025, the AEWR was based on a survey of farm operators conducted by USDA, commonly referred to as the Farm Labor Survey (FLS) which set AEWR wage rates for each state based on the regions surveyed by the FLS. While far from perfect, it was the best data set available on the wages of directly hired farmworkers in the United States. On August 28, 2025, USDA abruptly announced that it was discontinuing the FLS.21 A month later, on October 2, 2025, DOL issued the IFR laying out a new AEWR based on data from a different data set, the DOL’s Occupational Employment and Wages Statistics (OEWS) survey. In short, the OEWS is an inferior data set for agriculture and is not a valid survey for setting farmworkers’ wages, in part because it only surveys nonfarm employers—meaning farm labor contractors and other staffing firms that send farmworkers to different farms and pay them roughly only three-fourths of what farmworkers are paid when they are directly hired by farm operators.22

The updated AEWR cuts wage rates dramatically and creates two artificial “skill levels” for each state which set H-2A wages at the 17^th percentile of wages surveyed (skill level 1) and at the 50^th percentile (skill level 2), which is the median of wages surveyed, based on five combined occupations DOL has determined are relevant in the OEWS. DOL estimates that 92% of H-2A workers will be paid at skill level 1 and 8% at skill level 2. DOL’s IFR is fairly explicit about its desire to lower wages for H-2A farmworkers in order to benefit farm employers and increase H-2A hiring, and the administration’s move to eliminate the FLS and DOL’s move to substitute it with the OEWS appears to be a key action taken to achieve that.

In addition, DOL eliminates the previous requirement that employers pay for 100% of housing costs for H-2A workers. Currently, H-2A employers are required to provide housing for workers if they would not reasonably be able to return to their residences on a daily basis. This is an important requirement of the program given that H-2A workers are so low-paid that they cannot reasonably be expected to pay for their own housing, and that many farms where H-2A workers are employed are in remote areas, and not located close enough to a supply of affordable, accessible housing that still allow workers to report for duty for long hours in the fields. For years, news reports and worker advocates have documented many of the substandard conditions in employer-provided housing for farmworkers.23 However, instead of improving these problems, the AEWR would no longer require employers to pay for 100% of housing costs and implements a new deduction to let farm owners take deductions for housing out of H-2A workers’ paychecks—sometimes as much as nearly one-third of their hourly pay (up to 30%). This will harm farmworkers and reverberate across the industry.

In total, between wage cuts and housing deductions, DOL estimates that over $1.7 billion will be transferred from H-2A workers’ pockets back to farm employers under the new wage rule in 2026, amounting to $24 billion over the next ten years as the program grows to over 500,000 jobs, as DOL predicts will occur. This would represent a shocking upward redistribution of income away from some of the country’s most essential workers for the food system and its most underpaid. All of these impacts clearly violate the H-2A statute’s prohibition on “adversely affect[ing] the wages and working conditions of workers in the United States similarly employed,” and the lower wage rates will make it impossible for DOL to determine whether or not there are sufficient U.S. farmworkers “who are able, willing, and qualified, and who will be available at the time and place needed, to perform the labor or services involved” in H-2A job orders.

New AEWR based on OEWS data will result in $4.4 to $5.4 billion in wages being transferred annually from farmworkers to farm operators at the current size of the H-2A program

We believe the DOL’s estimates are incomplete because they fail to fully consider the wage impacts of the new AEWR, by not considering alternative methodologies and other scenarios that may result. For instance, DOL did not consider the impact on state minimum wage rates and whether the AEWR housing deduction may conflict with state laws, and DOL did not estimate the impact that a massive wage cut for H-2A farmworkers will have on U.S. farmworkers. In this section we present new estimates that we hope will inform the public and DOL as to the true impact of the October 2025 AEWR. They should be considered low-end estimates because the IFR also permits farm operators to pay H-2A workers the AEWR for duties associated with higher-paying non-farm jobs for up to 50% of their work hours. This will put downward pressure on a number of occupations like construction and truck driving, but we have not attempted to calculate those losses to workers, and neither has DOL. 

The IFR will significantly reduce the wages paid to H-2A workers. Weighted across their total weeks worked by state according to 2024 H-2A disclosure data from DOL’s Office of Foreign Labor Certification,24 the average AEWR set for 2025 was $17.43. The rule, however, proposes a two-tiered wage structure with far lower wages for 2026. The average skill level 1 and skill level 2 wages would be $13.70 and $17.22, respectively, even without housing deductions. With housing deductions, the average level 1 and level 2 wages would be $11.78 and $15.30. 

In many cases, the new state AEWR wages are low enough to fall below the wage rates set by state minimum wage laws, with the housing deduction lowering it even further, and in some states, the AEWRs will fall below the state minimum wage only after housing deductions are subtracted. In all those cases, the state minimum wage becomes the AEWR. As of yet, it is unclear how states will react to workers being paid below the state minimum after the housing deduction, and what guidance the federal government will provide with respect to it. For example, in Connecticut, the 2026 skill level 1 H-2A wage is $15.93, but the 2026 state minimum wage will be $16.94. If the state fully enforces its minimum wage and prohibits pay rates from falling below the state minimum, regardless of the Connecticut housing deduction of $2.06, then the lowest wage an H-2A worker would be paid legally is $16.94. But if Connecticut or federal guidance allows the AEWR minus the housing deduction paid to workers to go below the state minimum wage, then an H-2A worker in Connecticut could be paid as low as $14.88 per hour (i.e. the state minimum wage minus the housing deduction). 

It is possible that some states will take the position that the hourly wage rates paid to H-2A workers may not go below the state minimum after subtracting the housing deduction, while some states may allow the deduction, arguing that the federal regulation setting the AEWR supersedes the state minimum wage law. The agricultural industry is likely to argue the latter, and the issue may end up in multiple state and federal courts. As a result of this uncertainty, our estimates consider both state minimum wage scenarios.

The first row of Table 2 estimates the annual pay losses for H-2A workers in 2026 under the IFR, assuming, as DOL does, that 92% of H-2A workers would be paid the skill level 1 wage. If state minimum wages were fully enforced and do not permit the hourly AEWR paid to workers to go below the state minimum wage, then H-2A annual wages would fall by $1.7 billion in 2026, or 25.8%. If state minimum wages were not fully enforced and the housing deduction drops the AEWR below the state minimum wage rates, the losses would be larger: a $2.1 billion or 31.5% annual pay loss. Different states may treat the AEWR and state minimum wage differently; if some states prohibit and some permit the housing deduction to be less that the state minimum wage, then the total amount of annual pay losses would fall somewhere in between those two amounts. 

Table 2

Reducing the AEWR for H-2A workers will also lower wages for U.S. farmworkers—one-third of whom are U.S-born citizens, according to DOL’s latest NAWS survey.25 A fall in the H-2A wage will increase demand for H-2A workers, since employers can save significantly on labor costs if they hire them. As a result, it will become relatively more expensive to hire non-H-2A U.S. farmworkers. Employers will therefore reduce demand for U.S. farmworkers, putting downward pressure on their wages.

This is not hypothetical: Rutledge et al. found that a 10% increase in the AEWR caused an almost 2.8% increase in the wages of U.S. farmworkers.26 With those estimates, the authors estimated that a one-year AEWR wage freeze would reduce annual U.S. farmworker wages by $475 million. Using a similar methodology, we estimate the likely wage reductions for U.S. farmworkers due to the new rule.27

The H-2A wage reduction under a fully enforced minimum wage is 25.8%. Based on the responsiveness of U.S farmworker wages to H-2A wage rates from Rutledge et al., the second row of Table 1 shows that the new rule could reduce U.S. farmworker wages by 7.1%, or $2.7 billion in annual pay. The wage losses are again larger if states allow the housing deduction to push pay below the state minimum. In that case, U.S. farmworkers in 2026 would experience an annual pay cut of $3.3 billion, or 8.7%.28 

This means that farmworkers in total will see annual pay cuts of about $4.4 billion to $5.4 billion, depending on the enforcement of state minimum wage laws (9.9% to 12.1%). This amounts to a massive pay cut for farmworkers who are already some of the lowest-paid employees in the entire U.S. labor market, while working in one of the most difficult and dangerous jobs in the economy.

Estimates for alternative scenarios for wage transfers from H-2A farmworkers to farm operators

In this subsection we discuss alternative skill level scenarios that could result and one that DOL could have considered. The scenario that DOL predicts will result, with 92% of H-2A farmworkers being paid the skill level 1 wage and 8% being paid the skill level 2 wage, is an arguably reasonable estimate given certified wage rates in DOL disclosure data and employer behavior under a similar wage rule in the H-2B program29—a sister visa program of H-2A for workers in occupations outside of agriculture—which was implemented by the George W. Bush administration.

The first possible alternative scenario, which we believe is reasonable given employer savings and the growth that is likely to occur in the H-2A program, is one where 100% of H-2A workers are paid at the skill level 1 wage (or closer to 100% than 92%). Thus we have calculated what the wage losses would look like in that case, shown in Table 3. If state minimum wages were fully enforced and do not permit the hourly AEWR paid to workers to go below the state minimum wage, then H-2A annual wages would fall by $1.8 billion in 2026, or 26.8%. If state minimum wages were not fully enforced and the housing deduction drops wage rates below the state minimum wage rates, the losses would be larger: a $2.2 billion or 32.9% annual pay loss. Both result in a pay cut that is $100 million greater relative to the 92/8 scenario. 

Table 3

Another possible scenario could result if DOL updated and amended the IFR to require the minimum AEWR to be set at the skill level 2 wage, which is the median wage (i.e. the 50^th percentile wage), for the five OEWS occupations DOL uses to calculate the state AEWRs. This is not a likely scenario without a change to the IFR because unless they are forced to do otherwise, employers are likely to opt for the lower pay rates, as DOL also predicts. But setting the AEWR at the median would be a slightly more reasonable methodology for setting the AEWR—since it would at least arguably prohibit employers from undercutting H-2A wage rates relative to the median OEWS wages. (The H-2B program for example, sets the prevailing (minimum) wage rate at the local average wage for the occupation according to the OEWS.) Nevertheless this would still not be a methodology we believe is justified and we would not support it. Table 3 shows that even under this slightly more defensible formulation of the AEWR, H-2A workers would still see a pay cut of roughly $1 billion per year under both state minimum wage enforcement scenarios.

The median wage under the OEWS is still far too low

This significant wage cut for H-2A farmworkers, even if they are paid at the median wage according to OEWS data, reveals the inferiority of the OEWS data set for setting the wages of farmworkers. The OEWS does not directly survey farm employers, rather nonfarm employers that act as subcontractors and pay farmworkers much less on average—thus the OEWS is not an accurate representation of the farm labor market and should not be used to set the state AEWRs. DOL notes in the interim final rule that the OEWS will begin surveying farm employers in May 2026 and that the May 2027 release of the OEWS will be the first to include those survey data. However, it will take a number of additional years for the OEWS to have a robust data sample from farm employers as compared to a dedicated farm employment survey like the USDA’s FLS—three at least, given three-year cycle under which the OEWS operates under—and in the meantime, the wages of both H-2A and U.S. farmworkers will be undercut by billions each year.

Estimates for alternative scenarios for wage transfers from U.S. farmworkers to farm operators

Similarly to the alternative scenarios discussed in the previous section, we have calculated the wage losses to U.S. farmworkers where 100% of H-2A workers are paid the skill level 1 wage and where 100% are paid the skill level 2 wage. Table 4 shows that if state minimum wages were fully enforced and do not permit the hourly AEWR paid to workers to go below the state minimum wage, then annual wages for U.S. farmworkers would fall by $2.8 billion in 2026, or 7.4%. If state minimum wages were not fully enforced and the housing deduction drops wage rates below the state minimum wage rates, the losses would be larger: a $3.4 billion or 9% annual pay loss. Both result in a pay cut that is $100 million greater relative to the 92/8 scenario. 

Table 4 also shows that under the 100% skill level 2 scenario, U.S. farmworkers would see a pay cut of $1.4 billion or $1.6 billion, depending on enforcement of the state minimum wage laws. As noted earlier, different states may treat the AEWR and state minimum wage differently, so the total amount of annual pay losses would fall somewhere in between the amounts in each of the scenarios. 

Table 4

Estimates for alternative scenarios for wage transfers from H-2A and U.S. farmworkers

The final table shows the estimates of wage losses under the same alternative skill and state minimum wage enforcement scenarios, but for all farmworkers (U.S. + H-2A) farmworkers. Table 5 shows that if state minimum wages were fully enforced and do not permit the hourly AEWR paid to workers to go below the state minimum wage, then annual wages for all farmworkers would fall by $4.6 billion in 2026, or 10.3%. If state minimum wages were not fully enforced and the housing deduction drops wage rates below the state minimum wage rates, the losses would be larger: $5.6 billion, which is a 12.6% annual pay loss. Both result in a pay cut that is $200 million greater relative to the 92/8 scenario. 

Table 5

Table 5 shows that under the 100% skill level 2 scenario, all farmworkers would see a pay cut of $2.3 billion or 5.1% if state minimum wages were fully enforced, or $2.6 billion or 5.8% if they are not. Different states may treat the AEWR and state minimum wage differently, and in that case, the total amount of annual pay losses would fall somewhere in between those amounts. 

The IFR’s new housing deduction from H-2A wages will harm H-2A workers and adversely impact U.S. farmworkers because farm operators will prefer to hire underpaid H-2A workers

The IFR creates a new housing deduction that H-2A workers must pay out of the wages of each hour they work—which DOL refers erroneously refers to as a “housing adjustment.” In an Orwellian passage, DOL attempts to justify the housing deduction as promoting fairness for U.S. farmworkers who do not receive “additional non-wage compensation in the form of free housing.”30 The opposite is true: the housing deduction will harm both H-2A workers and U.S. workers.

H-2A workers are scarcely “benefitting” from employer-provided housing. H-2A housing is in fact, primarily for the benefit of the employer. The employer benefits by having a worker remain on or near the worksite, reducing travel time. Employers also benefit by exerting additional control over their workers whose lodging they own and control; workers have few options if they wish to reside elsewhere, and employers sometimes restrict the ability of workers to invite guests, which could include labor organizers or nonprofit groups that could inform H-2A workers of their rights.

H-2A workers also cannot reasonably be expected to afford housing in the United States on the low wages paid to H-2A workers. Even if they could afford housing—it could be nearly impossible to find temporary housing in a remote rural area, or to navigate the rental process if they don’t speak English, or have U.S. identification, or significant sums of money to pay for a down payment up front. H-2A workers also leave their families behind in their countries of origin and most are likely paying to maintain a residence there. Reducing the wages paid to H-2A workers by up to 30% as the IFR does, will only benefit employers by padding their profits by almost $880 billion in 2026, as DOL estimates.31

The housing deduction will also harm U.S. farmworkers, not help them. H-2A rules before the IFR required employers to offer no-cost housing to U.S. farmworkers if they were in corresponding employment with H-2A workers, thus they were entitled to the same benefit if they needed housing. But the massive reduction in wages that H-2A workers will see from the housing deduction will greatly reduce labor costs for employers who hire H-2A workers as compared to U.S. farmworkers—undercutting U.S. wages and incentivizing employers to hire H-2A workers and bypass U.S. farmworkers—which will unquestionably “adversely affect” the wages and working conditions of U.S. farmworkers.

The updated AEWR methodology and the housing deduction will conflict with many state minimum wage laws and DOL has not provided guidance on how to resolve them

The extremely low AEWRs that DOL has set in the IFR through the use of OEWS data and the creation of two skill levels has rendered the state AEWRs so low that many are now below the state minimum wage—or go below the state minimum wage after the housing deduction has been subtracted. Under the previous AEWR methodology, the AEWR was in all cases higher than the state minimum wage. While the state minimum wage will set the AEWR in states where the state minimum wage is higher than the AEWR, DOL has provided no guidance as to how H-2A employers should treat the housing deduction.

For example, in Florida, the biggest state for H-2A employment, the skill level 1 wage is $12.47 and the Florida state minimum wage will be $14.00 per hour in 2026. The AEWR methodology mandates that the higher state minimum wage of $14.00 per hour will set the H-2A wage. But when the housing deduction is subtracted from the state minimum wage, the H-2A wage falls to $12.00 per hour, violating the state minimum wage law. There are numerous states where this scenario plays out, but the IFR fails to mention or even contemplate this reality, or to suggest what the appropriate H-2A wage would be in such situations.

It is unclear how states will react to workers being certified at and/or paid an H-2A wage that is below the state minimum after the housing deduction, or if DOL will provide any guidance with respect to it. It is possible that some states will take the position that the hourly wage rates paid to H-2A workers may not go below the state minimum regardless of the housing deduction—essentially outlawing the deduction—while some states may allow the deduction, arguing that the federal AEWR regulation supersedes the state minimum wage law. The agricultural industry is likely to argue the latter, and the issue is almost certain to end up in multiple state and federal courts.

OEWS survey data are inadequate for setting the wage rates of H-2A farmworkers because they do not accurately represent the farm labor market

Since 1910, USDA has satisfied a statutory mandate to procure and preserve information concerning agriculture, including “by the collection of statistics” and “any other appropriate means within his power”32 by conducting the Agricultural Labor Survey, commonly referred to as the Farm Labor Survey (FLS).33 For decades the FLS has been the best and most reliable survey detailing conditions in the farm labor market—a fact DOL has acknowledged in multiple previous rulemakings on H-2A.34

USDA abruptly discontinued the FLS in late August of this year, before the final installment of the FLS could be completed for 2025. Arguably, this has left DOL without a viable survey with which to determine and set wage levels for H-2A workers that will prevent adverse effects on the wages of U.S. farmworkers. However, using the OEWS is not an adequate or rational alternative for setting H-2A wages given the inherent weaknesses in the OEWS data set.

First, as DOL notes, the OEWS only surveys non-farm employers—meaning farm labor contractors (FLCs) and other staffing firms that send farmworkers to different farms. However, nationwide, a majority of farmworkers are employed directly.35 As noted earlier, farmworkers employed by FLCs are paid only roughly only three-fourths of what farmworkers are paid when they are directly hired directly by farm employers.36 This is because FLCs are use a fissured subcontracting employment model, and research shows that subcontracted workers earn lower wages on average, in part because the FLC makes profits by taking a portion of workers’ wages and by lowering costs.37 EPI research also shows that FLCs account for the largest share of wage and hour violations in agriculture—roughly a quarter nationwide and half in two of the largest farm states, California and Florida.38 Thus, DOL is relying on a survey that is overrepresented by FLCs that pay farmworkers significantly less and violate the law at higher rates, while entirely excluding the vast majority of farmworkers who are directly employed and paid more.

Second, while DOL states that it will take action to revise the OEWS to cover agricultural employers to begin use in the May 2026 survey, with data first being available for the May 2027 edition of the OEWS, the reality is that OEWS data on agricultural employers will not be a reasonably adequate representation of the farm labor market until years after that. This is in part because the OEWS estimates are created by averaging wage rates across a span of three years. To be adequate, OEWS would need to collect data from farm operators in 2026, 2027, and 2028, with the data being first published and available at the earliest in 2029. In the meantime, the AEWRs set by OEWS wage data will be artificially low and adversely impacting the wages of H-2A workers and U.S. workers.

Another problematic aspect of using the OEWS is that the data being used by DOL for the 2026 AEWRs are from 2024, thus already two years behind, and DOL has made no upward adjustment for inflation so that the AEWRs reflect a more realistic snapshot of wage rates in the current farm labor market. It is irrational and harmful to both H-2A and U.S. farmworkers for DOL to use wages that are both representative of only non-farm employers and of wages that were paid to workers who were employed by FLCs two years ago.

The FLS was problematic in a similar way, with the average field and livestock worker wage in one year setting the AEWR for the following year, and DOL should have adjusted the FLS wages upward with an estimate for inflation, perhaps by using the Employment Cost Index (ECI) projection from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) for private-sector wage growth,39 or the average annual wage increase for farmworkers for the past five or ten years. But at least the FLS was a reasonable representation of what employers were paying farmworkers, even if one year behind.

Third, OEWS data also fail to reflect the seasonal nature of the farm jobs filled by H-2A workers. By only collecting data in May and November, it will fail to capture wages during peak harvest season in the summer,40 when farm employment peaks and wages may be higher due to increased hiring. The FLS on the other hand, more adequately captures seasonal peaks in farmworker employment and wages by measuring wages at four points during the year, in January, April, July, and October. 

Seen in this light, the move to use the OEWS seems like an intentional move by DOL to lower the wages of farmworkers as much as possible while ostensibly retaining some connection to available data sets. This is not the first time DOL attempted to set the AEWRs with a data set that would result in lower wages. In 2008, the Department temporarily stopped relying on the FLS and also implemented multiple skill levels, which led to a “precipitous drop” in farmworker wages.41 Thus DOL was aware that moving from the FLS to the OEWS would drastically lower wages for farmworkers.

Using multiple skill levels akin to those in the H-1B program is inappropriate and DOL has rejected such a methodology for other low-wage jobs in the H-2B program

DOL’s decision in the IFR to adopt a multi-tiered prevailing wage structure, which DOL notes reflects the one created for the H-1B program in the H-1B Visa Reform Act of 2004,42 and to require its application to prevailing wage determinations in the H-2A program, was irrational, arbitrary, and not adequately justified by the DOL—similarly to when DOL created multiple skill levels for the H-2B program in 2008.43 The four wage levels for each occupation superimposed on the OEWS prevailing wage data were designed to apply to the H-1B visa category—a visa category where the vast majority of beneficiaries possess at least a bachelors, masters, or doctoral degree (the minimum requirement is a bachelor’s or its equivalent). The four wage levels are intended to be “commensurate with” the workers’ “experience, education, and the level of supervision.”44 In the IFR, DOL has created two skill levels, setting the first, skill level 1, at the 17^th wage percentile of wages surveyed in the OEWS, mirroring the level 1 prevailing wage in the H-1B program. The second is the at the 50^th percentile (the median wage), mirroring the level 3 wage in the H-1B’s four-tiered structure.

If crafted smartly and enforced adequately, four wage levels could arguably make sense in the H-1B context, if for no other reason than to account for the variation in levels of educational attainment amongst the beneficiaries who are granted an H-1B visa. However, as EPI research has shown, the wage levels are not scientifically linked to degrees of education and experience, they are simply chosen points along the distribution of surveyed wages by DOL, and as Ron Hira and I have argued, DOL has set the two lowest wage levels far too low to protect U.S. wage standards.45 In addition, in the H-1B program it is clear that in practice the employer gets to choose the wage level and the government doesn’t verify that a prevailing wage is appropriate unless a lawsuit or a complaint is filed by a worker,46 which is rare, and it seems that very little enforcement has ever been conducted by DOL to prevent underpaying and misclassifying workers at inappropriate wage levels. It is thus reasonable to expect the results will be similar with regard to the use of skill levels in the H-2A context.

DOL’s use of skill levels for H-2A is akin to how it applied the four H-1B wage levels to the H-2B program—another visa program used for temporary low-wage jobs outside of agriculture—and its subsequent rejection of them for H-2B is instructive and worth recalling. In a 2010 notice of proposed rulemaking, DOL observed that “[t]he types of jobs found in the H-2B program involve few if any skill differentials necessitating tiered wage levels.”47 This is because the occupations filled by H-2B workers generally require little or no formal education or training—if some training is required, it can often be learned quickly and on the job (e.g., in the case of janitors, landscapers, amusement park and hotel staff)—and such positions offer little in the way of career advancement. As a result, employers hiring under the H-2B rule with multiple skill levels would routinely hire H-2B workers at the lowest prevailing wage level, because they are in fact searching for workers with only the most basic skills and no formal education. This had an obvious impact on wages, as DOL observed, finding that “in about 96 percent of the cases, the H-2B wage is lower than the mean of the OES wage rates for the same occupation.”48 [The OEWS was formerly known as the OES, which stands for Occupational Employment Statistics.] Using skill levels in the H-2A context will necessarily result in lowered wages for U.S. workers in farm occupations because they will be forced to compete with H-2A workers who are paid at the 17^th percentile for skill level 1, far less than the going rate for a U.S. farmworker.

DOL in its proposed H-2B wage methodology in 2010 also noted that “even if skill-based wage tiers were desirable as a theoretical matter, neither the OES nor any other comprehensive data series that we are aware of attempts to capture such variations.”49 The OEWS wage data do not differentiate the types of skills that would justify one particular wage level or tier over another, because, as DOL explained, “the actual OES survey instrument does not solicit data concerning the skill level of the workers whose wages are being reported.”50 In other words, there is no scientific correlation between the range of experience and skill level within an occupation and the wage tiers superimposed on the OEWS wage data.

Any prevailing wage structure that permits H-2A workers to be paid below the mean or the median wage is flawed and should be rejected by DOL. The H-2A statute’s mandate to ensure U.S. workers are recruited for farm jobs and to guard against adverse impacts on the wages of U.S. farmworkers cannot be complied with if employers are allowed to pay their H-2A employees at wages that are below the mean or median. By definition, any employer who is allowed to pay their H-2A employee a wage that is below the mean or median will be putting downward pressure on “wages and working conditions of workers in the United States similarly employed.” And U.S. workers will be reluctant to apply for jobs that are being advertised at wage rates that are far below the mean or median.

The mean or median wage alone as defined by the OEWS however, would still be too low of a wage, given the flaws inherent in the OEWS that render it an inadequate data set for setting H-2A wages, as discussed earlier. This is illustrated by the findings in Tables 3 and 4. Table 3 shows that even if all H-2A workers were paid at skill level 2, the median wage according to the OEWS, H-2A farmworkers would still see annual wage loses of $0.9 to $1.0 billion, and Table 4 shows that even if H-2A farmworkers are paid the median, U.S. farmworkers would see wage losses of $1.4 billion to $1.6 billion. To ensure that employers do not put downward pressure on the wages of U.S. farmworkers, DOL should amend the IFR to rely on FLS wages for 2024 or the latest release for 2025, which was published in May 2025 and had results for the January and April reference weeks. Those wage rates could then be adjusted upward with an estimate for inflation, perhaps by using the Employment Cost Index (ECI) projection from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) for private-sector wage growth,51 or the average annual wage increase for farmworkers for the past five or ten years.

Furthermore, Congress directed DOL through the H-1B statute to set four wage level tiers for the H-1B program, but Congress was silent when it came to wage levels in the H-2A program, which is strong evidence that they intended for the H-2A program to not use wage tiers. The H-2A statute states simply that the wages and working conditions of U.S. farmworkers should not be adversely impacted, and it is obvious that creating a new skill level that allows employers to pay farmworkers below the median or mean farmworker wage will undercut wage rates in agriculture and violate the plain language of the statute.

There is no question that creating a skill level that is below the median wage in the new AEWR methodology is inappropriate for farm jobs and will lead to adverse impacts on the wages and working conditions of U.S. farmworkers, and as a result, DOL should rescind the AEWR methodology in the IFR. But even skill level 2, which the IFR sets at the median wage, contradicts the H-2A statute because it is based on OEWS data which are inappropriate given the aforementioned flaws of the survey (only surveying farm labor contractors etc.) that lead to much lower wage rates than the FLS.

DOL did not consider or estimate the impact of the 50% rule, which will undercut the wages of workers outside of agriculture and circumvent the H-2B annual cap

The IFR permits farm operators to pay H-2A workers the state AEWR for duties associated with higher-paying occupational codes that fall outside of the main farmworker SOCs, for up to 50% of their workdays, as long as the duties that fall outside of the main farmworker occupations do not make up a majority of the workdays. In other words, H-2A workers could be employed doing construction work or truck driving for up to 50% of their workdays while being paid the AEWR—as long as they did not engage in those non-farmworker/non-agricultural duties for a majority of their workdays. While DOL is right to point out that many H-2A workers perform tasks associated with higher-paying occupations outside of agriculture, the IFR does not create adequate safeguards to protect workers and the result will be downward pressure on a number of occupations like construction and truck driving. DOL does not seem to have considered these impacts in the IFR nor has DOL attempted to estimate the impacts on U.S. workers, and the relevant provisions in the IFR do not appear to have been crafted carefully. DOL should rescind these provisions, estimate the impacts, and go back to the drawing board and solicit public input from the public, unions, and worker groups, whose interests appear to have been entirely ignored.

The IFR states that :

For all other occupations… The occupational classification and applicable Adverse Effect Wage Rate shall be determined based on the majority (meaning more than 50 percent) of the workdays during the contract period the worker will spend performing the agricultural labor or services, including duties that are closely and directly related, and the qualifications on the job order.52

Many of the terms in this passage are not defined clearly and it will be difficult for certifying officers (COs) and State Workforce Agencies (SWAs) to interpret in practice. For example the IFR uses a “workdays” standard for this provision to determine if a worker is performing job duties associated with agricultural labor, but workdays are not defined. How much time engaging in a particular task constitutes a “workday”? Why didn’t DOL use work hours instead?

DOL expects that adjudicators, COs, and SWAs will review the job duties on a job order and determine which duties will be performed for a majority of workdays, and then choose the applicable SOC code or codes and AEWRs, whether it be the AEWR for the main farmworker occupations or a separate non-farm occupation or occupations. But what are “closely and directly related” duties? Is the construction of a building on a farm closely and directly related to agricultural labor because it occurs on a farm? Would DOL certify a position that permits an H-2A worker to work for 60%, 80%, or 100% of their work hours doing work that should be classified in the construction laborer SOC code, since it takes place on a farm? And would DOL require that worker to be paid the AEWR rate rather than the higher construction laborer wage rate since it may believe that construction duties are closely and directly related to agricultural work, because it takes place on a farm?

Clarity is lacking and DOL’s language in the IFR creates a massive loophole that will lead to farmworkers being underpaid when they engage in non-agricultural tasks and U.S. workers in non-farm occupations will be undercut when they have to compete with underpaid H-2A workers who have few rights or other options, or the power to negotiate a higher wage with their employer. DOL’s lack of emphasis that H-2A jobs should be agricultural in nature and it’s broad and undefined closely and directly related standard, are not enough to prevent H-2A workers from being underpaid at the AEWR for higher-paying job duties.

The wage savings for employers who take advantage of the loophole created by the IFR are significant—creating a strong incentive to underpay H-2A workers. For example, DOL’s AEWR spreadsheet shows that the construction laborers occupation, Standard Occupational Code (SOC) 47-2061, in California has a median wage of $31.50 an hour (i.e. the skill level 2 wage for U.S. workers). The median wage can be considered the going rate for construction workers in California; if an employer wanted to hire a construction laborer, $31.50 is roughly the wage workers would expect to be paid, and that an employer recruiting a worker would have to advertise the job at. Compare the construction laborer median wage to the combined farmworker occupations AEWR for skill level 1 in California, which will be $16.90 in 2026, as set by the higher state minimum wage. The California AEWR will be just 54% of the statewide median wage for construction laborers—leading to a massive savings for farm employers who pay the AEWR for construction work.

In the southeast, in Georgia, it’s a similar story. According to DOL’s AEWR spreadsheet, the median (skill level 2) wage for U.S. workers in the construction laborers occupation is $19.43 per hour. The skill level 1 AEWR in Georgia, after the housing deduction is subtracted, is $8.77 an hour. That’s just 45% of the median wage for construction work—again giving employers a massive incentive to use H-2A labor to undercut wage standards in construction.

While DOL has now published applicable AEWR rates at two skill levels for occupations outside of the five main combined farmworker occupations, it is unlikely that employers will ever draft job orders in a manner that leads an adjudicator to select the higher wage to be paid to an H-2A worker, or that DOL will ever judge that the higher wage should be paid, given the broad and undefined standards for adjudication in the IFR. Since the H-2A the program is uncapped, employers who actually adhere to the standard in the IFR will still be able to get around the IFR’s requirements by hiring additional H-2A workers and having them work half their workdays doing non-farm duties while being paid the lower wage

A major open question is how much scrutiny and oversight will be applied to job orders that list job duties outside of the main farmworker occupations. Will each job order be reviewed by COs, SWAs, and staff at the Office of Foreign Labor Certification (OFLC) at DOL to prevent misclassification? Funding at OFLC has been flat while the workload has increased significantly,53 making additional scrutiny of 380,000 to over 500,000 job orders unrealistic. What about oversight after H-2A workers are already employed in the United States? Given that the number of Wage and Hour Division investigations of agricultural employers dropped to a record low of 659 in 202454 and that the number of investigators is also at a record low in 2025,55 and the fact that already, far fewer than 1% of agricultural employers are inspected in a given year,56 it is unlikely that employer abuse of this provision in the IFR will ever be discovered, allowing employers to operate with impunity and underpay H-2A workers.

DOL should take a strong stance that it will not certify any positions where a majority of the work hours will consist of duties outside of the main farmworker occupations. Such positions—like construction laborers, light truck drivers, and heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers—are more appropriate for the H-2B program, where DOL sets the minimum wage at the local average wage according to the OEWS. If H-2A workers are allowed to continue to engage in tasks and duties outside of the main farmworker occupations that should be paid at the higher wage for the occupation, DOL should cap the number of work hours in the non-farm occupation at 20%, and not certify any jobs where H-2A workers will spend more than 20% of their work hours performing those duties. And if H-2A workers are in fact performing tasks and duties outside of the major farmworker occupations, they should be paid the higher non-farm SOC’s wage—at the median, skill level 2 wage—for 100% of their work hours. In addition, if it is higher, they should be paid at the local average wage according to the occupation in the OEWS, which is DOL’s H-2B wage methodology, in order to prevent undercutting the wages of H-2B workers and U.S. workers similarly employed.

Recommendations

This section provides a brief summary of the recommendations, most of which are discussed in more detail in the earlier sections of this comment.

The White House should direct USDA to reinstate the Farm Labor Survey to set the AEWRs

The FLS has been the best and most reliable survey detailing conditions in the farm labor market—a fact DOL has acknowledged in multiple previous rulemakings on H-2A.57 USDA abruptly discontinued the FLS in late August of this year, before the final installment of the FLS could be completed for 2025. This has left DOL without a viable survey with which to determine and set wage levels for H-2A workers that will prevent adverse effects on the wages of U.S. farmworkers. While DOL is not responsible for USDA’s discontinuation of the FLS, in order to have an adequate data set with which to set the AEWRs, DOL should urge USDA and the White House that the FLS should be reinstated as quickly as possible in order to comport with 8 U.S.C. §1188(a)(1)’s requirement that H-2A employment “will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of workers in the United States similarly employed.”

The OEWS is inadequate and inappropriate for setting the AEWR because it does not reflect an accurate picture of the farm labor market, and DOL’s improvements will take years to implement

In multiple previous formal comments to DOL, we have discussed the inadequacies of the OEWS data set, including for its use to set agricultural wages,58 and have done so again here. Thus, until and unless DOL makes significant investments in, and improvements to, the OEWS data, they will continue to be inadequate as a substitute for the FLS. The OEWS’s reliance on wage data collected exclusively by farm labor contractors with a fissured business model and lower wages will significantly lower the AEWRs—as the results of the new AEWRs set in the IFR make clear. DOL notes that it is taking steps to improve the collection of farmworker wage and earnings data in the OEWS; for example, by expanding the population surveyed by the OEWS to include farm operators. However, while DOL says the first updated OEWS data will be available for the May 2027 edition of the OEWS, the reality is that OEWS data on agricultural employers will not be a reasonably adequate representation of the farm labor market until years after that. This is in part because the OEWS estimates are created by averaging wage rates across a span of three years. To be adequate, OEWS would need to collect data from farm operators in 2026, 2027, and 2028, with the data being first published and available at the earliest in 2029. In the meantime, the AEWRs set by OEWS wage data will be artificially low and adversely impacting the wages of H-2A workers and U.S. workers.

In addition, the OEWS data being used by DOL for the 2026 AEWRs are from 2024, thus already two years behind, and DOL has made no upward adjustment for inflation so that the AEWRs reflect a more realistic snapshot of wage rates in the current farm labor market. It is irrational and harmful to both H-2A and U.S. farmworkers for DOL to use wages that are both representative of only non-farm employers and of wages that were paid to workers who were employed by FLCs two years ago.

DOL should eliminate the use of artificial skill levels to set the AEWRs

DOL’s decision in the IFR to adopt a multi-tiered prevailing wage structure, which DOL notes reflects the one created for the H-1B program in the H-1B Visa Reform Act of 2004,59 and to require its application to prevailing wage determinations in the H-2A program, was irrational, arbitrary, and not adequately justified by the DOL—similarly to when DOL created multiple skill levels for the H-2B program which were later invalidated by a federal court and which DOL ultimately rejected. DOL notes at 90 Fed. Reg. 47933 that it has:

conclude[d] employers seeking temporary nonimmigrant workers under the H-2A visa classification should receive an AEWR determination that also takes into account the qualifications of the employer’s job offer to better effectuate the requirement to, protect the wages of U.S. workers similarly employed and more closely align the wage standard in the H-2A program with the wage standards in other employment-based immigration programs which use skill-based wage levels.

This reasoning fails for the reasons cited earlier, namely that unlike with the H-2A program, the four H-1B prevailing wage levels are mandated by statute, and are intended to differentiate between workers with different levels of education and experience in a work visa program where the minimum requirement is a bachelor’s degree. In addition, any prevailing wage structure that permits H-2A workers to be paid below the mean or the median wage is flawed and should be rejected by DOL because it fails to guard against adverse impacts on the wages of U.S. farmworkers as the H-2A statute’s mandate requires. By definition, any employer who is allowed to pay their H-2A employee a wage that is below the mean or median will be putting downward pressure on “wages and working conditions of workers in the United States similarly employed.” The mean or median wage as defined by the OEWS however, would not suffice, given the flaws inherent in the OEWS that render it an inadequate data set for setting H-2A wages, as discussed earlier, and as illustrated by the findings for skill level 2 wage impacts in Tables 3 and 4.

DOL should base the 2026 AEWR on the most recent FLS survey data available

Even if the FLS is not reinstated, to ensure that employers do not put downward pressure on the wages of U.S. farmworkers through H-2A employment, the IFR should be rescinded and DOL should rely on the most recent FLS data available to set the 2026 AEWR. This would mean using either the FLS annual wage data for 2024 (which set the 2025 AEWRs) or the latest release for 2025, which was published in May 2025 and had results for the January and April reference weeks. Those wage rates could then be adjusted upward with an estimate for inflation for 2026, by using the Employment Cost Index (ECI) projection from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) for private-sector wage growth,60 or the average annual wage increase for field and livestock workers in the FLS for the past five or ten years.

DOL in fact proposed a similar methodology in its 2020 AEWR Final Rule.61 That methodology would have abandoned the FLS, frozen worker wages for two years, and then adjusted the AEWR annually based on the Employment Cost Index for wages and salaries for the preceding 12 months. Freezing wages for two years would have been disastrous for workers, and DOL was rightly enjoined by a federal court from enforcing the 2020 AEWR Rule partly for that reason—but adjusting the FLS-based AEWR for inflation was a reasonable response to updated FLS data no longer being available.

H-2A employers should not be permitted to have their H-2A employees engage in non-agricultural tasks like construction for more than a small share of their work hours; never more than 20%

As discussed above, under the IFR farm operators will be permitted to employ H-2A workers who are paid at the combined farmworker occupations AEWR wage rates even when their job duties consist of non-agricultural tasks that would command much higher wages under the OEWS, for up to 50% of their workdays; so long as those job duties do not account for a majority of workdays. This will allow the employers of H-2A workers to undercut U.S. wage standards for occupations like construction and truck driving. Farm operators who primarily wish to hire construction workers, truck drivers, or workers in other non-agricultural occupations outside of the main farmworker (i.e. field and livestock worker combined) SOCs codes are eligible to utilize the H-2B program—which Congress created to fill labor shortages in occupations outside of agriculture—and should do so. Instead, DOL in the IFR has created a scheme that is rife with loopholes and that will be easily gamed by farm operators who can save on labor costs by hiring H-2A workers instead of U.S. construction workers and truck drivers, etc., who would command much higher wage rates than the combined farmworker SOC AEWRs. While it is understandable that H-2A workers in some cases will be required to carry out job duties that do not fall entirely under the main farmworker occupations—as DOL has acknowledged in the IFR by creating AEWRs by SOC codes for non-farm occupations—permitting anything beyond small share of an H-2A worker’s work hours to be dedicated to non-agricultural tasks risks undermining the statutory protections for workers in the H-2A program as well as the H-2B’s statutory protections and annual numerical limit. When certifying officers and State Workforce Agencies identify more than one SOC code for an occupation, they should require the employer to certify that the employee will not be engaged in duties that fall outside the definition of agriculture and the main combined farmworker SOC codes for more the 20% of the total work hours.

H-2A employers should be required to pay H-2A workers who engage in non-farm tasks at the higher non-farm wage for the occupation for 100% of their work hours, at skill level 2 or at the local average OEWS wage, whichever is higher

As discussed in the previous subsection, H-2A employers should not be permitted to have their H-2A employees engage in non-agricultural tasks like construction for more than a small share of their work hours; never more than 20%. If COs and SWAs identify more than one SOC code, including one that is outside of the main combined farmworker SOC codes (i.e. field and livestock worker combined), and where the worker will spend up to 20% of their work hours engaged in non-agricultural tasks and duties, then the H-2A worker should be paid the SOC code with the higher wage for 100% of the worker’s work hours. But skill level 1, because it is so far below the true market rate or the local median or average for both farm and non-farm occupations, should never set the AEWR for a non-agricultural occupation/SOC code. Instead, H-2A workers who are paid for 100% of their work hours for a non-agricultural occupation should be paid either the state median wage for the SOC—which is the skill level 2 AEWR—or the local average wage according to the occupation in the OEWS, if it is higher. The local average wage (i.e. the mean wage in the region or metropolitan statistical area, etc., as defined by the OEWS) is DOL’s H-2B wage methodology. The H-2B prevailing wage formulation should be included because H-2A workers performing duties in non-agricultural SOC codes will be doing work that would normally require an employer to hire an H-2B worker. Thus the same wage methodology must be utilized in order to prevent undercutting the wages of H-2B workers and U.S. workers similarly employed.

Paying workers for 100% of work hours at the highest wage rate for an applicable SOC code outside of the combined farmworker SOC codes is similar to DOL’s 2023 AEWR rule.62 In that rule, if the job duties on the H-2A application (including the job order) did not fall within a single occupational classification, and the occupations involved were subject to different AEWRs, the applicable AEWR would be the occupation with the highest wage for the applicable occupational classifications, and the worker would be paid for 100% of their work hours at that wage. The 2023 AEWR was vastly superior to the AEWR methodology in the IFR; EPI supported that proposed and final rule, with a key recommendation being that when the OEWS was used to set an AEWR, DOL should use the highest of the local or statewide OEWS wages. Agribusiness interests and employers filed multiple lawsuits that ultimately led to the 2023 rule being vacated recently, but only after the current administration ceased to defend the rule in court.63

If OEWS data are utilized to set wages, they should be set at the 90^th percentile wage for the state

The statutory mandate to ensure that U.S. workers are adequately recruited and that the employment of H-2A workers does “not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of workers in the United States similarly employed,” can only be met if the wage that employers must offer to U.S. workers to test the labor market is high enough to attract them and to prevent downward pressure on wages and standards in agriculture. Setting the wage at the new AEWRs according to the OEWS, a data set that is not appropriate for agricultural workers, will be far too low to attract available U.S. workers to work on farms. While DOL should not use the OEWS, if it continues to do so, DOL should not set the AEWR at percentiles (like the 17^th) that will put downward pressure on the wages of farmworkers. DOL could instead more adequately test the labor market and protect wages standards in agriculture by setting the AEWR at the 90^th percentile wage.

The following is one example comparing the OEWS 90^th percentile wage to the 2025 AEWR: Take the Farmworkers and Laborers, Crop, Nursery, and Greenhouse (SOC 45-2092) occupation in the OEWS for 2024—which is the most common and relevant farmworker occupation in the OEWS for H-2A jobs—and compare it with the wage rates set in the 2025 AEWR, which DOL set with FLS data from 2024. The 2025 AEWR for California, which is based on FLS data from 2024 (making it the more appropriate comparison year for 2024 OEWS wages) was $19.97. The 2024 OEWS 90^th percentile wage in California for SOC 45-2092 was $21.97 in 2024,64 about 10% percent more than the 2025 AEWR. The 2025 AEWR for Florida (based on 2024 FLS survey data) was $16.23, and the OEWS 90^th percentile wage for the occupation in 2024 was $17.81, just under 10% more than the FLS wage.

Since the OEWS already reports the 90th percentile wage, DOL would not have to do any complicated arithmetic when setting AEWRs. While still inadequate as compared to using FLS data, setting the AEWR at the 90^th percentile wage would help adjust for the fact that the OEWS only surveys non-farm employers that pay much lower wages to farmworkers and excludes directly-employed farmworkers. Setting the AEWR at the 90^th percentile wage, with a roughly 10% increase that results relative to the FLS data set of the same year in the main OEWS farmworker occupation in these two significant examples, would also help adjust for the fact that fringe benefits are not included in OEWS data—and help compensate for DOL’s ill-advised housing deductions—in either case making it a fairer wage vis-à-vis U.S. farmworkers, and going further to ensure that U.S. workers are adequately recruited and do not suffer adverse impacts. The 90^th percentile would also help protect the higher earners in farm occupations, rather than creating a de facto cap on H-2A earnings at the 50^th percentile (median) wage, which adversely impacts higher earners in the occupation. It must also be noted that 2024 OEWS wages are being used to set 2026 AEWRs in the IFR, despite being two years behind and not adjusted for inflation. If this recommendation is adopted, the 90^th percentile AEWRs should also be adjusted for inflation using the CBO’s projections in the Employment Cost Index, or by the annual average real increase in farmworker wages for the past five or ten years, if the OEWS wage data used are from years prior to the year for which they will be used to set the AEWR. (In other words the 2024 OEWS-based AEWRs should be adjusted for inflation to their projected real value in 2026, etc.)

Conclusion

There is no evidence to suggest that farmworkers overall have been overpaid or that the AEWR rates that H-2A workers have been paid are too high and unsustainable for farm operators to earn a profit. In fact, the evidence presented in this comment shows the opposite is true—that farmworkers are underpaid according to a number of metrics and their wages have far to go before they can reach levels that would make them comparable to workers employed outside of the agricultural industry. In addition, as USDA has pointed out, the modest increases in farm wages have been “offset” by productivity and output prices, so that “labor costs as a share of gross cash farm income have not shown an upward trend for the sector (as a whole) over the past 20 years.”65 Farmers have virtually exponentially increased their use of the H-2A program under the previous AEWR methodology—in fact its use and popularity is at an all-time high—contradicting DOL’s claims that the program needs radical changes to be sustainable for farm operators. As a result, DOL has not shown an adequate justification for sharply cutting the wages of H-2A farmworkers—or for lowering wages and reducing opportunities for U.S. farmworkers, which will inevitably result if the IFR is allowed to stay in place. In addition, The Administrative Procedure Act requires DOL to provide more notice and an opportunity for the public to comment—and must devise additional analyses and estimates regarding impacted stakeholders—before it can make such a radical change to a program that will impact the entire agricultural industry.

We urge DOL to resist the pressure from agribusiness to intentionally degrade wages and standards in the agricultural industry. Instead, we urge DOL to rescind the IFR and focus its efforts on protecting labor, health, and safety standards and worker rights for farmworkers, regardless of their immigration status, by vigorously enforcing the labor and employment laws that are applicable to farm operators.

Daniel Costa
Director of Immigration Law and Policy Research
Economic Policy Institute

Endnotes 

1. As counted by the latest Census of Agriculture from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2022.

2.  See Daniel Costa and Ben Zipperer, “Trump’s new H-2A wage rule will radically cut the wages of all farmworkers: New estimates show farmworkers stand to lose $4.4 to $5.4 billion annually under DOL’s updated Adverse Effect Wage Rate,” Working Economics blog (Economic Policy Institute), November 26, 2025.

3. Wenson Fung, Kimberly Prado, Amanda Gold, Andrew Padovani, Daniel Carroll, and Emily Finchum-Mason, Findings from the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) 2021–2022: A Demographic and Employment Profile of United States Crop Workers, Research Report no. 17, JBS International for the Employment and Training Administration, U.S. Department of Labor. September 2023.

4. See National Agricultural Statistics Service, “Agricultural (Farm) Labor,” for more background and to access Farm Labor Reports, U.S. Department of Agriculture.

5. Federal Policy Watch, “USDA ends the Agricultural (Farm) Labor Survey, the U.S.’s only survey of agricultural employers,” Economic Policy Institute, September 3, 2025.

6. Economic Policy Institute, State of Working America Data Library, “Hourly wage, average – Average real hourly wage (2024$),” 2025.

7. Economic Research Service, “Wages of Hired Farmworkers” in “Farm Labor,” U.S. Department of Agriculture, Updated November 18, 2025.

8. Wenson Fung, Kimberly Prado, Amanda Gold, Andrew Padovani, Daniel Carroll, and Emily Finchum-Mason, Findings from the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) 2021–2022: A Demographic and Employment Profile of United States Crop Workers, Research Report no. 17, JBS International for the Employment and Training Administration, U.S. Department of Labor. September 2023.

9. Veronica Nigh, “AEWR Methodology Change a Blow to Growers,” Market Intel, American Farm Bureau, March 30, 2023; American Hort, “Why You Can Expect Steep H-2A Wage Increases in 2022,” Greenhouse Grower, December 11, 2021.

10. Employment and Training Administration, Adverse Effect Wage Rate Methodology for the Temporary Employment of H-2A Nonimmigrants in Non-Range Occupations in the United States, U.S. Department of Labor, Interim Final Rule, 90 Fed. Reg. 47914, at 47923 (October 2, 2025).

11. Comments of Craig Regelbrugge in American Hort, “Why You Can Expect Steep H-2A Wage Increases in 2022,” Greenhouse Grower, December 11, 2021.

12. EPI analysis of Adverse Effect Wage Rates for 2021 and 2022 for the listed states; AEWRs are from the Employment and Training Administration, U.S. Department of Labor. All values have been adjusted to constant 2022 dollars using the Consumer Price Index (CPI-U). See also discussion and tables in Daniel Costa, “Testimony prepared for the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary for a hearing on ‘From Farm to Table, Immigrant Workers Get the Job Done,’” Economic Policy Institute, May 31, 2023.

13. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: Food in U.S. City Average [CPIUFDSL], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, last accessed November 26, 2025.

14. Economic Research Service, “Wages of Hired Farmworkers” in “Farm Labor,” U.S. Department of Agriculture, Updated November 18, 2025.

15. 5 U.S.C. § 553(b)(B)

16. Sorenson Commc’ns Inc. v. FCC, 755 F.3d 702, 706 (D.C. Cir. 2014).

17. Mack Trucks, Inc. v. EPA, 682 F.3d 87, 93 (D.C. Cir. 2012).

18. Wenson Fung, Kimberly Prado, Amanda Gold, Andrew Padovani, Daniel Carroll, and Emily Finchum-Mason, Findings from the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) 2021–2022: A Demographic and Employment Profile of United States Crop Workers, Research Report no. 17, JBS International for the Employment and Training Administration, U.S. Department of Labor. September 2023.

19. Jake Traylor, Myah Ward and Samuel Benson, “‘I really feel for her’: Brooke Rollins’ impossible Trump administration mandate,” Politico, July 10, 2025; Marcia Brown, “Ag secretary says able-bodied Medicaid recipients should replace immigrant farm workforce,” Politico, July 8, 2025.

20. Joseph Gedeon, “US agriculture secretary says Medicaid recipients can replace deported farm workers,” The Guardian, July 9, 2025.

21. See National Agricultural Statistics Service, “NASS discontinues select data collection programs and reports,” United States Department of Agriculture, August 28, 2025; for additional background see Federal Policy Watch, “USDA ends the Agricultural (Farm) Labor Survey, the U.S.’s only survey of agricultural employers,” Economic Policy Institute, September 2, 2025.

22. See Rural Migration News, “California: FLC Employment Down and Wages Up in 2020,” U.C. Davis, July 16, 2021. According to the latest data available from DOL’s Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, in 2024, directly hired crop farmworkers in California earned $905 per week, as compared to crop farmworkers employed by farm labor contractors (FLCs) who earned $649, or 72% of what directly-employed crop farmworkers earned. Nationwide in 2024, FLC employees earned 76% of what directly-employed crop farmworkers earned: $862 vs $655. See industry codes 111 (Crop production) and 115115 (Farm labor contractors and crew leaders).

23. See just one of many examples of reporting on this phenomenon: Felicia Mello and Wendy Fry, “State inspectors are supposed to visit all farmworker housing to ensure its safety. Sometimes they used FaceTime instead,” July 1, 2024.

24. Office of Foreign Labor Certification, Performance Data, Employment and Training Administration, U.S. Department of Labor [fiscal year 2024 data file for H-2A], last accessed November 25, 2025.

25. Wenson Fung, Kimberly Prado, Amanda Gold, Andrew Padovani, Daniel Carroll, and Emily Finchum-Mason, Findings from the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) 2021–2022: A Demographic and Employment Profile of United States Crop Workers, Research Report no. 17, JBS International for the Employment and Training Administration, U.S. Department of Labor. September 2023.

26. Zachariah Rutledge, Marcelo Castillo, Timothy J. Richards, Philip Martin, “H-2A Adverse Effect Wage Rates and U.S. farm wages,” American Journal of Agricultural Economics, first published June 9, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1111/ajae.12557.

27. For the full methodology, see the appendix in Daniel Costa and Ben Zipperer, “Trump’s new H-2A wage rule will radically cut the wages of all farmworkers: New estimates show farmworkers stand to lose $4.4 to $5.4 billion annually under DOL’s updated Adverse Effect Wage Rate,” Working Economics blog (Economic Policy Institute), November 26, 2025.

28. Given that U.S. workers typically do not experience nominal wage reductions, employers may implement the new lower pay rates for U.S. workers through wage freezes that are gradually eroded by inflation. At the same time, the high degree of churn and seasonality of farmworker jobs and the presence of a large contractor workforce may allow employers the opportunity to reduce U.S. wages more rapidly than would be the case in other sectors.

29. See discussion in Daniel Costa, The H-2B temporary foreign worker program: For labor shortages or cheap, temporary labor? Economic Policy Institute, January 19, 2016.

30. 90 Fed. Reg. 47941.

31. 90 Fed. Reg. 47955.

32. 7 U.S.C. § 2204

33. USDA, Farm Employment Estimates, 1910 Census: Volume 5, Agriculture (1913).

34. See Adverse Effect Wage Rate Methodology for the Temporary Employment of H-2A Nonimmigrants in Non-Range Occupations in the United States, 86 Fed. Reg. at 68178; Temporary Agricultural Employment of H-2A Aliens in the United States, Final Rule, 75 Fed. Reg. at 6898.

35. The most recent edition of the National Agricultural Workers Survey showed that in 2021-22, 78% of non-H-2A crop farmworkers worked directly for a farm employer (see page 25).

36. See Rural Migration News, “California: FLC Employment Down and Wages Up in 2020,” U.C. Davis, July 16, 2021. According to the latest data available from DOL’s Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, in 2024, directly hired crop farmworkers in California earned $905 per week, as compared to crop farmworkers employed by farm labor contractors (FLCs) who earned $649, or 72% of what directly-employed crop farmworkers earned. Nationwide in 2024, FLC employees earned 76% of what directly-employed crop farmworkers earned: $862 vs $655. See industry codes 111 (Crop production) and 115115 (Farm labor contractors and crew leaders).

37. A number of studies show a wage penalty for subcontracted/outsourced workers. For example, see Arindrajit Dube and Ethan Kaplan, “Does Outsourcing Reduce Wages in the Low-Wage Service Occupations? Evidence from Janitors and Guards,” Cornell University ILR Review. January 1, 2010); Deborah Goldschmidt and Johannes Schmieder, “The Rise of Domestic Outsourcing and the Evolution of the German Wage Structure,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 132(3), 2017, pages 1165-1217; Andres Drenik, Simon Jäger, Pascuel Plotkin, and Benjamin Schoefer “Paying Outsourced Labor: Direct Evidence from Linked Temp Agency-Worker-Client Data,” Econometrics Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, September 2020.

38. Daniel Costa, Philip Martin, and Zachariah Rutledge, Federal Labor Standards Enforcement in Agriculture: Data Reveal the Biggest Violators and Raise New Questions About How to Improve and Target Efforts to Protect Farmworkers, Economic Policy Institute, December 2020.

39. Congressional Budget Office, data supplement for CBO’s September 2025 report, CBO’s Current View of the Economy From 2025 to 2028, available at https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2025-09/51135-2025-09-Economic-Projections.xlsx

40. See Figure A in Daniel Costa and Philip Martin, Coronavirus and farmworkers: Farm employment, safety issues, and the H-2A guestworker program, Economic Policy Institute, March 24, 2020.

41. Temporary Agricultural Employment of H-2A Aliens in the United States, 74 Fed. Reg. 45905, 45911 (proposed Sept. 4, 2009).

42. Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) §212(p)(4).

43. See CATA v Solis, p. 36-37, AILA Infonet Doc No. 10100169. (Posted 10/01/10).

44. Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) §212(p)(4).

45. Daniel Costa and Ron Hira, H-1B visas and prevailing wage levels: A majority of H-1B employers—including major U.S. tech firms—use the program to pay migrant workers well below market wages, Economic Policy Institute, May 4, 2020.

46. Daniel Costa and Ron Hira, H-1B visas and prevailing wage levels: A majority of H-1B employers—including major U.S. tech firms—use the program to pay migrant workers well below market wages, Economic Policy Institute, May 4, 2020.

47. 75 Fed. Reg. 61580.

48. 75 Fed. Reg. 61580, see n.2.

49. 75 Fed. Reg. 61580.

50. 75 Fed. Reg. 61580.

51. Congressional Budget Office, data supplement for CBO’s September 2025 report, CBO’s Current View of the Economy From 2025 to 2028, available at https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2025-09/51135-2025-09-Economic-Projections.xlsx

52. 90 Fed. Reg. 47963.

53. See Figure B and discussion in Daniel Costa and Ron Hira, “EPI comment on DOL’s RFI regarding Schedule A modernization,” Economic Policy Institute, Public Comments, May 13, 2024. Submitted online via https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/02/15/2024-03187/labor-certification-for-permanent-employment-of-foreign-workers-in-the-united-states-modernizing

54. See Wage and Hour Division, “Agriculture” [data tables], U.S. Department of Labor, accessed November 2025, and discussion of previous years in Daniel Costa and Philip Martin, Record-low number of federal wage and hour investigations of farms in 2022: Congress must increase funding for labor standards enforcement to protect farmworkers, Economic Policy Institute, August 22, 2023.

55. Jake Barnes, Janice Fine, Daniel J. Galvin, Jenn Round, Hana Shepherd, To Help U.S. Workers, We Need Labor Standards Enforcement, Not Mass Deportations, Data Brief, Workplace Justice Lab, Rutgers University, May 2025.

56. Daniel Costa and Philip Martin, Record-low number of federal wage and hour investigations of farms in 2022: Congress must increase funding for labor standards enforcement to protect farmworkers, Economic Policy Institute, August 22, 2023.

57. See Adverse Effect Wage Rate Methodology for the Temporary Employment of H-2A Nonimmigrants in Non-Range Occupations in the United States, 86 Fed. Reg. at 68178; Temporary Agricultural Employment of H-2A Aliens in the United States; Final Rule, 75 Fed. Reg. at 6898.

58. Daniel Costa and Ron Hira, “EPI comments on DOL Request for Information on determining prevailing wage levels for H-1B visas and permanent labor certifications for green cards,” Economic Policy Institute, June 1, 2021, public comment submitted for Request for Information on Data Sources and Methods for Determining Prevailing Wage Levels for the Temporary and Permanent Employment of Certain Immigrants and Non-Immigrants in the United States, Request for Information, DOL Docket No. ETA-2021-0003, RIN: 1205-AC00. Regarding the OEWS and agricultural wages, see Daniel Costa, “EPI comments on DOL’s proposed changes to the Adverse Effect Wage Rate methodology for H-2A visas for temporary migrant farmworkers,” Economic Policy Institute, January 31, 2022, public comment submitted for Adverse Effect Wage Rate Methodology for the Temporary Employment of H-2A Nonimmigrants in Non-Range Occupations in the United States, RIN: 1205-AC05, DOL Docket No. ETA-ETA-2021-0006.

59. Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) §212(p)(4).

60. Congressional Budget Office, data supplement for CBO’s September 2025 report, CBO’s Current View of the Economy From 2025 to 2028, available at https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2025-09/51135-2025-09-Economic-Projections.xlsx

61. Employment and Training Administration, Adverse Effect Wage Rate Methodology for the Temporary Employment of H-2A Nonimmigrants in Non-Range Occupations in the United States, U.S. Department of Labor, 20 CFR Part 655, DOL Docket No. ETA-2019-0007, RIN 1205-AB89 (November 5, 2020).

62. Employment and Training Administration, Adverse Effect Wage Rate Methodology for the Temporary Employment of H-2A Nonimmigrants in Non-Range Occupations in the United States, U.S. Department of Labor, final rule, 20 CFR Part 655, DOL Docket No. ETA-2021-0006, RIN 1205-AC05 (February 28, 2023).

63. Judgment, Teche Vermilion Sugar Cane Growers Ass’n Inc. v. Su, No. 6:23-cv-00831-RRS-CBW (W.D.La. Aug. 21, 2025), ECF No. 87.

64. OEWS data for 2024: https://data.bls.gov/oes/#/area/0600000

65. Economic Research Service, “Labor Cost Share of Total Gross Revenues,” in “Farm Labor,” U.S. Department of Agriculture, Updated November 18, 2025.

The farmworkers who toil in the fields do not deserve a pay cut—they deserve a raise. Instead of cutting wages, the Trump administration should restore the previous standards that required employers to pay H-2A workers no less than the average wage for field and livestock workers according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Introduction to the H-2A visa program and the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR)

The H-2A visa program is used to fill seasonal and temporary jobs in agriculture, after employers go through a (mostly pro-forma) process to prove that they could not find an available U.S. worker to hire. With no annual limit on the number of workers that can be hired, H-2A has been the fastest-growing U.S. work visa program—nearly tripling over the past decade to 352,682 workers in 2024, according to our estimates (see Figure A). The vast majority of H-2A workers are employed on crop farms—picking fruits and vegetables—and the average duration of an H-2A job is roughly six months.

Figure A

It is well documented that the H-2A program is rife with abuse and workers are not adequately protected, in part because H-2A farmworkers are indentured to their employers through their visa status and due to lax government oversight. As a result, there have been countless exposés from journalists and advocates that reveal how H-2A farmworkers are frequently robbed, exploited, victimized, and trafficked, and EPI has shown how most back wages stolen and employer penalties levied on farms come from employers breaking H-2A rules.

Some governance aspects of the H-2A program have long been a contentious policy fight, especially when it comes to worker rights and setting minimum wage rates for H-2A workers. The H-2A law requires that H-2A workers be paid the highest of the local, state, or federal minimum wage, unless there is an applicable local prevailing wage or collective bargaining agreement—or the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR) if it is higher, which is calculated and set by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) based on survey data. In fact, the vast majority of H-2A farmworkers have been paid the AEWR, since until now it was almost always higher than any of the otherwise applicable minimum wages. The purpose of the AEWR is to ensure that H-2A workers are paid a wage that is consistent with U.S. wage standards on farms and to prevent adverse impacts of H-2A employment on U.S. farmworkers’ wages. But the agricultural industry has pushed lawmakers and federal agencies to modify the AEWR methodology to push H-2A wages as low as possible.

Since 2010, the AEWR in each state has been based on a survey of farm operators conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), commonly referred to as the Farm Labor Survey (FLS). While far from perfect, it is the best data set available on the wages of directly hired farmworkers in the United States. However, in August, the Trump administration’s USDA abruptly announced that it was discontinuing the FLS. A month later, DOL issued an interim final rule laying out a new AEWR based on data from a different data set, the Occupational Employment and Wages Statistics (OEWS) survey. OEWS is an inferior data set for agriculture and is not a valid survey for setting farmworkers’ wages, in part because it only surveys nonfarm employers—meaning farm labor contractors and other staffing firms. These nonfarm employers send farmworkers to different farms and pay them much less on average than the majority of workers who are hired directly by farm employers.

The Trump administration’s new regulation will drastically lower wages for migrant farmworkers hired through the H-2A visa program

The new Trump AEWR cuts wage rates dramatically and creates two artificial “skill levels” for each state which set H-2A wages at the 17^th percentile of wages surveyed (skill level 1) and at the 50^th percentile (skill level 2) based on five occupations DOL has determined are relevant in the OEWS. DOL estimates that 92% of H-2A workers will be paid at skill level 1 and 8% at skill level 2. The Trump DOL, in the preamble to its interim final rule, is fairly explicit about its desire to lower wages for H-2A farmworkers in order to benefit farm employers and increase H-2A hiring. And its move to eliminate the FLS and substitute it with the OEWS appears to be a key action taken to achieve that.

In addition, DOL has removed the previous requirement that employers pay for 100% of housing costs for H-2A workers. Currently, H-2A employers are required to provide housing for workers if they would not reasonably be able to return to their residences on a daily basis. This is important given that H-2A workers are so poorly paid that they cannot reasonably be expected to pay for their own housing. Further, H-2A workers are often employed on farms in remote areas that are not located close enough to a supply of affordable, accessible housing that still allows workers to report for duty for long hours in the fields. Reporter and worker advocates have documented many of the substandard conditions in employer-provided housing for farmworkers. However, instead of improving these problems, the AEWR lets farm owners take new deductions for housing out of H-2A workers’ paychecks—sometimes as much as 30% of their hourly pay.

Between wage cuts and housing deductions, DOL estimates that H-2A workers would lose over $1.7 billion under the new wage rule in 2026, amounting to $24 billion over the next 10 years as the program grows to over 500,000 jobs, as DOL predicts will occur. This would represent a shocking redistribution of income away from some of the country’s most essential and underpaid workers in order to line the pockets of farm employers.

However, we believe DOL’s estimates are incomplete because they fail to fully consider the new AEWR’s wage impacts, by not considering alternative methodologies and other scenarios that may result. For instance, DOL did not consider the impact on state minimum wage rates and whether the AEWR housing deduction may conflict with state laws, and DOL did not estimate the impact that a massive wage cut for H-2A farmworkers will have on U.S. farmworkers. In this post, we present new estimates that we hope will inform the public and DOL as to the true impact of the October 2025 AEWR. They should be considered low-end estimates because the interim final rule also permits farm operators to pay H-2A workers the AEWR for duties associated with higher-paying non-farm jobs for up to 50% of their work hours. This will put downward pressure on a number of occupations like construction and truck driving, but we have not attempted to calculate those losses to workers, and neither has DOL.

Trump’s H-2A wage rule will lead to a total pay cut of $4.4 to $5.4 billion for H-2A farmworkers and U.S. farmworkers

The interim final rule will significantly reduce H-2A workers’ wages. The average AEWR set for 2025 was $17.43 per hour, weighted by total weeks worked by state in 2024. The rule, however, proposes a two-tiered wage structure with far lower wages for 2026. The average skill level 1 and skill level 2 hourly wages would be $13.70 and $17.22, respectively, even without housing deductions. With housing deductions, the average level 1 and level 2 hourly wages would be $11.78 and $15.30, respectively.

In many cases, the new state AEWR wages are low enough to fall below state minimum wage laws, with the housing deduction lowering it even further. In some states, the AEWRs will fall below the state minimum wage only after housing deductions are subtracted. In all those cases, the state minimum wage supersedes the AEWR and sets the minimum H-2A wage. Currently, it is unclear how states will react to workers being paid below the state minimum after the housing deduction, and what guidance the federal government will provide with respect to it. For example, in Connecticut, the 2026 skill level 1 H-2A wage will be $15.93, but the 2026 state minimum wage will be $16.94. If the state fully enforces its minimum wage and prohibits pay rates from falling below the state minimum, then the lowest wage an H-2A worker could be paid legally is $16.94, and no housing deduction will be permitted. But if Connecticut or federal guidance allows the housing deduction to take the H-2A wage below the state minimum wage, then an H-2A worker in Connecticut could be paid as low as $14.88 per hour (i.e., the state minimum wage minus the $2.06 housing deduction).

It is possible that some states will take the position that the hourly wage rates paid to H-2A workers may not go below the state minimum after subtracting the housing deduction, while some states may allow the deduction, arguing that the federal AEWR regulation supersedes the state minimum wage law. The agricultural industry is likely to argue the latter, and the issue may end up in multiple state and federal courts. As a result of this uncertainty, our estimates consider both state minimum wage scenarios.

The first row of Table 1 estimates the annual pay losses for H-2A workers in 2026 under the interim final rule, assuming—as DOL does—that 92% of H-2A workers would be paid the skill level 1 wage. State minimum wage laws should not permit the hourly wage paid to H-2A workers to go below the state minimum wage; and in this scenario, H-2A annual wages would fall by $1.7 billion in 2026, or 25.8%. If state minimum wages are allowed to be undermined and the housing deduction drops the H-2A wage below the state minimum wage rates, the losses would be larger: a $2.1 billion or 31.5% annual pay loss. If some states prohibit and some permit the housing deduction to take the H-2A wage below the state minimum wage, then the total amount of annual pay losses would fall somewhere in between those two amounts.

Table 1

Reducing the AEWR for H-2A workers will also lower wages for U.S. farmworkers—one-third of whom are U.S-born citizens, according to the latest DOL survey. A fall in the H-2A wage will increase demand for H-2A workers, since employers can save significantly on labor costs if they hire them. As a result, it will become relatively more expensive to hire non-H-2A U.S. farmworkers. Employers will therefore reduce demand for U.S. farmworkers, putting downward pressure on their wages.

This is not hypothetical: Rutledge et al. found that a 10% increase in the AEWR caused an almost 2.8% increase in the wages of U.S. farmworkers. With those estimates, the authors estimated that a one-year AEWR wage freeze would reduce annual U.S. farmworker wages by $475 million. Using a similar methodology, we estimate the likely wage reductions for U.S. farmworkers due to the new rule (see the appendix for methodological details).

As we showed earlier, the H-2A wage reduction under a fully enforced minimum wage would be 25.8%. Based on the responsiveness of U.S farmworker wages to H-2A wage rates from Rutledge et al., the second row of Table 1 shows that the new rule could reduce U.S. farmworker annual wages by $2.7 billion, or 7.1%. The wage losses are again larger if states allow the housing deduction to push pay below the state minimum. In that case, U.S. farmworkers in 2026 would experience an annual pay cut of $3.3 billion, or 8.7%.

This means that farmworkers in total will see annual pay cuts of about $4.4 billion to $5.4 billion (9.9% to 12.1%), depending on the enforcement of state minimum wage laws. This amounts to a massive pay cut for farmworkers who are already some of the lowest-paid employees in the entire U.S. labor market, while working in one of the most difficult and dangerous jobs in the economy.

Conclusion and recommendations

Without question, the Trump DOL has established an AEWR that will lead to much lower pay for both U.S. farmworkers and those recruited from abroad through the H-2A program—and that appears to be its explicit intention. H-2A and U.S. farmworkers risk their lives and health in dangerous conditions like extreme heat in order to put food on the tables of U.S. households. These workers do not deserve a pay cut—they deserve a raise.

The Trump DOL is accepting input from the public through the Federal Register website on the AEWR interim final rule until December 1, 2025, which they are required by law to consider when crafting the final version of the rule. The Trump administration should reconsider its recent actions and listen to the many farmworker advocates and unions who have criticized the new AEWR for its negative impacts. However, the Trump administration has made clear it doesn’t care about the well-being of immigrant workers, or improving the quality of the jobs in which they’re overrepresented. In fact, Trump has expressed wanting to improve jobs and opportunities for native-born workers through the exclusion, deportation, or terrorizing of immigrant workers—something we know won’t work. The AEWR rule policy change, however, shows that the administration is still willing to help agribusiness more easily hire the most exploitable and underpaid labor possible—even if it decimates the jobs and wages of the one-third of farmworkers who are U.S.-born citizens.

Instead of taking money out of the pockets of U.S.-born and foreign-born farmworkers alike, the administration should at minimum:

• Reinstate the USDA Farm Labor Survey, which has been the best available source of government data on farmworkers’ wages and employment;
• Issue an updated AEWR rule with a methodology that reverts back to the previous rule that requires employers to pay H-2A workers no less than the average wage for field and livestock workers as reported in the FLS; and
• Prohibit farm employers from hiring H-2A workers for jobs where they will perform non-farm tasks like construction for more than a trivial portion of their work hours. Those workers should be hired through the H-2B program, or if they remain in the H-2A program, they should be paid the higher non-farm wage for the occupation for 100% of their work hours.

Last week, ICE agents violently removed organizer and advocate Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez from his car while dropping his partner off at work. Juarez is well known in Washington state for fighting for farmworkers’ basic rights, such as overtime pay and protections from extreme heat. Although Juarez lacks an immigration status and had an order of removal dating back to 2018, he had no criminal record and was thus likely targeted for his work with workers’ rights organizations. He is currently being held in the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma.

Nearly half of farmworkers are undocumented immigrants according to government estimates, which means they are much more likely to be the victims of workplace violations like wage theft because they fear deportation if they speak up to defend their rights. The targeting and detention of Alfredo Juarez is a prime example of how employers and the government can exploit an individual’s immigration status to intimidate workers from exercising their right to organize as a means of improving their working conditions. We don’t know how Juarez got on ICE’s radar, but could a disgruntled and anti-union employer have called ICE and told them to look into Juarez? It’s not out of the realm of possibility—and it’s certainly a tactic that employers have at their disposal, especially now under the current White House leadership which ultimately values terrorizing immigrants rather than public safety or workers’ rights.

Immigrant workers, even those who lack immigration status or have temporary status and permission to work, are protected under U.S. labor and employment laws—at least on paper. However, many employers can violate workers’ rights with near impunity because labor standards enforcement agencies are woefully underfunded and understaffed, and there are insufficient penalties to punish those who break labor laws. For example, there are no civil monetary penalties for when employers violate workers’ rights under the National Labor Relations Act. A 2019 EPI study found that employers were charged with violating labor law in 41.5% of all union elections. Simply put, employers will use any means necessary, including legal and illegal forms of intimidation, to dissuade workers from advocating for fair pay and better working conditions.  

While some federal labor laws protect farmworkers, they are excluded from others, which makes their experience in the workplace even more precarious, leaving them to rely on a patchwork of laws in a small handful of states that provide some basic labor protections. Despite being the backbone of the U.S. food supply, farmworkers experience low pay, dangerous working conditions, and harsh living conditions.

Fortunately, Washington state law entitles a majority of farmworkers to the state minimum wage, overtime pay, and the right to join unions. For more than a decade, Alfredo Juarez organized to improve these state laws. Even just last month, Juarez led a group of farmworker activists to Washington’s capitol to speak with state lawmakers about working conditions in the fields. By detaining a prominent union organizer, the Trump administration has sent a message that exercising your legal right to improve your working conditions can make you the target of a government that won’t think twice about putting you in a cage and removing you from the country.

Immigration has been a source of strength for the U.S. economy and has great potential to boost it even more, but the current U.S. immigration policy regime squanders too many of its potential benefits by depriving immigrants of their full rights as workers and granting employers too much power to manipulate the system. It is crystal clear that immigration expands U.S. gross domestic product and is good for growth. And immigration overall has led to better, not worse, wages and work opportunities for U.S.-born workers. Yet, it is also clear that when workers are denied full and equal labor and employment rights, as some immigrants are when their immigration status is used against them—it makes immigrant workers’ lives more precarious and can harm the people with whom they work side-by-side in the same industries.

Even in the face of our unjust policy regime, immigration today provides numerous benefits to the U.S. economy. The nation could benefit even more, and the benefit could be shared more widely with a smarter set of immigration policies that benefit all workers.

The benefits are too often overlooked, and the challenges it poses for policymakers and U.S.-born workers are often grossly exaggerated. In this paper, we assess the evidence on immigration’s effect on a number of economic outcomes given the policy status quo. We then go on to highlight how immigration status impacts wages and working conditions, and finally, offer recommendations on how to craft a better immigration policy regime—one that grants immigrants their full rights as workers in U.S. labor markets, generating broad benefits for U.S. and foreign-born workers alike. Our key findings are: 

• Immigration is enabling economic growth despite the sharp deceleration in the growth of the U.S.-born workforce. Immigrants have risen as a share of the U.S. population in recent decades. Because immigrants are younger and more likely to be working age than the U.S.-born population, they have risen even faster as a share of the labor force. These trends are driven as much by the sharp deceleration of growth of the U.S.-born workforce as they are by a sharp increase in the absolute scale of immigration flows. Even when available data are adjusted to better reflect the notable increase in immigration in recent years, the growth of the foreign-born population since 2022 is not out of line with other historical periods (and is lower than what prevailed in the late 1990s). What is unprecedented in recent years is the rapid deceleration of growth in the U.S.-born population—a population that will soon start seeing outright contraction. Without immigration, the prime-age workforce (between the ages of 25 and 54) would have seen essentially no growth at all in the past quarter century, dramatically constricting the ability to grow our economy and staff key industries. 
• Immigration does not reduce the number of jobs available for U.S.-born workers and has provided a source of deflationary pressure in recent years. Macroeconomic policymakers like the Federal Reserve and Congress have both the necessary tools and the obligation to ensure that demand in the economy is strong enough to absorb willing workers in a reasonable amount of time. Historical periods when job opportunities have become scarce were not driven by increased immigration flows but instead by the failures of macroeconomic policymakers to respond in a timely fashion to weakness in demand for labor. Immigration flows generally do not make policymakers’ task of matching macroeconomic supply and demand any harder because immigrants add to both economywide supply (by increasing labor supply) and demand (by buying goods and services). Overall, immigrants likely tilt this balance more toward supply relative to U.S.-born workers, but only by a bit. This net supply increase is sometimes quite useful—by boosting supply a bit more than demand over the 2021–2023 period, immigration provided a source of deflationary pressure that helped bring inflation down in those years, while also assisting in preventing a recession. 
• Immigration’s effects on U.S. wages overall range from neutral to slightly positive. Immigrant workers tend to complement rather than substitute for U.S.-born workers of similar educational levels. The educational mix of immigrants is much more similar to that of U.S.-born workers than is often recognized, hence limiting the scope for competition from immigrants to lower wages for any U.S.-born workers of any particular educational background. Additionally, while the overall wage effects from immigration are neutral to slightly positive for U.S.-born workers, it is true that our flawed immigration policy regime often sees employers use the precariousness of some immigrant workers to suppress wage growth in particular sectors. Immigration reforms that remove this precariousness would aid the wage growth of both immigrants and the U.S.-born workers they work alongside in these labor markets. 

• Immigration is clearly positive for the balance of taxes and spending at the federal level. Immigrants pay substantial amounts of tax (nearly $100 billion in the most recent years, and almost $60 billion in federal taxes) and yet are often excluded from drawing on key benefits. At the state and local level, the balance is much closer. The types of goods and services provided by these governments (public education and infrastructure, for example) are generally more available to immigrant families regardless of their legal status. Taken together, the net of federal and state/local taxes and spending stemming from immigration flows is positive, with immigrants paying more in taxes relative to what they draw in spending than U.S.-born households.

• Increased housing costs are caused not by immigration, but by the failure of U.S. housing markets to meet any new demand with more housing units rather than higher prices. Immigration, like any source of population growth, can put upward pressure on housing prices on the demand side. Yet the rapid rise in housing costs over the past decade has come at a time when overall population growth has slowed significantly—indicating strongly that the root of the problem is a dysfunctional housing supply side that translates any housing demand increase into sharp price increases rather than newly constructed housing. This can be seen most clearly in the very large run-up in home prices in 2020 and 2021, just as rates of immigration were plummeting. Further, higher rental costs stemming from the intersection of population growth and supply-side rigidity actually boost housing wealth for homeowners, who are disproportionately U.S.-born. Finally, immigrants are a key source of labor that boosts the supply side of housing markets. Anti-immigrant reforms (like mass deportations) done in the name of preserving housing affordability for U.S.-born workers could well see large increases in housing costs due to resulting shortages of workers employed in residential construction.

• People who immigrate into the United States increase the economy’s stock of human capital and ideas, two crucial ingredients for long-run economic growth. Immigrants can provide a key source of innovation and economic vitality. If immigration into the United States allows talented individuals a better chance of realizing their full potential and contributing to economic activity at their maximum level than they would have had in their country of origin, this immigration flow can be highly beneficial for both the U.S. and global economies. Research on past waves of immigration shows that they had positive causal effects on long-run economic growth in the United States. 

• Policy reforms that grant immigrants full rights in the labor market spur benefits for everyone in the U.S. economy. The evidence is clear that workers who lack formal immigration status or have precarious or temporary immigration statuses experience degraded pay and conditions. Thus, the most obvious and pressing policy priority is to provide a quick and broad path to legal status and a green card (and eventually citizenship) for the currently unauthorized immigrant population. Regularization would provide a near instant wage boost for these workers, which would in turn bid up wages in the labor markets they share with U.S.-born workers. The same logic, backed by research, suggests that future immigration flows should rely much more on green cards than temporary work visas. Green cards give immigrant workers the ability to shop around for the best fit for their skills and abilities, which breaks employers’ power over these workers and helps lift standards for all workers. Allowing temporary migrant workers to control their own visas rather than being tied to specific employers would also be a win-win for both foreign-born and U.S.-born workers.
• Underresourced labor standards enforcement is enabling low-road employers to abuse immigrant workers with impunity and flout basic worker protections. Rather than spending tens of billions of dollars per year for immigration enforcement, what’s needed are more resources and staffing for labor standards enforcement agencies and a more strategic focus on labor standards enforcement that does not take immigration status into account. Lawbreaking employers who abuse workers of any status should face much higher chances of being caught and much higher penalties than they currently do.

Immigration to the U.S. provides many economic benefits, and those benefits would increase substantially if immigration policy was improved to guarantee equal and enforceable labor and workplace rights. With proper alignment with other policy spheres, such as investment in physical and human infrastructure, win-win opportunities abound for the United States with respect to future immigration flows or even expansions. 

Current and historical immigration and where immigrants are in the U.S. economy

Immigrants in the economy and recent growth in the immigrant population

Migrants and immigrants who resided in the United States in 2022 accounted for 13.8% of the population, as measured by the American Community Survey (ACS). The ACS is perhaps the most commonly used source for the size of the foreign-born population. However, we can get slightly more timely data from a different data source, the Current Population Survey (CPS). The CPS is also the most cited source of data on labor market trends in the United States. Because of this, we also show CPS-based trends in the annual foreign-born shares of the U.S. population in Figure A. In 2023, this share was 14.9%.1

Figure A

Because so many debates around immigration center around its effect on U.S. labor markets, in Figure B we also present the number and share of immigrants in the overall labor force, defined as those ages 16 and older who are working or seeking jobs. As of last year, the U.S. workforce had 31.0 million immigrants, or 18.6% of the total U.S. labor force. Since 2000, immigrants have been more likely to be in the labor force than U.S-born workers, largely reflecting the fact that immigrants are younger and more likely to be of working age than the U.S. born population.2

Figure B

Immigrant flows have fluctuated greatly in recent years. During the beginning of the Trump administration and also the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, immigration slowed due to border closures and other restrictions. As those restrictions were lifted, a strong U.S. labor market and high employer demand for workers coincided with a reestablishment of the administrative elements of the immigration system and higher immigration flows. Immigration flows over the last two years have been relatively high according to some estimates, prompting calls for more immigration enforcement at the U.S. southern border and restrictions on asylum, and discussions about the number of new arrivals that the U.S. economy can absorb.

However, Figure C shows that while recent flows of migrants and immigrants into the United States have been high, the number of immigrants residing in the United States at any given point is growing at a rate similar to other periods of high immigration like the late 1990s. The decennial censuses estimated that the foreign-born (immigrant) population grew by 4.6% annually between 1990 and 2000. Between 1994 and 2000, the immigrant population in the CPS grew by 5.6% annually. In contrast, recent data from the CPS show that the 2022–2023 immigrant population growth rate was 3.7%.

Figure C

Recently there has been some debate as to whether the CPS may underestimate recent growth in immigration levels.3 After making an adjustment to account for this undercount, the CBO (2024) estimated significantly higher immigration levels using CPS data, but even with this adjustment, the modified CBO/CPS flows between 2022 and 2023 are still lower than estimates from the late 1990s. The modified CBO/CPS immigrant population growth between 2022 and 2023 was 4.8%, compared with an annual rate of 5.6% between 1994 and 2000 using the unmodified CPS.4

The rates in Figure C also show how U.S.-born population growth has been declining, from 0.9% annually in the 1990s to 0.2% in 2022–2023. Figure D examines this in more detail, focusing on the prime-age labor force—i.e., those who are ages 25 through 54 and employed or seeking work. Over the last three decades, the total size of the U.S.-born prime-age labor force has essentially stayed the same. In fact, were it not for immigration, the total prime-age U.S. labor force would have stagnated: Over 95% of the cumulative growth of the labor force in the past three decades is due to immigration.

Figure D

Occupations that rely heavily on immigrants

In 2023, immigrants were about 18.6% of U.S. employment, and many immigrants are disproportionately concentrated within a select number of occupations. Table 1 shows the top-ten major occupation groups with the highest shares of immigrants. These occupations have immigrant shares of employment ranging from about 21% to 40%, and together they comprise just over half (54%) of all employed immigrants in 2023.

Table 1

Immigrants are often associated with agricultural occupations—and they do comprise two-thirds of the workforce in crops (Fung et al. 2023), but because of the relatively small total size of agricultural occupations overall, most immigrants work in other types of jobs. For example, in 2023, 2.2 million immigrants were employed in “Building and grounds cleaning and maintenance” occupations, like janitors, custodial workers, and landscapers, accounting for 40% of employment in the occupation. For the purpose of comparison, the 2.2 million immigrants in the occupation is the roughly the same number of all hired farmworkers, including immigrants and U.S.-born citizens (USDA 2024). Immigrants were also about one out of every four (24%) workers in “Healthcare support occupations,” which include jobs like home care aides and nursing, dental, and medical assistants.

While immigrants work in some high-paying occupations, many of the occupations in which immigrants are disproportionately concentrated typically pay low wages. Table 1 shows that a majority of the top-ten occupation groups with higher shares of immigrants have median hourly wage rates that are substantially lower than the national median wage. For example, building and grounds cleaning and maintenance workers, who had a national median wage of $17 an hour in 2023, were paid 32% less than the 2023 national median wage of $25 per hour.

Health care support occupations are also paid a wage that is much lower than the median national wage (28% lower). These occupations, however, are expected to be among the fastest growing over the next decade according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS 2023). If BLS employment projections turn out to be correct, and if we assume that immigrant workers will continue to fill the same share of jobs in the occupation that they do now (24%), then that implies over 250,000 more immigrants will be needed for health care support jobs alone between 2023 and 2032 (BLS 2024b). Low wages and large workforce requirements suggest that we should ensure that immigrants who fill these jobs arrive with full and equal employment rights and a path to citizenship. The second-fastest growing occupation according to BLS will be in computer and mathematical occupations, an occupation that is expected to grow by 15.2% (BLS 2023) and in which 27% of current workers are immigrants.

Economic effects and impacts of immigration

This section provides a review of arguments and evidence on how immigration can affect economic outcomes. We focus on a range of issues in which particular concerns about the effects of immigration have been commonly raised in public debates: jobs, wages, fiscal effects, housing, and long-run economic growth. We also highlight in each section how policy changes can loosen any particular trade-off that might bind from balancing the benefits of higher immigration and the economic welfare of U.S.-born residents.

This focus on the economic welfare of U.S.-born residents is not because it is the only population we care about. It is instead because this is a politically salient issue, and because disentangling the effects on U.S.-born residents helps inform sound policymaking to promote broadly shared prosperity.

For example, calculations are occasionally presented regarding the “economic impact” of immigration that simply tally up all spending done in the U.S. by immigrants. This is a large-sounding number (on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars at least). But increasing overall gross domestic product (GDP) or overall consumer spending by increasing the number of people (and workers) in an economy does not mean much in terms of impacting the welfare of any individual (whether immigrant or native-born) in that country. What matters far more for human welfare is income or spending per capita, and how it grows over time.

An equally useless exercise would be to remove a particular set of immigrants from calculations of per capita GDP—note that this removal increases per capita GDP—and suggest that this tells us something about the economic effect of immigration. Removing lower-income segments will inflate the average income of any group simply through composition effects. This removal does nothing to boost any real person’s income or living standards; it is simply an arithmetic quirk.

In what follows, we aim to provide a serious discussion of the substantive effects of immigration on various economic outcomes.

Employment effects of immigration

A common trope in immigration debates is that immigrants take jobs away from native-born workers. The weakness in this argument is fairly obvious: It presumes there are a fixed number of jobs that does not respond at all to rising immigration flows. But that’s not how employment generation works. Take the most obvious example of why this reasoning is wrong: There are 70 times more people in the United States as there are in Norway (a similarly rich country). There are also almost 70 times as many jobs in the United States as there are in Norway. Is it just a lucky coincidence that the United States was able to generate 70 times as many jobs as Norway and give decent employment outcomes for our much larger population?

Obviously not. When an economy is being managed well, it should be providing a job for essentially all people in the economy who want to work regardless of how large or small that number of people is. Immigration does not change this, and it does not even put much pressure at all on the mechanisms that are supposed to ensure near full employment of every person who wants a job.

In the jargon of macroeconomists, unemployment rises when growth in aggregate demand lags behind growth in potential output. Aggregate demand is simply all desired spending in the economy; consumption spending by households, investment spending by businesses, and public spending by governments. Potential output is a measure of how much the economy could produce if nearly all of the economy’s willing workers were employed. When aggregate demand falls beneath the economy’s potential output, then unemployment rises.

This logic might at first glance seem to buttress fears about increased immigration in generating unemployment—a larger labor force boosts the economy’s potential output, and if this boost pushes it above the economy’s aggregate demand, then unemployment results. But the fault in this story is essentially never that potential output is rising too fast; it is instead that aggregate demand is falling too rapidly (or rising too slowly).

The key insight here is that aggregate demand moves far more quickly than potential output, and it swings up and down much more in compressed periods of time. In short, recessions and recoveries are clearly driven by these quick and large movements in aggregate demand, not in the steady rise of potential output.

So long as policymakers recognize any change in potential output in a reasonably short time frame—like an increased labor supply stemming from immigration—then they can adjust aggregate demand to ensure enough jobs are created to keep unemployment rates from rising. Aggregate demand can be boosted through either monetary or fiscal policy interventions, with the Federal Reserve using monetary policy tools like interest rate cuts to boost demand and Congress and the president setting taxes and spending at levels that boost demand when that is needed (in practice, fiscal policy is the more powerful tool if used effectively). Support for the idea that policy can quickly restore falls in aggregate demand is provided by the U.S. economic recovery from the COVID-19 recession. In late 2020, there was a burst of job creation as the first wave of the pandemic eased and the economy reopened. Nevertheless, in December of that year, the unemployment rate remained high at 6.7%, and job growth had turned negative. But thanks to fiscal recovery packages passed in December 2020 and March 2021, by the end of 2021 the unemployment rate had already fallen below 4.0%—essentially matching the immediate pre-pandemic level.5

Further, policymakers in charge of aggregate demand really do not have to try all that hard to keep aggregate demand matched to potential output as immigration flows rise. Immigrants do boost potential output—but they also boost aggregate demand. That is, immigrants are not only workers, but they are also consumers.

Relative to U.S.-born residents, immigrants do tend to boost potential output a bit more than they boost aggregate demand, mostly by virtue of being younger and hence more likely to work than U.S.-born residents.6 Because immigration boosts potential output a bit more than aggregate demand, the net effect is slightly deflationary. Overall, this deflationary slant of immigration is neither good nor bad. Sometimes deflationary influences in the economy need to be counterbalanced by policymakers, but sometimes deflationary influences just help reach targets policymakers are already aiming for.

The obvious example of the latter is the beneficial deflationary effect of a rebound in immigration following the immigration collapse of 2020. The pandemic led to a very sharp fall in net immigration in that year (in part because of slowdowns of visa processing at U.S. consulates around the world and mass layoffs in sectors with a heavy immigrant worker presence). As the pandemic also led to a sharp rise in inflation as the economy recovered, policymakers began looking for ways to reduce these inflationary pressures in late 2021 and 2022. The rebound in immigration flows in 2022 and 2023 clearly went in the correct direction to help tamp down inflation, though this effect can be exaggerated. The overall dynamics of inflation over the whole 2021–2023 period were generally not driven by the labor market. Wage growth consistently muffled instead of amplified price inflation, and it was the extraordinary growth in corporate profit margins that was a key part of the initial inflation surge in 2021.7 Though inflation was not caused by labor markets, the rebound of immigration flows in 2022 and 2023 provided some measure of deflationary relief in those years.

It is also worth noting that immigration is not the only challenge facing policymakers in charge of aggregate demand. Similar challenges exist for all sorts of economic influences—technological change, exchange rate movements driven by events abroad, sharp changes in household wealth driven by financial market excesses, and many others. There is nothing uniquely challenging about sustaining job creation in the face of immigration flows if policymakers have the will to do it. If any significant number of U.S.-born workers are finding it hard to find work, it is macroeconomic policymakers, not immigrants, who are to blame.

As important as it is for policymakers to keep unemployment low for all workers, this consideration should be mostly irrelevant when considering optimal immigration policy. U.S. immigration policy should decide the level and composition of immigrant flows that the U.S. should seek to absorb—taking into consideration the need for new workers or to meet humanitarian obligations, etc.—and in terms of the effect of that immigration policy on jobs and employment for U.S.-born workers, macroeconomic policymakers should just seek to keep aggregate demand at levels that keep unemployment low and jobs plentiful for the number of people entering the workforce.

It is worth reemphasizing how much the experience of the U.S. labor market in the years after the pandemic highlights the point that there is no trade-off between immigration and job opportunities for U.S.-born workers. Even as there has been an increased inflow of immigrants and immigrant workers in recent years following the dip driven by the Trump administration and pandemic shutdowns, unemployment rates for U.S.-born workers are historically low, and the share of prime-age U.S.-born workers with a job is historically high. While we remain concerned that in the medium- to long-term, there are potential significant challenges to having millions of new workers entering the workforce who only have temporary, precarious statuses, it is nevertheless an odd historical moment indeed to raise the specter that rapid growth of immigrant workers is hurting the job prospects of U.S.-born workers. Very simple policy changes—namely, providing these workers with full workplace rights and the ability to participate in society that comes with a green card—could blunt those challenges and maximize the economic benefits these new workers can bring.

Finally, we should note that while immigration poses no real challenge to creating enough jobs for U.S.-born workers, one particularly damaging form of immigration policy could profoundly affect these jobs: mass deportation. One example comes from a recent study by East et al. (2023), which looked at past episodes of significant deportations and found that for each 1 million immigrants seized and deported from the United States, 88,000 jobs were lost for U.S.-born workers. These deportations reduced local demand for output, which led to job loss, and they led to employers having to shut down all production in the face of key bottlenecks incurred by losing their immigrant workforce, including production that supported employment of U.S.-born workers.

Immigration and wages

One of the major concerns about immigration is that it could reduce the wages of U.S.-born workers. Yet across the economy broadly, a large body of empirical evidence suggests this concern is misplaced. A review by Peri (2014) of more than 270 estimates from 27 published studies found that the average effect of immigration on native-born wages is essentially zero. Two-thirds of studies were clustered around zero, finding small positive or small negative effects. The comprehensive review of immigration, wages, and employment by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) found that “when measured over a period of more than 10 years, the impact of immigration on the wages of natives overall is very small” (NASEM 2017). Below we explain some of the mechanisms behind why increased immigration does not tend to harm the wages paid to U.S.-born workers, at least at the broader nationwide level.

The conventional warning about how immigration can reduce the wages of U.S.-born workers is a supply-side story in which large flows of immigrants push down the market wages of otherwise comparable native-born workers. In this story, the labor market employs some mix of workers of different education levels: workers with college degrees and workers without college degrees. Under this theory, the relative supply of and demand for these different types of workers determine their relative wages. Immigration can then change the wage structure by changing the mix of low-education and high-education workers. In particular, if immigration increases the relative supply of workers without a high school degree, there could be downward pressure on market wages for all low-education workers, including U.S.-born workers.

To a rough approximation, however, immigration in the United States in recent decades has not dramatically changed the relative mix of the workforce that has or doesn’t have college degrees. Figure E shows that the share of foreign-born workers with a college degree is similar to that of U.S.-born workers: About 4 in 10 people in the U.S. labor force has college degrees, whether or not they were born in the United States or in another country. This empirical fact greatly reduces the scope of any substitution between types of workers and therefore also limits any resulting wage effect of immigration on U.S.-born workers. Historically, increasing the number of immigrants has had little effect on the educational mix of U.S. workers.

Figure E

Wages are, of course, not solely determined by a simple model of college and noncollege labor, and the education distribution of immigrants is not completely identical to U.S.-born workers. There are relatively more foreign-born workers with no high school degree, but also relatively more foreign-born workers with advanced degrees. But adding more real-world complications to a simple model of wage determination also further limits the scope of immigration’s effect on the overall wages of U.S.-born workers.

For example, immigration to a particular area also increases demand for goods and services. As immigrants purchase food and housing, they raise the overall demand for labor, offsetting the potential wage decreases induced by increased labor supply. In addition, investment will eventually respond to the increased demand and also to the increased population growth that raises the relative productivity of physical capital. Once capital can adjust to the change in population, there is little to no long-run effect of immigration on average wages (Card 2012).

The naïve story about college and noncollege workers above implicitly assumes that at least within education categories, foreign-born workers are essentially identical to U.S.-born workers. However, empirical evidence like Peri and Sparber’s (2009) makes clear that even within education categories, U.S.- and foreign-born workers often have different skills and perform different tasks at work.

It is also useful to point out here that the idea or claim that most immigrants work in low-wage jobs is inaccurate. As depicted in Figure F, Kallick and Capote (2023) found that among persons who work full-time and year-round, the share of immigrants with higher-wage jobs that pay more than twice the median earnings level (17%) is the same as the share of U.S.-born workers. They also found that 65% of immigrant workers who work full-time and year-round earn at least two-thirds of median earnings.

Figure F

Immigrants may be overrepresented in some jobs and underrepresented in others, but the difference between the U.S.- and foreign-born shares is rarely as dramatic as is often assumed. Immigrants are strongly represented in some high-wage jobs and play a significant role in many middle-wage jobs. For example, 24.6% of dental, nursing, and health aides are immigrants, as are 37.7% of computer software developers—well above immigrants’ 18.6% share of the labor force.8 While immigrants are overrepresented in low-wage occupations, immigrants are a significant part of the top, middle, and bottom of the economic ladder in the workforce.

A final reason the wage impact of immigration is smaller than one might expect is that recent immigrants are very geographically mobile. Basso and Peri (2020) show that newly arrived immigrants with less than ten years in the United States are more likely to move across states and different labor markets than U.S.-born workers. When employment demand in a local labor market is declining (or increasing), recently arrived immigrants are much more likely than native-born workers to move away from (or into) that locality. Because of this exit option, employers may have somewhat less leverage over immigrants than they would otherwise. Recently arrived immigrants therefore reduce the monopsony and wage-setting power employers have over immigrants and also U.S.-born workers who are viewed as substitutes.

At the same time, research has shown that some incumbent foreign-born workers are more likely than U.S.-born workers to be substituted by employers for newly arrived immigrants. As a result, the wage effects of increased immigration on previous immigrants may be more negative. Ottaviano and Peri (2012) found that while immigration had small positive effects on the wages of U.S.-born workers, it had negative effects on the wages of foreign-born workers. Policies should thus be implemented to ensure that wages are not degraded for immigrants who have already resided in the United States for many years.

Immigration, taxes, and public spending

The preponderance of the research and evidence shows that immigration does not create a fiscal burden. Differences between the U.S.-born and immigrant populations in the taxes they pay and the public services and benefits they receive improve the fiscal position of the federal government while, to a lesser extent, putting financial pressure on state and local governments. As detailed in the 2017 NASEM report and related research, the net effect is positive over the lifetimes of immigrants, their children, and grandchildren (NASEM 2017; Orrenius 2017).

The fact that immigration is a boon to the federal government’s fiscal balance but a strain on state and local governments’ balances can be addressed by increasing the federal share of jointly funded programs. Since the federal government already transfers nearly a trillion dollars annually to state and local governments through numerous grant programs, these transfers could simply be made more generous. A perhaps bigger challenge is that the short-term fiscal impact of immigration can be negative even if the long-term impact is positive.

Relative to U.S.-born residents at equivalent income levels, immigrants put less strain on other taxpayers because they have high employment rates and do not qualify for many public services and benefits. Further, immigrants have little or no impact on the cost of national defense, foreign aid, interest on the national debt, and similar expenses known as public goods. However, if an equal share of these costs is assigned to immigrants, the NASEM report found that they and their children and grandchildren will pay less in taxes than they will receive in services and transfer payments over their lifetimes, as is also true of U.S.-born residents (keeping in mind that the United States consistently runs a budget deficit in the consolidated government sector).

This does not mean that immigration is costly to U.S.-born residents, however. To the contrary, immigrants will pay more in taxes than the additional public spending they generate. That is, immigrants’ net contribution is enough to reduce the taxes paid by others—just not enough to cover a proportionate share of public goods like national defense and interest on the debt (NASEM 2017; Orrenius 2017).

Most immigrants to the United States arrive as adults, and some 30–40% later return to their countries of origin, often following a drop in earnings (NASEM 2017; Migration Policy Institute 2022; Akee and Jones 2024). As a result of these patterns of migration and return migration, much of the cost of immigrants’ upbringing and education, and some of the cost of supporting them in disability or old age, are borne by their families and the governments in their countries of origin. More of their time spent in the United States, meanwhile, is during prime working-age years when people tend to pay more in taxes than they receive in public services and benefits.

Immigrants have somewhat larger families than U.S.-born residents, though not large enough to stem a decline in the under-20 U.S. population in recent years (SSA 2023). In 2017, immigrant women were estimated to have 2.18 children over their lifetimes, versus 1.76 for U.S.-born woman (Peri 2020). Given the low U.S. birth rate, immigration itself and larger immigrant families were the only factors preventing the U.S. population from shrinking.

As discussed elsewhere in this report, immigrants are more likely than U.S.-born residents to lack high school degrees, but also more likely to have advanced degrees and to work in STEM fields (“STEM” refers to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Research shows that immigrants tend to be highly innovative and entrepreneurial, and their presence boosts productivity growth. For example, Hunt (2011) found that immigrants were roughly twice as likely as U.S.-born residents to be granted patents, including patents that are licensed or commercialized, and Peri (2012) found that productivity is higher in areas that attract immigrants based on historical settlement patterns and distance from the Mexican border (factors that are used as statistical instruments to differentiate between higher productivity attributable to immigrants versus immigrants being drawn to higher-productivity areas).

While lifecycle patterns tend to benefit countries attracting immigrants, economic migration of less-educated immigrants from poorer to richer countries can increase spending on means-tested benefits. This may be less true in the United States than in many other destination countries, however, because the United States has a less generous safety net than most wealthy countries and because many immigrants to this country are ineligible for, or dissuaded from, accessing benefits (Lacarte, Gelatt, and Podplesky 2024). Moreover, people who take on the costs and risks of migration, even if they hail from countries with lower educational attainment, tend to have a high capacity for gainful employment, often supporting less healthy or skilled family members back home (Feliciano 2020).

Immigration of working-age adults slows the rise in the age dependency ratio—the size of the population 65 and older relative to that of the prime working-age population. Immigrants’ relatively high birth rate, conversely, slows the decline in the youth dependency ratio—the under-20 population relative to the working-age population. The net effect on the working-age share of the U.S. population is positive, though the impact on public finances also depends on the relative cost of different programs.

Generally, faster population growth will tend to increase the tax rates needed to fund education and other programs that primarily benefit young people while reducing the tax rates needed to fund Social Security, Medicare, and other programs that primarily benefit older people. In addition to the relative cost of these different programs, timing matters. As a result of the decline in birth rates that followed the post-World War II baby boom, the United States, like many countries, has an aging population, such that funding Social Security and Medicare is a bigger challenge than funding education. This demographic imbalance is even more acute in other countries, notably Japan, which admits too few immigrants to allow a shrinking workforce to support its aging population.

Age, family size, and earnings potential are not the only factors affecting the net impact of immigration on public finances. For example, recent research indicates that unauthorized immigrants pay just under $60 billion per year in federal taxes and over $37 billion in state and local taxes (Davis, Guzman, and Sifre 2024). Yet many benefits, notably Medicare, are not accessible if an immigrant returns to their home country even if they are naturalized U.S. citizens or were legal residents who had paid into the program and would have been eligible for benefits if they had remained in the United States. Other benefits, such as Social Security, are portable but are not available to unauthorized workers. Though some means-tested benefits are currently available to unauthorized immigrants—a few states extend health and other benefits to low-income families regardless of legal status—take-up by immigrants is low since many fear it could jeopardize their ability to remain in the country or apply for citizenship (KFF 2023).

Millions of unauthorized immigrant workers contribute to Social Security using numbers that are not their own. This reduces Social Security’s projected shortfall but does so at the expense of a disadvantaged population. Immigration reform that allows immigrants to fully participate in society would help future immigrants receive the benefits to which they contribute. It could also potentially help some immigrants access benefits that can be linked to past contributions through Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs).

As discussed elsewhere in this report, immigration reform that includes a broad regularization for those who lack an immigration status would increase earnings, reported earnings, and the taxes paid on these earnings, including contributions to social insurance programs such as Social Security and Medicare. However, the net impact on these contributory programs as well as some programs funded by general revenues, such as Medicaid, could be negative in the short run if immigrants who paid into these programs gain access to benefits. Factoring in both increased revenues and increased costs, however, the Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2013 that legislation that would have significantly increased the number of immigrants living and working legally in the United States would have decreased federal budget deficits by nearly $200 billion over a 10-year period (Elmendorf 2013).

In the long run, society generally gains when workers have full legal rights and protections and are able to achieve their full potential. However, there is always the potential that a large influx of new migrants or immigrants earning low wages, if they were eligible for most government benefits, could tilt the balance toward a negative fiscal impact in the short run. This should not be the only consideration, however, in decisions about whether to welcome or extend government benefits to vulnerable immigrants, just as humanitarian policies should not be expected to pay for themselves. It is worth noting, in any case, that even in the case of refugees and asylees who tend to have low educational attainment and are eligible for the same government services and benefits as U.S. citizens, a recent report found that their fiscal impact is positive in the long run (Ghertner, Macartney, and Dost 2024).

Studies that find negative fiscal impacts from immigration of lower-wage workers typically ignore dynamic effects on prices, productivity, and profits that improve U.S. residents’ living standards. Correcting for one of these omissions, a study accounted for increased tax revenue from higher profits attributable to immigration and found that the net fiscal impact of immigrants without college degrees changed from negative to positive when this revenue was taken into account (Clemens 2022).

Immigrants’ positive fiscal impact reflects their strong motivation and ability to improve their lives. Uprooting one’s life to travel to a new country to live and work is costly and risky, so people with a higher-than-average earning potential are more likely to emigrate, even if their formal education is limited (Feliciano 2020). As a result, after an initial adjustment period, immigrants tend to have high employment rates compared with the general population. They also tend to be more geographically mobile in response to economic conditions within the United States, boosting productivity growth by better matching workers and jobs (Basso and Peri 2020).

The success of immigrants extends to their families and can have spillover effects on the general population. The children of immigrants, most born in the United States, are more likely to have college degrees and are less likely to be poor than other Americans (Pew 2013). The presence of foreign-born and second-generation students has a positive effect on the academic achievement of other students, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds (Figlio et al. 2024).

Immigration and housing affordability

One of the most pressing issues regarding immigration and housing in the current moment is providing adequate and humane shelter for the significant number of migrants who have entered the United States in recent years—many of whom are applicants for asylum who are awaiting a hearing. These migrants often have steep barriers to finding employment or other means of earning income, and they have had to rely on already inadequate systems to help the unhoused population in the United States.

In the shorter term, there are a range of stopgap and ameliorative measures that could be taken to provide humane housing options for recent arrivals. Solf, Guerrero, and Sherzad (2024) outline the scope of the problem and offer some short-term solutions, and a report by Eikenberry and Obser (2023) for the Women’s Refugee Commission provides an in-depth discussion about the key challenges and offers best practices for managing and housing large numbers of new arrivals at the federal, state, and local levels. 

In the longer run, the larger issue of homelessness in the United States would be greatly alleviated if measures that broadly reduced the cost of rent and homeownership were implemented. Given existing shelter capacity for the unhoused population, policies that increased housing affordability in the long run would also create more slack that could help absorb temporary surges in demand for short-term shelter. 

Further, the issue of housing affordability is not just an issue of people becoming unhoused; it has become a prime concern for working families up and down the income scale in the United States. Since the mid-1990s, housing cost inflation has outpaced overall price inflation significantly, particularly in a subset of major cities that provide promising employment opportunities.

The root cause of the housing affordability crisis is simply that housing supply has not kept up with rising demand, especially in areas experiencing strong economic and population growth. Essentially, new housing supply is not responsive enough to increased demand, so demand surges mostly are resolved with higher prices rather than greater housing output.9

This unresponsiveness of housing supply to demand surges means that any demand change can cause distress in local housing markets. For example, during the pandemic, millions of people realized they would be able to work from home (at least partially) for an extended period of time. This led to a strong change in preferences regarding what they wanted from a home. More space to accommodate home offices was desired, while the benefits of a short commute eroded. These changing preferences led to a surge of population away from city centers and into surrounding suburbs, and, to a lesser extent to increased intercity movements. Given the unresponsiveness of housing supply generally, this sharp change in demand patterns led to a historically large increase in housing costs—even in years when immigration from abroad dropped sharply.10

The constraints on housing supply are varied, but a major factor is restrictive land-use policy, generally set by local governments. The policy agenda to alleviate these constraints is multifaceted and beyond the scope of this paper but suffice to say that such a policy agenda would provide huge relief to U.S.-born residents if it was enacted  regardless of the level of immigration flows.11 As we noted before, housing demand shocks can (and do) happen constantly, even during times of low immigration flows (like during 2020 and 2021), and they lead to sharp affordability problems.

It is certainly true that given our dysfunctional housing supply side in the United States, any source of housing demand will put upward pressure on housing costs. Both long-term immigrants and new migrants—like U.S.-born residents—need housing and hence, higher levels of immigration will boost housing demand. Under our current housing supply-constrained regime, this does put some upward pressure on housing costs. Saiz (2007) and Mussa, Nwaogu, and Pozo (2017) find that an increase in immigration equal to 1% of the existing population leads to an increase of roughly 1% in housing costs. However, as we showed earlier, increased immigration flows in recent decades in the United States have largely not even made up for declining growth in the U.S.-born population. If our housing supply regime in the United States cannot even provide affordable housing for a population whose overall growth is steadily decelerating, it seems there is clearly a more important issue to address.

Another key issue is the difference between the cost of housing services and the price of homes. Generally, economists looking to measure inflation or the burden of housing costs use measures of housing rents. These rents are seen as the consumption value of housing services. Home prices bundle the cost of housing services as a consumption good with the cost of purchasing an investment good (a home is a valuable asset). In a country like the United States in which most families live in a home that they own, this raises some measurement challenges. But aside from this, it also introduces some distributional conflict regarding housing costs. For a family that must rent a home, rising rents are a pure cost burden that lowers consumption possibilities on nonhousing items. For a family that owns a home, rising rents are an implicit income that drives up the value of their assets and hence their net worth. Additionally, because most homeowners either own their home outright or have fixed-rate mortgages that pin down their monthly payment, the only significant effect of rising rents they face is a rising value of their home. In short, anything—including higher levels of immigration—that raises rental costs for housing also raises the value of homeowners’ wealth. Given that homeownership rates are substantially higher among U.S.-born residents than foreign-born households, rising rents stemming from higher immigration flows are a direct transfer from immigrant households to native households.

There is one final important intersection between immigration and housing: Immigrants are exceedingly overrepresented in the construction workforce, and particularly so in residential construction (see Bivens 2014). They are a key source of skilled labor for this sector. Policy changes that sharply slowed (or reversed) immigration flows could quickly reduce the labor supply in construction, restrict housing output, and raise the cost of building new homes. Howard, Wang, and Zhang (2024) examined the staggered rollout of a national immigration enforcement increase to see if it affected costs and output in residential construction. They found that counties that saw greater immigration enforcement effort saw reductions in the residential construction workforce, fewer homes built, and higher prices, all consistent with immigration enforcement suppressing labor supply in this sector. 

Of course, one could argue the same thing about any policy change that raised wages in construction—and part of our policy recommendations includes measures (like providing a path to citizenship) that would raise wages for immigrants in construction. However, the rise in wages stemming from boosting immigrants’ bargaining power vis-à-vis employers (by regularizing their legal status) would largely come from a pure redistribution from business income. Employers’ power in labor markets—particularly relative to unauthorized immigrant workers—means they can impose a “markdown” on wages and earn supernormal profits.12 Curtailing this power will overwhelmingly show up in lower supernormal profits and not in higher construction prices. Further, evidence has shown that the higher wages that accompany normalizing immigrants’ legal status are often “financed” largely through higher productivity. With more secure, permanent, and lawful immigration status, immigrants are incentivized to invest in productivity-enhancing training and education and are freer to enter occupations with higher productivity that require more stringent scrutiny of their immigration status. 

The direct effect of reduced labor supply, on the other hand, is to immediately lower construction output, and this would almost surely raise home prices.

All in all, it is mechanically true that any population growth puts stress on the nation’s dysfunctional system of housing supply. Recent decades have seen very little change in overall population growth, so the inability of the nation’s housing supply sector to accommodate this (slow and unchanged) growth without creating affordability problems is glaring. It is this dysfunctional supply side of the housing market, not anything—including immigration—on the demand side that should be the focus of policymakers. Further, the overall effect of immigration on U.S. housing should take into account the effects of immigration flows on the housing wealth of U.S.-born residents and on the construction industry’s ability to produce new homes at reasonable costs. Tallying these up leads to very little reason to think that increased immigration flows are a first-order challenge in U.S. housing policy. 

Immigration and long-run growth

The size and growth rate of aggregate GDP will obviously be directly affected by immigration in coming decades. But when economists talk about growth, they mostly are referring to growth in per capita GDP or even growth in productivity—the amount of output generated in an average hour of work in the economy. Productivity growth is the basis of rising living standards—the level of productivity (and not the level of aggregate GDP) is what determines if a country is rich or not. Bangladesh, for example, has an aggregate GDP roughly 4 times larger than Norway, yet it is Norway’s tenfold advantage in GDP per capita that makes it rich relative to Bangladesh.

Accordingly, when economists assess the effect of any influence—including immigration—on economic growth, they are mostly talking about the effect on productivity growth. It is true that if immigrants are younger than U.S.-born residents, that an influx of immigrants can boost per capita GDP simply by virtue of having higher employment rates. But for most of the following section, we will abstract from that when discussing the literature on immigration and growth (the greater employment rates of immigrants, however, are of first-order importance in their effect on the nation’s fiscal balances, as we discuss in a later section).

Theories of economic growth have enough variety and complexity that it is nearly impossible to make firm predictions about the effect of immigration on this long-run growth, but we will note just a few things in this section.

First, in all growth models that posit a negative relationship between growth in per capita income and population growth (including immigration), the influence of faster population growth that slows per capita income growth is its effect in suppressing growth in the capital-to-labor ratio. But the evidence over business cycles shows little relationship between slower growth of the capital-to-labor ratio and immigration flows in the U.S. data. The scatterplot in Figure G shows the change in the overall capital-to-labor ratio in the U.S. economy over various decades, along with the change in the immigrant share of the population. If the worries about immigration and growth are to be sustained, there should be a clear negative relationship: A higher immigrant share should be associated with a smaller increase in the capital-to-labor ratio. But there is no obvious relationship (if anything, it appears to be slightly positive). This is not dispositive evidence, obviously, but it does highlight once again that rising shares of immigrant workers in the U.S. economy are mostly matched by declining growth rates of the native-born population and labor force.

Figure G

Further, richer models of economic growth consider other determinants of growth besides just the rate of physical capital accumulation. Many models highlight that human capital (the skills and training of the workforce) not only matters for growth but also generates externalities (positive economic returns that are not fully captured by the workers creating them). Given this, immigration that increases human capital in the destination country might actually boost per capita income growth.

A related (but not identical) idea is that today’s economic growth depends on the existing stock of ideas (including ideas from decades or even centuries ago). If the total stock of ideas is related strongly to the simple size of the population, then rising population can be an aid to growth rather than a drag. Because ideas are often fluid across national borders, the link between a larger population and faster growth might hold more tightly at the global rather than the national level, but if any parts of idea formation are nationally “sticky,” then it might hold at the national level as well (and patents and copyrights and other forms of intellectual property protection probably do make ideas’ economic benefits “sticky” in the country in which they are formed, for good or for ill).

A recent paper from Bernstein et al. (2022) highlights the disproportionate success of immigrants in patenting new inventions from the period 1990–2016. Immigrants constituted 16% of inventors applying for patents in the United States, but accounted for 23% of the total patents, and 25% of the most cited patents (a proxy for the importance of the innovation).

Sequeira, Nunn, and Qian (2017) provide examples of how past immigration flows into the United States brought ideas that surely contributed strongly to growth:

One example of such an innovation is the suspension bridge, which was pioneered by John A. Roebling, a German-born and trained civil engineer, who built numerous suspension bridges, including the Niagara Fall Suspension Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge (Faust, 1916, p. 10). Other notable engineers include… John F. O’Rourke, an Irish engineer, who built seven of the tunnels under the East and Hudson Rivers, and six of the tunnels of the New York subway systems (Wittke, 1939, pp. 389–390). Another example is Alexander Graham Bell …[who] developed an acoustic telegraph…. Other notable inventors include David Thomas (Welsh), who invented the hot blast furnace; John Ericsson (Swedish), who invented the ironclad ship and the screw propeller; Conrad Hubert (Russian), who invented the flashlight; and Ottmar Mergenthaler (German), who invented the linotype machine (Kennedy, 1964, pp. 33–34). Immigrants also made important contributions to the educational system of the United States. For example, the concept of kindergarten, which has been shown to have had important economic effects, was brought to the United States by German immigrant Friederich Fröbel (Paz, 2015, Ager, Cinnirella and Jensen, 2016). Recent research by Paz (2015) finds that the presence of kindergartens during the kindergarten movement (1890–1910) resulted in an average of 0.6 additional years of total schooling by adulthood and six percent higher income…The State University system… was modeled after the Prussian… system… (Faust, 1916, pp. 10–11). 

These crosscutting theoretical effects of immigration on growth are likely why the empirical estimates of immigration on growth yield mostly neutral results. For example, Borjas (2019) uses cross-state estimates of income growth and immigration flows and finds largely neutral results for the causal effect of immigration flows on per capita income growth. Kane and Rutledge (2018) also use cross-state data to assess the link between immigration flows and growth. In the raw data, there is an unambiguous positive correlation between immigration flows and state growth, but some of this is due to immigrants settling in states with strong economies. Using techniques to isolate the causal effect of immigration flows on per capita GDP growth, they find modestly negative growth effects, but no effect on levels, which they interpret as indicating that the negative growth effects are transitory. Using historical data, Sequeira, Nunn, and Qian (2017) find that past waves of immigration in the United States had significantly positive short- and long-run causal effects on economic growth.

Finally, it is worth noting again that the possible win-win economic effects of immigration are often squandered by bad immigration policies and a system that doesn’t work well enough for workers. It is very likely that the returns to innovation and human capital that would accrue to many immigrants within the United States are artificially suppressed because the immigrant workers would not be able to claim the same benefits from innovation that U.S.-born workers might. If a U.S.-born worker has an idea for a great invention, they can start their own company and retain full control over the resulting patent. Many highly skilled and educated temporary migrants must remain attached to a specific employer as a condition of residence and employment in the United States, and this means that they may see their employer able to claim many of the benefits of their innovation instead of getting it themselves.

The artificially created labor market monopsony facing many temporary migrant workers in the United States almost surely stifles many potential innovations. Take a couple of recent examples: One of the key inventors of the mRNA vaccines was Katalin Karikó, a Hungarian citizen working in the United States on an academic visa. When Karikó tried to change jobs and move to another lab with better working conditions, her academic adviser threatened to have her deported. The resulting legal entanglements led to the offer from the other lab being withdrawn (Shrikant 2023). Another example is Sandeep Maganti whose situation is detailed in a recent Bloomberg investigative news report on the H-1B visa program. Maganti is a software engineer who, while on a student visa, created a business that grew “into a million-dollar company that employed six people” (Fan et al. 2024). U.S. “visa rules wouldn’t allow Maganti to sponsor himself” for an H-1B visa so that he could remain and run his company. Without a viable path to a temporary H-1B visa—a visa that would require Maganti to be sponsored by an employer and become an employee—he thus “had to sell his stake and stop working at his own company” (Fan et al. 2024).

Immigration pathways and statuses in the United States

While the previous sections of this paper have focused on the migrant and immigrant population and what existing research says about their impact on the economy, wages, and housing, it has so far only briefly mentioned how people arrive to the United States from abroad, and how those pathways and the resulting immigration statuses—or lack thereof—impact the economic outcomes of immigrants themselves and labor standards for all workers writ large. In order to provide some background, this section summarizes the broad immigration statuses for migrants and immigrants in the United States, and the different rights they have depending on their particular pathway and status. The following section will focus on why the differences in immigration status matter to the economy and workplaces across the country.

Pathways into the United States and immigration statuses

There are multiple pathways that persons abroad take to arrive in the United States. The following is a brief summary:

Green cards: One of the available lawful pathways includes adjusting to lawful permanent resident (LPR) status—also commonly referred to as obtaining a permanent immigrant visa or “green card”—which can be through the family-based (FB) or employment-based (EB) preference categories, through a humanitarian pathway such as a refugee resettlement program or by qualifying as an asylee, through the Diversity Visa (DV) lottery, or through one of the lesser known narrower categories, which account for a small share of total green cards. 

The total number of green cards granted averaged just over one million per year between 2003 and 2022 (1,021,966). One thing to keep in mind with respect to this total number is that not all green cards granted go to newly arriving immigrants from abroad; in most years, half to two-thirds of green card recipients were already present in the United States in some other status and adjusted to lawful permanent resident status.13 Persons with green cards are eligible to apply for citizenship after five years, or three years if they have been married to a U.S. citizen. In terms of employment, green card holders may work for nearly any employer, except for positions that require citizenship, and may change jobs or employers without requiring authorization from the U.S. government.

Temporary, nonimmigrant visas: The other major pathway into the United States is as a temporary visitor, student, trainee, diplomat, exchange visitor, or employee acquiring a “nonimmigrant” visa or status.14 Nonimmigrant visas and statuses are temporary, meaning that the foreign-born person to whom the visa is issued must depart the United States after the visa expires unless they adjust to LPR status by acquiring either one of the green cards described or another valid nonimmigrant status. Many nonimmigrant visa classifications authorize the visa or status holder—sometimes referred to as the visa beneficiary—to be employed in the United States. Employed nonimmigrants are also often referred to as temporary foreign workers, temporary migrant workers, or guestworkers, but no one definitive term has been agreed upon (for the purposes of this report, we refer to them as temporary migrant workers). Most temporary migrant workers are only permitted to work for one employer, the employer that sponsored their visa. In 2023, nearly 1.8 million new temporary work visas were issued to temporary migrant workers and their accompanying family members.15 The total number of temporary migrant workers in the United States who are employed in a given year is estimated to be just over 2 million (because some temporary visa statuses can last for more than one year) (Costa 2021).

Humanitarian pathways (refugees, asylees, and asylum seekers): As noted above regarding green cards, some persons obtain green cards through the U.S. refugee resettlement program or after being granted asylum (a person granted asylum is referred to as an asylee). The refugee pathway comes from the United Nations Refugee Convention of 1951, which defines a refugee as someone fleeing his or her country because of persecution or “owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside of the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.” In the United States, the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), as amended by the Refugee Act of 1980, implements the Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol into U.S. law, and authorizes and governs the admission and resettlement of refugees into the United States.16 The number of refugees admitted to the United States in 2023 was just over 60,000 (Migration Policy Institute 2024). Refugees are permitted to work for any employer, just like green cards holders (except for positions that require U.S. citizenship).

Asylum is another form of humanitarian legal protection for persons who have been forcibly displaced and fear harm and persecution, similar to the protections available to those who qualify as refugees, although under U.S. law, there is a separate process for persons who apply for asylum (i.e., asylum seekers or asylum applicants) and those applying for refugee status. Like refugees, asylum seekers must meet the definition of a refugee; however, a major difference between applying for refugee status or asylum is that to apply for asylum, the applicant must already be in the United States or apply for asylum at an official U.S. port of entry, rather than applying from abroad as refugees do.17 Successful asylum applicants who become asylees are eligible and on the path to a green card. However, processing of asylum claims through the relevant government agency or in immigration court often takes years before they are adjudicated.

Asylum may also be claimed as a defense to deportation for persons who are detained by immigration authorities. During that time, asylum applicants (aka asylum seekers) do not have a formal immigration status but are authorized to remain in the United States while their claim is adjudicated.

Asylum seekers are authorized to work in the United States, but they are subject to applicable rules and wait times. They must first be issued an Employment Authorization Document (EAD) from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), but may only file for an EAD 150 days after they have applied for asylum, and then become eligible to receive an EAD once their asylum application has been pending for a total of 180 days. There were an estimated 1.5 million asylum seekers employed in the United States in 2023.18

Irregular migration: The other pathway involves migrants who are present in the United States but who do not have an authorized immigration status; such individuals are sometimes referred to as unauthorized, undocumented, or irregular migrants (being in an irregular status), and sometimes (derogatorily) called illegal migrants or illegal immigrants. Unauthorized migrants either entered into the United States without inspection by the appropriate authorities—often referred to as entering without inspection (EWI) in government documents and data—and may have done so in a clandestine manner. Other unauthorized migrants may have originally entered the United States lawfully with a nonimmigrant visa or through the Visa Waiver Program and after an inspection by government authorities, but then lost their temporary immigration status. The loss of status may have occurred because of a violation that led to the revocation of their visa or status or the simple expiration of a nonimmigrant visa that was temporarily valid for a set time, usually a period of authorized travel, employment, or study.

There are a few existing estimates on the number of persons in the United States who lack an immigration status, the most recent of which estimate the population at between 11 and 11.3 million as of 2022.19 The vast majority of the unauthorized migrant population is settled, with 79% being long-standing residents who arrived in the United States in 2010 or earlier (Baker and Warren 2024). Unauthorized migrants are not authorized to be employed in the United States, but an estimated 8.3 million were employed in the U.S. labor force in 2022, accounting for just under 5% of the total U.S. labor force (Passel and Krogstad 2024).

Precarious immigration statuses: There are a few types of temporary protections or quasi-statuses, which are not technically immigration statuses and which do not directly lead to any form of permanent immigration status. For example, while unauthorized immigrants lack a formal immigration status, some may nevertheless be in an authorized period of stay in the United States in which they are temporarily “lawfully present,” which can occur if they have qualified for some sort of temporary immigration relief like deferred action, humanitarian parole, parole-in-place, or Temporary Protected Status (TPS).

Because of their temporary nature, we refer to them as precarious statuses and other analysts like the Migration Policy Institute have referred to them as “twilight,” “liminal,” or “limbo” statuses.20 Persons may either enter the United States with one of these precarious protections already in place—for example if they qualified for the parole program for Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, and Nicaragua—or they may have entered without inspection and later qualified for TPS, deferred action, or parole-in-place (a form of parole granted to persons who are already in the United States). Persons with these precarious statuses are usually eligible to obtain an Employment Authorization Document (EAD), also known as a work permit, which allows them to work lawfully. There were an estimated 2.8 million persons in precarious statuses as of early 2024.21

The U.S. foreign-born population by immigration status

The pathways described above, and the resulting statuses, are generally categorized into four major categories of immigration status for immigrants (or lack thereof): Either immigrants have obtained lawful permanent residence (having a green card), or they have naturalized, meaning they have become U.S. citizens, or they have a temporary lawful nonimmigrant status, or they lack a lawful immigration status. For the purpose of population estimates—in part because of data limitations—the migrants who have qualified for some sort of precarious temporary immigration relief like deferred action, parole, or TPS, or who are pursuing an asylum claim, are counted as unauthorized migrants or immigrants, even though they technically have a form of authorized stay.22

In terms of the shares of persons in these statuses, according to an analysis done by the Pew Research Center (represented in Figure H), as of 2022, roughly half of all immigrants (49%) were naturalized U.S. citizens, one-quarter (24%) were lawful permanent residents, 4% were temporary lawful residents, and 23% were unauthorized immigrants (lacking an immigration status or having a precarious form of temporary protection) (Passel and Krogstad 2024).

Figure H

The impact of immigration status on wages and workplace rights

All persons in the United States have—at least on paper—basic labor and employment rights under U.S. law, which in theory, should protect them from lawbreaking employers. However, the extent to which those rights are able to be exercised, and the extent to which they are enforceable in practice, depends very much on immigration status because of the power that employers have over workers vis-à-vis that immigration status and because of how employers can exploit that power. This section briefly discusses the connection between immigration status and workplace rights and the existing research on the impact that immigration status can have on wages and labor standards.

Naturalized citizens

All persons who become naturalized citizens enjoy all of the same labor and employment rights as native-born U.S. citizens, including being able to work for any employer and in any position—(except they lack the ability to become elected to the office of president of the United States). Naturalized citizens are not subject to removal from the United States, which is a fear that many migrants and immigrants in other statuses have (unless they are found to have committed fraud during the naturalization process). Naturalized citizens also have access to the same social safety net benefits as native-born citizens and are the only group of immigrants that can vote in federal elections—meaning they are allowed to fully participate in political life.

These rights, benefits, and protections—in particular, not fearing deportation—result in better economic outcomes, including higher wages, than persons in other immigration statuses or compared with persons who lack an immigration status. Below are just a few examples of research showing the impact of naturalization on economic outcomes.

Peri and Zaiour (2021) modeled a number of scenarios for a legalization program that would provide status to unauthorized immigrants, to all or a subset of them, depending on certain characteristics. In their first scenario, which would consist of a legalization and path to a green card and citizenship for all unauthorized immigrants, they found that in the short run—meaning five years, in which unauthorized immigrants would have a lawful immigration status but would not yet become naturalized U.S. citizens—workers who were previously unauthorized would see a wage gain of 10%, amounting to $4,300 per year. Peri and Zaiour then assume that all those who gained an immigration status would become naturalized citizens after five years—and in the long run, meaning five to ten years—the newly naturalized immigrants would see an increase in their annual wages of 32.4%, amounting to an increase of $14,000 per year. They also found a positive wage impact beyond just the workers who naturalized, estimating that all other workers would see an annual increase in wages of 1.1%, or $700. Their estimate on the broader impact of a pathway to citizenship was that it would increase gross domestic product by up to $1.7 trillion over the next decade and create hundreds of thousands of new jobs.

Lynch and Oakford (2013) estimated the wage gains for both legalization as a first step and the additional wage gains that would follow after naturalization. They estimated first, the same increase in income that unauthorized immigrants saw from legalization after the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), as measured by the U.S. Department of Labor, of 15.1% after five years (see more discussion in the next section on green cards). They then calculate the effect of moving from legalization to citizenship, estimating an additional 10% increase in income after acquiring citizenship. In total, they estimate that “the full effect of granting legal status and citizenship to unauthorized immigrants is an income gain of 25.1%. Of this boost in income, about three-fifths comes from legalization and about two-fifths is attributable to transitioning from legal status to citizenship.”

Pastor and Scroggins (2012) also found that citizenship would boost individual earnings of workers by 8% to 11%, “leading to a potential $21–45 billion increase in cumulative earnings over ten years that will have ripple effects on the national economy.”

Shierholz (2010) observed a difference between foreign-born adults who had become naturalized citizens and those who had not become naturalized, in terms of both economic outcomes and poverty rates. Naturalized citizens in 2007 had a median annual family income that was very similar to that of native-born U.S. citizens, even earning slightly more than the native-born. But noncitizen immigrants had an annual median income that was 33.2% below that of naturalized citizen immigrants. In terms of poverty rates, they were much higher for noncitizen immigrant adults: In 2007, the poverty rate for noncitizen immigrants was 20.0%, more than twice the 9.2% rate for naturalized citizen immigrants and the 9.8% rate for native-born U.S. citizens. The poverty rate difference was starkest for Latinos, with the poverty rate for naturalized citizen Latinos being 4.3 percentage points lower than the poverty rate of Latino noncitizens.

Sumption and Flamm (2012) made very similar findings, showing that “naturalized citizens earn more than their noncitizen counterparts, are less likely to be unemployed, and are better represented in highly skilled jobs.” They further found that:

Most of the gap between citizens’ and noncitizens’ outcomes is explained by the fact that naturalized immigrants have higher levels of education, better language skills, and more work experience in the United States than noncitizens. Even after accounting for these differences, however, there is some evidence that the naturalized may earn a wage premium of at least 5 percent.

Green cards

All persons who obtain green cards—whether through the family-based, employment-based, humanitarian, or Diversity Visa pathways—enjoy nearly all of the same labor and employment rights as U.S. citizens, including being able to work for any employer and in any position except for those that explicitly require citizenship. For the most part, green card holders are not subject to removal from the United States, although unlike naturalized citizens, they can be removed if they commit certain crimes that make them deportable or if they are deemed to have abandoned their permanent resident status.

Under current federal law, green card holders must wait five years before using most public support and social insurance programs. Green card holders are not eligible to vote in federal elections, although some jurisdictions allow them to vote in local elections for positions like school boards and city council seats and to run for some local elected offices.

Being able to work lawfully without fearing deportation results in better economic outcomes for green card holders, including higher wages, relative to persons in other lawful immigration statuses or compared with persons who lack an immigration status. Below are just a few examples of research showing the impact of naturalization on economic outcomes. (Estimates of the economic benefits obtained by green card holders depend on their status before they obtained their green cards. The two types discussed here are persons who were previously on a temporary work visa and persons who previously lacked an immigration status.)

One example of research assessing the economic and workplace impact of having a green card compared with a temporary work visa comes from Mukhopadhyay and Oxborrow (2012), who looked at college-educated migrant workers on temporary visas. They found that “H-1B workers are paid less than native workers” and that the wage gain associated with obtaining an employment-based green card was $11,860 per year. The authors noted that their “result shows that the current process of acquiring a green card gives too much power to employers and hinders job mobility among highly skilled immigrants.”

Apgar (2015) reviewed Mexican Migration Project survey data and compared employment outcomes for Mexican males who were on temporary visas, unauthorized immigrants, and green card holders. Controlling for other factors, Apgar found that the hourly wages of temporary migrant workers were about 11% less than those of immigrants with green cards and that unauthorized immigrant workers earned about 13% less than immigrants with green cards.

There is extensive research on the impact of unauthorized immigrants who regularized their status by becoming eligible for green cards going as far back as the 1990s, including research on the effects of the 1986 legalization program implemented after enactment of IRCA, which was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan. This research is particularly relevant for measuring the impact of obtaining a green card because nearly all migrants legalized under IRCA were eligible to receive a green card after 18 months. The discussion here only offers a small sampling of the existing literature.

Smith, Kramer, and Singer (1996), in a report conducted for the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), found that after four or five years, the real hourly wages of persons who had their immigration status regularized increased on average by 15.1% by 1992 (13.2% for men and 20.5% for women). Kossoudji and Cobb-Clark (2000) found that, according to the same data set, 38.8% of Mexican men had moved on to higher-paying occupations by 1992.23

Hinojosa-Ojeda (2010) summarizes other related research and notes that “[t]he findings of these researchers vary according to their economic models, but the results show uniformly positive results for IRCA beneficiaries,” including measured wage increases that occurred even after controlling for factors such as education and English proficiency, and broader changes in the economy that might have impacted wages more generally.24

Temporary work visas and temporary migrant workers

Although they are legally authorized to work, temporary migrant workers are among the most exploited laborers in the U.S. workforce because employer control of their visa status leaves many virtually powerless to defend and uphold their rights. The vast majority of temporary migrant workers do not have a path to permanent residence through their nonimmigrant visa, and under current federal law, are ineligible for most federally funded public benefits. 

The first major temporary migrant worker programs in the United States were the Bracero programs, which were negotiated as bilateral agreements between the United States and Mexico in 1917 and 1942 (Martin 2020). Since then, numerous cases of abuse and exploitation of migrant workers employed with temporary visas have come to light through the media, reports from advocates and labor unions, and government audits.25 Many of the abuses occur because of the structure of the visa programs, which have few rules and inadequate protections and oversight by federal or state labor standards authorities.

Temporary migrant workers have good reason to fear retaliation and deportation if they speak up about wage theft, workplace abuses, or other working conditions like substandard health and safety procedures on the job—not because they don’t have a valid immigration status, but because their visas are almost always tied to one employer that owns and controls their visa status. That visa status is what determines the worker’s right to remain in the country; if they lose their job, they lose their visa and become deportable (Bauer and Stewart 2013). That leaves them afraid to speak up and complain to their employer or government authorities if their wages are stolen or other workplace violations take place. This arrangement results in a form of indentured servitude.26 Further, employers can punish temporary migrant workers for speaking out by not rehiring them the following year or by telling recruiters in countries of origin that they shouldn’t be hired for other job opportunities in the United States (effectively blacklisting them).27

Although on paper, temporary migrant workers have labor and employment rights and access to remedies that are on par with those of U.S. workers—including immigrants who are green card holders and naturalized citizens—the specter of retaliation makes it understandably difficult for temporary migrant workers to hold lawbreaking employers accountable through complaints to their employers or to government agencies about illegal conditions like unpaid wages and substandard working conditions. Private lawsuits against employers who break the law are also an unrealistic avenue for enforcing rights for two reasons: First, most temporary migrant workers are not eligible for federally funded legal services under U.S. law, and second, those who have been fired are unlikely to have a valid immigration status permitting them to stay in the United States long enough to pursue their claims in court. Because of the conditions created by tying workers to a single employer through their visa status, temporary work visa programs have been dubbed by some as “close to slavery” or “the new American slavery,” and government auditors have noted that increased protections are needed for temporary migrant workers.28

It is also well established that many, if not most, temporary migrant workers pay hefty fees to obtain their temporary jobs in the United States (CDM 2013 and 2020). Those who are in debt after paying recruitment fees are anxious to earn enough to pay back what they owe and hopefully make a profit, exacerbating their situation and making them even more unlikely to speak up at work when things go wrong on the job.

When it comes to wages, there is abundant evidence that the laws and regulations governing major temporary work visa programs—such as H-2B and H-1B—permit employers to legally pay their temporary migrant workers much less than the local average wage for the jobs they fill.29 For example, in the H-1B program—which has a prevailing wage rule that is intended to protect local wage standards—60% of all H-1B jobs certified by the DOL in 2019 were certified at a wage that was below the local average wage for the specific occupation (Costa and Hira 2020). However, most work visa programs have no minimum or prevailing wage rules at all—and while employers are still required by law to pay temporary migrant workers at least the state or federal minimum wage, that’s often far less than the true market rate, or the local average wage, for the occupation in which they are employed.30 Evidence also exists of rampant and systematic wage theft committed against temporary migrant workers.31

Considering how the wage rules or lack thereof in these programs operate, and the situation workers are left in, perhaps it is no surprise that according to one study, there is evidence that temporary migrant workers in low-wage jobs earn approximately the same wages, on average, that unauthorized immigrant workers do for similar jobs, despite being in a technically lawful status (Apgar 2015). In other words, temporary migrant workers may have little financial incentive to work legally through visa programs since there is a small or zero wage premium to be gained for it—and, in fact, authorized temporary migrant workers can end up worse off economically than unauthorized workers because of the debts they incur through fees paid to recruiters, and the fact that many have no family or social networks to rely on. This can incentivize workers to migrate without authorization, rather than using available legal channels.

In essence, these visa programs give employers dangerous levels of monopsony power over workers—similar to company towns in which an employer has enormous leverage over workers because it is the only employer in town.32 A growing body of research, some of it focused on temporary work visa programs, has shown that even modest amounts of employer monopsony power are corrosive to workers’ ability to bargain for better wages.33 

Unauthorized immigrants

Unauthorized immigrants, who make up nearly 5% of the U.S. labor force, contribute to the economy in vital industries and pay billions in taxes and contributions to the social safety net (Davis, Guzman, and Sifre 2024; Fernández Campbell 2018). But these nearly eight million workers are not fully protected by U.S. labor and employment laws because they lack an immigration status. Unauthorized immigrants are also vulnerable to exploitation by employers because they are largely ineligible for federally funded public support and social insurance programs because of their immigration status (as discussed earlier in this report) (Lacarte, Gelatt, and Podplesky 2024). There are a few narrow exceptions to this rule, which allow immigrants to be eligible for certain benefits regardless of immigration status; those programs include emergency Medicaid (if otherwise ineligible for their state’s Medicaid program), programs that provide immunizations and/or treatment of communicable disease symptoms, and school breakfast and lunch programs.34 Under federal law, all children have equal access to public education at the elementary and secondary level regardless of their immigration status or the status of their parents. 

On paper, unauthorized immigrants have labor and employment rights and access to remedies that are on par with those of U.S. workers35—including immigrants who are green card holders and naturalized citizens—but the specter of retaliation makes it understandably difficult for unauthorized immigrants to hold lawbreaking employers accountable. These workers are often afraid to complain about unpaid wages and substandard working conditions because employers can retaliate against them by taking actions that can lead to their deportation. Thus, complaints to their employers or to government agencies about illegal conditions like unpaid wages and substandard working conditions seem like risky options—and perhaps with a low chance of success given how underresourced and understaffed labor standards enforcement agencies are (Costa 2022).

This imbalanced relationship gives employers extraordinary power to exploit and underpay these workers, also making it more difficult for other workers to improve their wages and working conditions. The exploitation described here is not theoretical. A landmark study and survey of 4,300 workers in three major cities by Bernhardt et al. (2009) found that 37.1% of unauthorized immigrant workers were victims of minimum wage violations, compared with 15.6% of U.S.-born citizens. In other words, unauthorized immigrants are more than twice as likely to be the victims of wage theft compared with U.S.-born citizens. Immigrants who had a lawful immigration status (labeled as “authorized immigrants” in the study) were also more likely to be the victims of wage theft, but the gap with U.S.-born citizens was significantly narrowed, compared with unauthorized immigrants: 21.3% of authorized immigrants were the victims of wage theft versus 15.6% of U.S.-born citizens. Bernhardt et al. (2009) also looked at overtime pay violations and found that an astounding 84.9% of unauthorized immigrants were not paid the overtime wages they worked for and were legally entitled to, compared with 67.2% of authorized immigrants and 68.2% of U.S.-born citizens. And finally, beyond just the higher rates of wage theft, research related to IRCA by Kossoudji and Cobb-Clark (2002) also examined the value of the wage penalty for being an unauthorized immigrant worker, estimating that it ranged from 14% to 24%.

Migrants with precarious temporary immigration protections and work permits

When it comes to migrants with precarious temporary immigration protections like TPS, parole, and deferred action, or who are going through the asylum application process, most of the migrants who qualify for those temporary protections are also eligible to receive an Employment Authorization Document, which is often referred to simply as a work permit or EAD. All foreign-born persons who are not authorized to work by virtue of being a naturalized citizen, green card holder, or temporary migrant worker must first obtain an EAD from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) before they can be authorized to work.36 To do so, they must belong to an eligible group, including, for example, certain foreign students, or the spouses of temporary migrant workers in certain visa programs, such as H-1B or J-1, or they may obtain an EAD by qualifying for one of the forms of administrative immigration relief, such as TPS, deferred action, Deferred Enforced Departure, humanitarian parole, or parole-in-place. EADs are also available for other categories of individuals such as asylum applicants (after a waiting period of six months), certain applicants for adjustment of status, asylees, and refugees who have not yet obtained green cards, as well as persons granted withholding of removal.37

For workers who lack a permanent or more durable immigration status, obtaining a temporary EAD can mean having enforceable workplace rights that the individual would otherwise not have. While all workers have some labor and workplace rights under U.S. law—regardless of immigration status, as discussed in other parts of this section in this report—enforcing them in practice becomes virtually impossible because of the threat of deportation, which prevents workers who lack an immigration status or an EAD from calling out lawbreaking employers and demanding that they comply with the law, or from reporting workplace violations to labor enforcement agencies. But having protection from deportation through temporary administrative immigration protections accompanied by an EAD means that, in practice, workers can report workplace violations to government officials without fear of retaliation that can lead to deportation. It also means that a migrant worker with an EAD can be employed by just about any employer and change jobs or employers, unlike temporary migrant workers who must be employed by the sponsor of their visa.

There are some examples of research showing the important economic contributions that hundreds of thousands of migrants with precarious statuses and EADs are able to make thanks to their temporary protections. For example, when the TPS population was approximately 354,000 in 2021, AIC (2023) estimated that “TPS holders contributed more than $2.2 billion in taxes, including almost $1 billion to state and local governments,” as well as “held $8 billion in spending power.” Another estimate by Moriarty (2024) found that TPS-eligible individuals “annually contribute some $31 billion in wages to the national GDP.” The total number of TPS holders in 2024 is now roughly 864,000; thus these totals are likely to be much higher now.

Research has also quantified some of the contributions made by persons who have qualified for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). DACA was created by the Department of Homeland Security during the Obama administration in 2012, and recipients are eligible for protections from deportation and EADs that are valid for two years and renewable. More than 835,000 persons have benefitted from DACA, and more than 500,000 are currently still protected by DACA (President’s Alliance 2024). Svajlenka and Truong (2021) found that DACA recipient households “pay $6.2 billion in federal taxes and $3.3 billion in state and local taxes each year,” and “after taxes, these households hold $25.3 billion in spending power,” and that DACA recipient families “own 68,000 homes, making $760 million in mortgage payments and $2.5 billion in rental payments annually.”

When it comes to measuring the workplace impact and economic benefits of being issued an EAD for the workers themselves, there are limited examples, but three are worth citing here. One is an annual survey of DACA recipients that was conducted in 2024 for the ninth time. The most recent survey, conducted by Wong et al. (2024) and published by the Center for American Progress, showed that DACA has been an essential tool to improve the economic and educational outcomes of recipients. In terms of the impact that deferred action and an EAD have had on the employment of DACA recipients: 59.1% of respondents moved to a job with better pay; 47.3% moved to a job with better working conditions; 47.5% moved to a job that “better fits [their] education and training”; 49.6% moved to a job that “better fits [their] long-term career goals”; 57.3% moved to a job with health insurance or other benefits; and 19.6% of respondents obtained professional licenses.

Wong et al. also measured the impact of DACA and EADs on wages, finding that “[d]ata from the past nine years show that DACA has had a significant and positive effect on wages: Recipients’ average hourly wage more than doubled from $11.92 to $31.52 per hour—an increase of 164.4 percent—after receiving DACA.” These significant wage increases are no doubt a result of the labor and workplace rights and stability that DACA recipients gain from having an EAD.

Orrenius and Zavodny (2014) examined the wage and employment impact of another form of temporary immigration protection, that of TPS—which allows those who are eligible to also be granted an EAD. They looked specifically at migrants from El Salvador, finding that having TPS increased employment rates, and that less-educated Salvadoran men who were employed earned 13% more if they had TPS. They note that “As a whole, the results suggest that less-educated Salvadoran men who receive TPS are able to move into better jobs and become more selective about the jobs they hold, increasing their earnings but also their job search and unemployment incidence.”

One other analysis that assesses the wage impact of being issued an EAD comes from Kallick (2023), which looks specifically at asylum seekers in New York and nationwide. Relying on previous methodologies for measuring the impact of a lawful immigration status being granted to unauthorized immigrants, Kallick estimates that asylum seekers who are granted EADs increase their wages by 10%.

While the relative benefits of precarious and temporary immigration protections and EADs to migrant workers and the broader economy are clear, it is important to note here that the protections and EADs are only temporary and will end if renewals are not approved. This may occur either because the migrant no longer qualifies or because the program that authorized them has ended or not been renewed (for example if DHS decides not to renew a TPS designation or if DACA or another program is ended by DHS or found to be unlawful according to a federal court ruling). Since migrants with precarious immigration protections and EADs do not have a direct path to a green card, they may never obtain one unless Congress passes reforms to provide them with such a path—keeping them in a precarious status indefinitely until there is a policy change or their protections are not renewed.

In fact, if we include asylum seekers with EADs, there are approximately 4.3 million migrants who have protections through a precarious immigration status as of early 2024.38 But more than half are in danger of losing their protections and EADs if the current U.S. president or a future president decides to end any or all of the administrative immigration relief programs or if a court rules them invalid. Thus, millions who have been issued temporary protections and an EAD could potentially lose the workplace rights and protections that a work permit provides, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation by employers. In the case of asylum seekers, many can and will lose their ability to remain lawfully in the United States along with their work permits, depending on how their case is adjudicated in immigration court or by USCIS.

Immigration enforcement and the impact of inadequate resources for labor standards enforcement

The inability of both unauthorized immigrants and temporary migrant workers to hold employers accountable through regular channels, as discussed in this report, is exacerbated by the current immigration enforcement regime, which prioritizes removing unauthorized immigrants, detaining migrants, and detecting persons who attempt to enter the United States without authorization. This section briefly discusses the U.S. government’s lopsided enforcement priorities, the resulting challenges faced by labor standards enforcement agencies, and the impact on all workers.

Labor standards enforcement agencies are underfunded and short-staffed

In order to carry out its immigration enforcement priorities, as Figure I shows, U.S. immigration enforcement agencies received $30.2 billion from Congress in fiscal year 2023. All U.S. labor standards enforcement agencies that protect workers, on the other hand, only received $2.2 billion (also Figure I). That gap between the amounts appropriated for immigration enforcement as compared with labor standards enforcement means that immigration enforcement agencies are now funded at a rate that is nearly 14 times higher than the budgets of all federal labor standards enforcement agencies combined. This is up from 12 times as much in 2021—and when it comes to staffing, immigration enforcement agencies had eight times as many staff as labor standards enforcement agencies in 2021 (Costa 2022). The ultimate result of these disparities is to increase the fear that unauthorized immigrants already have when considering whether to report workplace violations, thereby making it even less likely that labor standards enforcement agencies will know about employer lawbreaking and be able to adequately respond.

Figure I

Hinojosa-Ojeda (2010) provides a useful summary of a 2008 report from the Atlanta Federal Reserve (Brown, Hotchkiss, and Quispe-Agnoli 2008) that examined the negative impact that the current immigration enforcement regime has on low-wage labor markets:

The enhanced [immigration] enforcement regime moves unauthorized workers further underground, lowering their pay, and ironically, creating a greater demand for unauthorized workers. A 2008 report from the Atlanta Federal Reserve analyzes how this vicious cycle is activated and expands as firms find themselves forced to compete for the supply of cheaper, unauthorized labor. When a firm cuts costs by hiring unauthorized workers for lower wages, its competitors become more likely to hire unauthorized workers for lower wage, as well, in order to benefit from the same cost savings.

This impact of escalating immigration enforcement, coupled with a lack of funds for labor standards enforcement, leaves workers vulnerable and largely unprotected from employer lawbreaking. There are some clear examples in particular industries in which enforcement is inadequate, but violations are common, for example, in agriculture, as we discuss in the next subsection—in which more than half of the workforce is comprised of unauthorized immigrants and temporary migrant workers (Costa and Martin 2023).

First, some background is appropriate regarding how one of the main federal worker protection agencies, the Wage and Hour Division (WHD), part of DOL, has been impacted by inadequate staffing and funding. WHD is responsible for enforcing provisions of several federal laws related to minimum wage, overtime pay, child labor, federal contract workers, work visa programs, migrant and seasonal agricultural workers, family and medical leave, and more. Yet, despite this broad portfolio and the 167 million workers who are covered by these protections (WHD 2023),39 funding for WHD has not kept pace with the growth of the U.S. labor force.

Figure J shows that, in inflation-adjusted 2023 dollars, WHD’s budget in 2006 was $250 million, and in 2023, $260 million—an increase of just $10 million over nearly two decades. As Figure J also shows, this trend has been consistent with appropriations for two other key worker protection agencies, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). At both OSHA and the NLRB, inflation-adjusted appropriations were significantly lower in 2023 compared with 2006.

Figure J

In addition to funding levels that have barely kept up with inflation at WHD and the 167 million workers WHD has a mandate to protect, the number of WHD investigators that the agency employs, who are primarily responsible for ensuring that federal wage and hour laws are obeyed by employers across all 50 states and U.S. territories, is near an all-time low. Figure K shows that there were only 733 WHD investigators at the end of 2023 to enforce all federal wage and hour laws, 79 fewer than in 1973, the first year for which data are available, and 499 fewer than the peak year of 1978 when there were 1,232 WHD investigators. Meanwhile, the number of workers that WHD has a mandate to protect has increased sharply. The average number of workers in 2023 was 167.1 million, which amounts to 227,989 workers for every wage and hour investigator. Compare this with 1973 when there were 72,588 workers for every wage and hour investigator.40 Investigators are now responsible for more than triple the number of workers as in 1973.

Figure K

The value of back wages recovered by WHD, the number of employees who received back wages as a result of WHD actions, and the total number of hours the WHD spent on investigations “all dropped in fiscal year 2022 compared to the year prior” according to WHD data reported on by Bloomberg Law in December 2022 (Rainey 2022). Despite WHD’s stated intention to hire 100 new investigators during the Biden administration, a heavy workload and inadequate funding from Congress appear to be hindering WHD from hiring enough staff for the tasks at hand. As the same Bloomberg Law report noted, WHD has “struggled to recruit new investigative staff.”

Inadequate labor standards enforcement in agriculture exemplifies the impact of underfunded and short-staffed worker protection agencies

What has been the result of underfunded and short-staffed worker protection agencies like WHD and OSHA in an industry like agriculture in which half of workers lack an immigration status and roughly one-tenth have a precarious status through temporary H-2A visas? There has been a clear downward trend in the number of closed investigations of agricultural employers by WHD over the past two decades, from more than 2,000 a year in the early 2000s, to 1,000 or fewer a year during the last three fiscal years. In fiscal year 2023, WHD closed only 831 investigations of agricultural employers—a record low during the 2000 to 2023 period—amounting to an average of 68 a month in 2023 (WHD 2024). Eight hundred thirty-one investigations in 2023 is just over a third of the 2,431 agricultural investigations closed in 2000, the peak year for WHD agricultural investigations (Costa and Martin 2023). 

The low number of investigations means that most farms are never investigated by WHD; in fact fewer than 1% of agricultural employers are investigated per year (Costa and Martin 2023). Since farm operators know there is a very low likelihood that they will ever be investigated, some may feel emboldened to have a business model that relies on wage theft and other forms of lawbreaking. In addition, when it comes to health and safety violations on farms, reporting from ProPublica suggests that farmworkers are unwilling to come forward to report employer violations because of a perception that OSHA doesn’t have adequate resources to investigate (Sanchez and Jameel 2023).

These issues extend beyond agriculture, but the agricultural industry is a useful microcosm that exemplifies the broader issues. Another problem that was recently identified that extends beyond agriculture is that even when WHD detects and can confirm employer violations, as another report from Bloomberg Law revealed, WHD “cannot litigate every case due to resource issues,” citing violations in the H-2B visa program where employers violated the law but were not punished (Rainey 2023).

Yet another enforcement gap has to do with governance of temporary work visa programs. WHD data show that violations of the H-2A visa program—which allows farm employers to hire temporary migrant farmworkers—now account for the vast majority of back wages owed and civil money penalties assessed on employers (73%) (Costa and Martin 2023). Thus, nearly three-fourths of all penalties in agriculture now result from violations of work visa program rules. WHD also recently reported that in the previous five fiscal years, “in 88 percent of WHD’s H-2A investigations, WHD found employers in violation of the law” (ETA and WHD 2024). That means that when WHD investigates H-2A violations, they nearly always detect them. These data strongly suggest that violations of the H-2A visa program in agriculture are not limited to a few employers who are “bad apples,” but instead that widespread and systematic violations of H-2A rules are ongoing.

In addition, in all U.S. temporary work visa programs, employers that have been found to violate the law—whether it be wage and hour, labor, health and safety, discrimination, or civil rights laws—are nevertheless allowed to continue to hire through visa programs. As numerous investigative reports have shown, even some of the worst violators are allowed to keep hiring, even after they have been sanctioned for lawbreaking and extreme abuses of their workers.41 Changing and enforcing a rule to prohibit them from hiring would also likely require a significant increase in funding to DOL’s Office of Foreign Labor Certification (OFLC), which certifies the applications of employers seeking to hire temporary migrant workers. But funding and staffing levels there have not increased proportionally with the rise in the number of applications for work visas and prevailing wage determinations over the past decade. (OFLC’s workload has increased by nearly 50%, while funding has declined by 4% since 2012 after adjusting for inflation (Costa and Hira 2024)). WHD would also need increased funding to help enforce the rule to bar employers that violate the rules.

Taken together, all of these realities further embolden lawbreaking employers to victimize their employees who lack an immigration status or only have a temporary or precarious status because employers know that unauthorized migrants and temporary migrant workers are unlikely to complain and report violations. And even when workers are brave enough to do so, employers know that labor standards enforcement agencies don’t have the resources or capacity to respond adequately. The ultimate result is that employers can often steal wages and violate labor and employment laws with impunity, which degrade labor standards for all workers, including the U.S.-born workers who work alongside foreign-born workers.

How to reform immigration policies to maximize benefits for workers and minimize challenges

So far in this report we have discussed existing analyses of how immigration impacts the economy and how immigration status impacts wages and worker rights. But we wish to reiterate that most, if not all, of the negative impacts or potential negative impacts that immigration could have on the economy, wages, or labor standards, are the result of how the immigration system is structured and its legal framework. In particular, the rights and protections that migrants and immigrants have depending on their immigration status, or lack thereof, and the employment relationships that result between migrants and immigrants and their employers, are the result of policy choices. A severe power imbalance between workers and employers that is tilted almost entirely in favor of employers is what leads to worker exploitation. Temporary and precarious immigration statuses, or the lack of status, can embolden employers to break laws while making it difficult to hold them accountable.

This section briefly discusses some of the most important policy reforms that should be made to update the immigration system in order to level the playing field between workers and employers, and thereby lift standards and raise wages economywide. Successfully doing so would maximize the economic benefits of immigration and bring credibility to the immigration system, allowing all workers to see that the system is not being misused by employers to degrade wages and labor standards. That credibility is necessary in order to build public support for higher levels of immigration and to assuage the concerns of those who have valid critiques of the current pro-employer U.S. immigration policy framework.

In sum, an immigration system that leads to shared prosperity for all workers means lifting standards and ensuring that all workers have equal and enforceable labor and workplace rights regardless of immigration status—as well as having a flexible and data-driven immigration system that can adjust based on the needs of the economy.

A broad and quick path to a green card for the unauthorized immigrant population and those with precarious statuses

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the first and most important reform needed is a quick and broad legalization for the current unauthorized immigrant population—roughly 5% of the total U.S. workforce—that leads to lawful permanent residence (green cards), making beneficiaries eventually eligible for citizenship. Having 5% of the U.S. workforce vulnerable to exploitation and workplace abuse only benefits lawbreaking employers—and it drags down labor standards for all workers, including  the U.S.-born, naturalized citizens, and green card holders. This reality has existed for far too long and should be an urgent priority for Congress to address.

To maximize economic gains that come with the path to a green card and citizenship—which include raising wages significantly, especially for workers in low-wage industries—the path must be as inclusive as possible. The pathway should not be long and arduous like those that have been proposed in major immigration reform bills of the past, such as S.744 from 2013, which required a 10-year path to a green card and another three years for citizenship eligibility. As discussed earlier, the 1986 IRCA legalization made beneficiaries eligible for green cards after 18 months; the same timeline should be the goal. However, one valid critique of IRCA was that the law’s legalization program was not nearly broad enough; it failed to legalize millions, which left behind the core of today’s unauthorized population (Chishti and Kamasaki 2014).

Having a long and difficult pathway with onerous requirements (which may be designed to reduce the number of eligible beneficiaries for green cards) will have the effect of leaving potential beneficiaries who are awaiting green cards vulnerable to abuse by employers. For example, a requirement that workers be employed for a set number of days per year in a particular industry, such as agriculture, could have the effect of leaving them in a quasi-indentured state. S.744 required potential applicants for green cards to pay processing fees and back federal taxes, as well as meet minimum income and employment tests—requirements that would have led to a significant share of the total unauthorized immigrant population never obtaining a green card—dooming the nation to repeat history.

A long and difficult pathway to permanent status also delays potential wage gains for immigrants and other workers, including U.S.-born workers and earlier immigrants, and the additional tax revenue associated with increased earnings. It makes no sense to restrict the wage gains and other societal benefits that come with a green card, which have been measured time and time again through rigorous research. And it would delay the ability of immigrants to fully integrate and participate in civic life, and make them less likely to make the kind of longer-term investments in their future that would also benefit the broader economy, whether it be purchasing a home, starting a business, or investing in job training and education.

The executive branch should use existing authority to expand temporary rights and protections and issue work permits to protect workers and improve labor standards

The number of people in precarious statuses through temporary protections like parole, deferred action, or Temporary Protected Status (TPS), has increased. There were almost 2.8 million migrants in those statuses as of early 2024, nearly all of whom are eligible for work permits, which are formally known as Employment Authorization Documents (EADs).42 There has also been a large increase over the past decade in the number of asylum seekers who are lawfully employed with EADs, over 1.5 million as of late 2023, who are also in a precarious quasi-status while they pursue their claims.43

In fact, the recent increase in precarious statuses has resulted in close to one-third of the entire unauthorized immigrant population having some form of temporary protection and the workplace rights that come with an EAD.44 As discussed in this report, the workers in precarious statuses who possess EADs are in a vastly better situation compared with being unauthorized with no EAD—because work permits allow them to have workplace rights that can be enforced in practice—even if most are unable to access an eventual path to a green card and citizenship. The current status quo in which one-third of an exploitable population has enforceable workplace rights—however precarious and temporary—is vastly preferable over the prior reality where nearly all had rights that only existed on paper and were virtually impossible to enforce in practice.

Whether through the use of TPS and humanitarian parole—which are based in statute—or deferred action and other forms of prosecutorial discretion, the executive branch has demonstrated across multiple presidential administrations that it has the requisite tools and legal authority necessary to expand temporary rights, protections, and work permits for the millions of migrants who lack an immigration status. (Many of whom have resided in the United States for decades and are deeply integrated into communities across the United States.)

The executive branch should thus take immediate action to improve standards for all workers through new and expanded TPS designations, additional use of humanitarian parole and parole-in-place, and grants of deferred action—at least until Congress acts and passes the most essential reforms necessary. Doing so would instantly improve wages and working conditions for both foreign-born and U.S. born workers in countless industries.

Green cards instead of temporary work visas

There are now at least 2 million temporary migrant workers in the United States who are employed through temporary work visas. The numbers of visas issued and workers in the programs have grown exponentially since the Immigration Act of 1990, while the number of employment-based green cards has remained relatively flat due to the annual numerical limit for employment-based green cards (Costa 2020). Temporary work visas are often the only viable employment-based option for migrant workers seeking jobs in the United States, but as discussed earlier in this report, temporary work visas leave those workers indentured and often (legally) underpaid compared with similarly situated U.S. workers—creating a two-tiered system of rights and standards in the workplace. Moreover, most temporary work visas do not offer a viable or direct path to permanence.

To ensure that all workers have equal rights and to restore the balance of power between employers and workers, the U.S. immigration system should be tilted away from temporary work visa programs and toward providing more green cards for workers. Instead of arriving in a quasi-indentured status and having limited rights, the vast majority of migrant workers should be able to arrive with a green card in hand, giving them the freedom to change jobs if they can earn more or be more productive working for another employer or starting their own business. This will also allow them to benefit from the economic gains associated with green cards and citizenship and to make long-term investments in their future that benefit the U.S. economy.

Reforming work visa programs

Given the critiques reiterated in this report and explained with extensive evidence through various EPI publications, we strongly believe that the U.S. immigration system should shift away from temporary work visa programs because of their inherent flaws that allow employers to exert a coercive amount of power over workers, which allows them to exploit and underpay workers and to violate labor and employment laws with impunity. The bargaining power of all U.S. workers is undercut when more than 2 million temporary migrant workers—1.2% of the U.S. labor force—are underpaid by employers and cannot safely complain to labor standards enforcement agencies or sue employers that exploit them because their visa status is owned and controlled by their employer.

The issue is not that all employers of temporary migrant workers break laws or have bad intentions, but that the current structures and legal frameworks of temporary work visa programs facilitate worker exploitation and are coupled with inadequate mechanisms in place for oversight and accountability. Reforming the system would ensure an even playing field for employers and raise wages and improve standards for both temporary migrant workers and U.S. workers in adjacent occupations and industries.

To achieve this, we propose several key reforms that are necessary to protect workers and modernize the U.S. immigration system:45

1. Congress should require employers to recruit and offer jobs to qualified U.S. workers before being allowed to recruit workers abroad.
2. Congress should regulate foreign labor recruiters to protect migrant workers and ensure transparency in recruitment chains, and hold end-user employers jointly liable for the actions of their recruiters.
3. Employers should be prohibited from hiring through temporary work visa programs if they have violated labor and employment laws, as well as civil rights, anti-discrimination and anti-trafficking laws.
4. Temporary migrant workers should be paid fairly according to U.S. wage standards based on the specific occupation and region.
5. Temporary migrant workers should be allowed to change employers and never be indentured to their employers through their visa status.
6. Temporary migrant workers should be allowed to self-petition for permanent residence after a short period in temporary status; ideally no longer than 18 months.
7. Much more funding should be appropriated to the U.S. Department of Labor to enforce an updated work visa system and strengthen the department’s mandates to conduct adequate oversight and debar employers, as well as to conduct random audits of employers.
8. Transparency in temporary work visa programs should be improved to protect workers and aid anti-trafficking efforts, in particular through the systematic release of more and better government data on temporary work visa programs.
9. An independent commission on employment-based migration and immigration should be established to make the system more flexible and data-driven and to depoliticize the adjustment of numerical limits in temporary work visa programs and for employment-based green cards.

Making U.S. labor migration more transparent, data-driven, and flexible with an independent commission on immigration

The U.S. immigration system needs to be much more flexible and data-driven in order to be responsive and able to adjust to the needs of the economy. Adjusting annual visa caps for both employment-based green cards and temporary work visa programs requires congressional action, which can be contentious because it is influenced by lobbying and opaque political considerations rather than facts, and too slow to keep up with changing economic conditions. Most permanent and temporary employment-based visa quotas have not changed since 1990, despite a vastly different U.S. economy and workforce three and a half decades later.

EPI has long proposed an independent commission on immigration and the labor market that would report regularly to Congress and the president, proposing new quotas on an annual or semiannual basis—based on economic needs and conditions, and issue public reports citing the evidence for its recommendations, which would be based on methodologies that are credible and transparent. The commission would consider the many trade-offs inherent in immigration policymaking in its recommendations, and Congress would ultimately decide which policies to adopt or reject. Basing quotas on evidence, data, and changing economic realities would depoliticize the process of setting numbers and provide an evidence base for decisions that can be inspected by all.46 Other expert organizations and groups have also called for a similar commission model.47

Expanding and strengthening humanitarian migration pathways

The world is experiencing the largest global displacement crisis in modern history, and the forced migration seen on the Western Hemisphere is a major component of the broader global trend (UNHCR 2024). Given the history of interventions in its own hemisphere, the United States government has a special responsibility to at least accept more refugees and asylum seekers from the region,48 but should also accept more from other regions. Existing research already shows that humanitarian migrants see wage gains and integrate well into communities across the United States and make important economic contributions, leaving little to fear from an economic perspective.

Existing humanitarian pathways should be expanded to meet the current need of persons fleeing persecution, conflict, and environmental change by (1) increasing the annual refugee ceiling quotas and investing in a more robust and durable network for resettlement assistance and support and (2) making the U.S. asylum system more welcoming, including by broadening the definition of asylum, either by statute or executive action where possible, including the creation of pathways for migrants who are displaced by the climate crisis and armed conflict. In addition, humanitarian pathways should be improved through strengthening worker protections for newly arriving refugees, asylees, and asylum seekers through know-your-rights trainings. And employers that regularly recruit and hire refugees, asylees, and asylum seekers, should be required to commit to providing fair and decent working conditions, including a commitment to labor neutrality.

To further facilitate workforce integration, public assistance should be made available to new arrivals; work permits should be expedited to boost economic gains and reduce the workload of social services providers, including shelters; and government agencies should partner formally with unions, workers’ centers, and assistance providers on job training and matching workers with employment opportunities.

Adequately funding labor standards enforcement and stricter penalties for lawbreaking employers

As EPI has reported numerous times over the years and as discussed in this report, the U.S. government now appropriates nearly 14 times more for immigration enforcement than on all labor standards enforcement combined ($30.2 billion vs $2.2 billion). Rather than spending tens of billions of dollars per year for immigration enforcement, what’s needed are more resources and staffing for labor standards enforcement agencies, and a more strategic focus on labor standards enforcement that does not take immigration status into account. A shift away from immigration enforcement will result in removing barriers to organizing in workplaces across the country—which will boost economic outcomes through the adoption of collective bargaining agreements—that also serve to close racialized and gendered gaps in wages and working conditions.

At present, labor standards agencies are underfunded, short-staffed, and ill-equipped to hold lawbreaking employers accountable. While immigration benefits the U.S. economy overall as discussed in this report, when worker protection agencies cannot adequately do their jobs, employers can exploit the millions of migrant workers who lack an immigration status or who only have a temporary or precarious status in ways that degrade standards for all workers.

U.S. labor standards enforcement agencies must therefore be staffed and funded adequately to protect the rights of all 167 million workers in the United States, including migrant and immigrant workers, so that lawbreaking employers who abuse workers of any status will face much higher chances of being caught and much higher penalties than they currently do. Congress must make major investments to achieve this, by at least tripling the funds appropriated to worker protection agencies like the Wage and Hour Division and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in the U.S. Department of Labor, and the National Labor Relations Board.

Family-based immigration should remain an important pathway

Family-based immigration accounts for roughly two-thirds of all green cards and should remain a robust and important immigration pathway. While EPI’s immigration analyses and proposals mainly focus on the employment-based aspects of immigration, we fully support family reunification remaining the dominant pathway in the U.S. immigration system. Family reunification is in the national interest because families are our most basic learning and support systems and therefore greatly facilitate the assimilation of immigrants into American life. Many, if not most, family-based immigrants also enter the labor market and make important economic contributions to the United States, even if these contributions have not been analyzed and measured to the same extent as those of other migrants and immigrants.

Conclusion

As the body of evidence in this report shows, immigration to the United States has contributed greatly to growing the economy, and foreign-born workers have been complementary to U.S. workers and expanded opportunities for them. From an economic and labor force perspective, continuing or increasing immigration levels is not something to be feared if the right polices are in place and governance is improved. The challenges and potential pitfalls that must be addressed are mainly the result of workers lacking equal rights in the workplace due to their immigration status.

The share of those workers in the U.S. labor force, who either lack an immigration status or only have a temporary and precarious status that can expire or be rescinded, is large and growing. A workforce with so many workers in this situation results in a massive power imbalance that benefits employers and allows them to keep workers in fear of calling out workplace violations like wage theft and various other forms of lawbreaking. The precariousness of migrant workers makes it nearly impossible for them to exercise the labor and employment rights they ostensibly have on paper, which leads to degraded workplace conditions for all workers, compared with an ideal scenario in which all workers have full and equal rights. The reforms and policy interventions we have outlined are needed to fix this.

Nevertheless, despite an unjust immigration policy regime and the abuses enabled by the status quo, immigration has still benefitted the economy greatly, including most foreign-born and U.S.-born workers. But if the recommendations outlined here were implemented, leading to a guarantee of full and equal workplace rights for all workers and an improved and expanded labor standards enforcement regime—then future immigration flows and even expansions will result in a fairer and more broadly shared prosperity for all workers and increased dynamism for the U.S. economy.

Notes

1. In this report, the statistics we present from the American Community Survey and Current Population Survey follow the convention that immigrants are synonymous with what the U.S. Census Bureau calls the “foreign-born population”, which are defined as those people in the U.S. who were not citizens at birth. The small number of U.S. citizens born abroad to U.S. parents are not included in the foreign-born population and in this report, are treated as “U.S. born”.

2. The labor market participation rate in 2023 was 66.6% for immigrants and 61.8% for U.S.-born workers (BLS 2024a).

3. CBO (2024) in particular adjusts for the possibility that growing survey nonresponse in the CPS is causing an undercount of the size of the foreign-born population. Correcting this possible undercount also helps to make sense of a recent gap between the household-based CPS and the establishment-based Current Employment Statistics survey, as explained by Edelberg and Watson 2024 and Tedeschi 2024. At the same time, Butcher et al. 2023 argue that the CPS may be overstating the size of the foreign-born population.

4. Appendix B of CBO 2024 reports that their adjustments to the CPS increase the estimated foreign-born population share to 15.6% in 2022 and 16.2% in 2023. In Figure 2 of the CBO report, the total Social Security area population estimates are about 335.5 million in 2022 and about 338.4 million in 2023. Together, these estimates imply that the foreign-born population grew by about 4.8%.

5. See Bivens 2022 for an overview of the U.S. economic situation before the American Rescue Plan passed and the law’s subsequent effect on labor markets.

6. Immigrant workers at a given income level also likely have smaller propensities to consume out of current income than U.S.-born residents because they are much more likely to send remittances abroad to family members in their origin countries. This is another reason why a larger share of immigrants in the population is likely deflationary.

7. For an overview of the evidence on the weak causal link between labor market developments and subsequent inflation, see Banerjee and Bivens 2023.

8. Authors’ analysis of the 2023 Current Population Survey basic monthly microdata. “Dental, nursing, and health aides” refers to the occupations Home Health Aides, Personal Care Aides, Nursing Assistants, Orderlies and Psychiatric Aides, Occupational Therapy Assistants and Aides, Physical Therapist Assistants and Aides, Massage Therapists, Dental Assistants, and Medical Assistants.

9. See Saiz 2010 for evidence on the lack of responsiveness of supply to shifts in demand for housing.

10. See Kmetz, Mondragon, and Wieland 2022 for the effect of the pandemic shock on housing demand.

11. See Schuetz 2022 for an overview of this agenda.

12. For a discussion of monopsony power and wage markdowns, see Manning 2020.

13. Authors’ analysis of Baugh 2023 and Department of Homeland Security Statistics, Yearbook of Immigration Statistics (various years).

14. The fact that these visas are called “nonimmigrant” in U.S. law has to do with the fact that foreign nationals who apply for them are not allowed to immigrate permanently to the United States. U.S. law presumes that all foreign nationals wish to reside permanently in the United States, and in order to be issued a nonimmigrant visa, the applicant for the visa has to prove to the U.S. government that they do not intend to reside permanently in the United States.

15. Authors’ analysis of State Department nonimmigrant visa statistics and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services petition data.

16. The Refugee Act of 1980, S.643-Refugee Act of 1979 (title upon introduction), 94 Stat. 102, Public Law 96-212 (March 17, 1980), 96th Congress (1979–1980), Congress.gov.

17. There are also separate provisions in the Immigration and Nationality Act for the granting of asylum on a case-by-case basis to persons who are physically present in the United States or who arrive in the United States and who meet the definition of a refugee. For more background, see Bruno 2019.

18. Authors’ analysis of USCIS Form I-765 data for fiscal years 2022 and 2023.

19. See Ruiz Soto, Gelatt, and Hook 2024, Passel and Krogstad 2024, Baker and Warren 2024, and Warren 2024.

20. See for example, Chishti and Bush-Joseph 2023, Chishti, Bush-Joseph, and Putzel-Kavanaugh 2024, Ruiz Soto, Gelatt, and Hook 2024.

21. See Table A1 in Batalova, Gelatt, and Fix 2024, updated by authors with latest TPS population estimate in Wilson 2024. The 2.8 million total cited here excludes asylum seekers whom we also consider to be in a precarious status. As noted above, there were 1.5 million asylum seekers who held valid EADs in 2023, but the total number of asylum seekers is greater but unknown.

22. See for example, discussion of data in Passel and Krogstad 2024, Baker and Warren 2024, and Ruiz Soto, Gelatt, and Hook 2024.

23. See discussion in Hinojosa-Ojeda 2010.

24. Hinojosa-Ojeda 2010 summarizing and citing Rivera-Batiz 1999; Amuedo-Dorantes, Bansak, and Raphael 2007; and Kossoudji and Cobb-Clark 2002. Kallick 2013 also provides a useful review and commentary on the studies that measure the impact of granting status to unauthorized immigrants (see Appendix A).

25. See for example, Galarza 1956, Meissner 2004, and Costa 2021.

26. See for example, Lapinig 2017.

27. See for example, Bauer and Stewart 2013.

28. See for example, Bauer and Stewart 2013, Garrison, Bensinger, and Singer-Vine 2015, and GAO 2017.

29. See for example, Costa and Hira 2020, Costa 2016, Hira 2015, and Costa 2017.

30. For example, see discussion in Costa 2021.

31. See for example, Hira and Costa 2021 and Costa and Martin 2023.

32. Bivens and Shierholz broadly define “monopsony power” as “the leverage enjoyed by employers to set their workers’ pay.” See Bivens and Shierholz 2018.

33. See for example, Gibbons et al. 2019 and Naidu, Posner, and Weyl 2018 for estimates of monopsony power’s effects in wage suppression in the United States.

34. For more background, see Broder and Lessard 2023.

35. With the exception of back pay under the National Labor Relations Act due to the Hoffman Plastics decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, see for example WHD 2008.

36. For more discussion and background, see Kolker and Morton 2023.

37. For the full list of EAD eligibility categories, see USCIS 2024.

38. This total includes 2.8 million migrants in precarious statuses like DACA, TPS, and parole, and the 1.5 million asylum seekers with an approved EAD (see discussion in previous section).

39. The document cited from WHD does not list a date but was last viewed by the authors in mid-2023, meaning it was likely citing the number of workers in the civilian labor force in 2022; it is referenced as evidence of the number of workers who are protected by WHD. We cite an updated number for the number of workers in the civilian labor force in 2023, as the number for which WHD is responsible for protecting. The number of covered workers is derived from the annual averages reported for the total civilian labor force, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey, Series Id: LNU01000000, Not Seasonally Adjusted, Series title: (Unadj) Civilian Labor Force Level, ages 16 and over [data tables], U.S. Department of Labor.

40. To derive this estimate, the number of workers in 1973 and 2023 was divided by the number of WHD investigators in those years. The number of covered workers is derived from the annual averages reported for the total civilian labor force, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey, Series Id: LNU01000000, Not Seasonally Adjusted, Series title: (Unadj) Civilian Labor Force Level, ages 16 and over [data tables], U.S. Department of Labor.

41. See for example, Costa, Martin, and Rutledge 2020, Bensinger, Garrison, and Singer-Vine 2016, and Cotsirilos 2023.

42. Authors’ analysis of Table A-1 in Batalova, Gelatt, and Fix 2024 plus additional updated numbers for the TPS population reported in Wilson 2024.

43. Authors analysis of USCIS n.d. for employment authorization category “C085, applicant/pending asylum.”

44. Authors’ estimate based on the total population of persons in precarious statuses as a share of the total unauthorized immigrant population, which also relies on estimates by Passel and Krogstad 2024 and Batalova, Gelatt, and Fix 2024.

45. For more discussion, see Costa 2021.

46. See further discussion in, for example, Marshall and Eisenbrey 2010, Marshall 2009 and 2011, and Ruhs and Martin 2013.

47. See for example Papademetriou et al. 2009 and Gelatt and Chishti 2024.

48. See for example, Faux 2017, Borger 2018, and Shesgreen 2018.

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Wage and Hour Division (WHD). 2024. “Agriculture Data Table.” U.S. Department of Labor, n.d. Accessed July 1, 2024.

Warren, Robert. 2024. After a Decade of Decline, the US Undocumented Population Increased by 650,000 in 2022. Center for Migration Studies, January 28, 2024.

Wilson, Jill H. 2024. Temporary Protected Status and Deferred Enforced Departure. Congressional Research Service, RS20844, updated May 28, 2024.

Wong, Tom K., Ignacia Rodriguez Kmec, Diana Pliego, Karen Fierro Ruiz, Silva Mathema, Trinh Q. Truong, and Rosa Barrientos-Ferrer. 2024. 2023 Survey of DACA Recipients Highlights Economic Advancement, Continued Uncertainty amid Legal Limbo. Center for American Progress, March 25, 2024.

In the past two years, seven states have introduced bills to strengthen child labor protections and four have enacted them

In the past two years, seven states have introduced bills to strengthen protections for child labor and four have enacted them (Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, and California). In June 2023, Colorado enacted a law that allows a family to sue the employer of a child who was injured at work while employed in violation of the law. In September, Illinois passed a law mandating that child influencers and children who appear in their parents’ monetized digital content must be fairly compensated—the first of its kind in the nation. And in October, California’s governor signed into law a measure that will teach high school students about their workplace rights and right to join a union—also the first of its kind. Earlier this year, Arkansas passed a harmful bill eliminating youth work permits, which informed families of a child’s rights at work and provided documentation that can be used to aid compliance with the law. A week later—following a slew of negative press attention and alarm raised by child welfare advocates—Arkansas lawmakers passed a bill to increase penalties for child labor violations, though without adding any new enforcement funding or capacity.

Most of the state-level bills introduced to strengthen child labor protections deal with enforcement: increasing civil monetary or criminal penalties, establishing enhanced penalties for repeat and willful violations, or allowing victims to sue for damages. A smaller set of bills are related to work hours or protections for certain industries. In addition to Illinois, a Pennsylvania state lawmaker has proposed a bill to protect child influencers. And in Virginia, a bill to ban child labor in tobacco was introduced in 2022 but was not reintroduced in 2023 (see Table 1). Federal law does not prohibit youth under 18 from handling or harvesting tobacco despite the well-known risks of nicotine poisoning, pesticide exposure, and heat-related illnesses, which are particularly acute for youth.

Multiple bills have also been introduced at the federal level, including proposals to increase penalties for child labor violations, bar repeat violators from receiving federal contracts, and increase the age for farm work, among other proposals.1 However, federal bills face a difficult path to enactment in a divided Congress.

Table 1

Federal bills offer guidance for states to strengthen child labor protections

Because of exemptions in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)—the federal labor law that governs wage and hour standards and youth employment—children can work in agriculture at younger ages, for longer hours, and in more hazardous conditions than in non-agricultural work. These FLSA exemptions are deadly—more children die in agriculture than in any other industry. Between 2003 and 2016, more than half of the 452 work-related fatalities among children were in agriculture, even though the industry employs a very small share of youth workers.

States can choose to enact stronger child labor standards in agriculture than the FLSA but few have done so. No U.S. state complies with the minimum standards set forth in Article 2 of the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which sets minimum ages for employment and hazardous employment in agriculture, and the U.S. has not ratified the International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention on which this principle is based. Furthermore, while the United States has ratified the ILO Convention on eliminating the worst forms of child labor, it remains out of full compliance with the Convention because of persistent agriculture exemptions and its failure to update hazardous occupation orders.

Numerous federal proposals to strengthen child labor protections have been introduced, and lawmakers can adapt these provisions at the state level. For example, the recently reintroduced Children’s Act for Responsible Employment and Farm Safety (CARE) Act would raise the age to work in agriculture from 12 to 14, raise the minimum age for hazardous work from 16 to 18, and restrict the number of hours 14- and 15-year-olds can work (in line with FLSA child labor standards in non-agricultural employment). The bill would also increase civil monetary and criminal penalties for child labor violations and provide children with protection from pesticide exposure. Meanwhile, the Children Harmed in Life-Threatening or Dangerous (CHILD) Labor Act of 2023 would increase civil and criminal penalties for child labor violations, expand the U.S. Department of Labor’s authority, increase requirements of federal contractors and their subcontractors, hold suppliers and subcontractors jointly liable for violations, and allow victims of child labor to sue their employer for damages.

At minimum, states that lack standards in certain areas or have child labor standards that are weaker than those in the FLSA should raise standards to align with the FLSA. This is important both to improve employer compliance by preventing confusion over conflicting state and federal standards, and to ensure state enforcement agencies are equipped to act when FLSA standards are violated (in the absence of state standards, such enforcement can be handled only by the federal Department of Labor).

State lawmakers should adopt other changes to help deter exploitation of children, such as raising the minimum wage to $17 an hour, which would benefit over 10 million young workers and raise the floor for 21.5 million adult low-wage workers whose wages and employment are undercut by low-wage child labor. State policymakers should also eliminate youth subminimum wages, which incentivize employers to hire youth at exceptionally low pay rates and then fire them when they reach adulthood.

Overall, the bills introduced so far in seven states show that there is appetite for strengthening child labor protections and that state lawmakers can achieve progress when called to act. While these bills address a variety of different issues related to child labor, they represent basic changes that would drastically improve protections for young workers that every state should adopt.

Note

1. Federal bills to address child labor introduced in the 2023-2024 Congress include: H.R. 2388, H.R. 2956, H.R. 4020, H.R. 6079 / S. 3163, H.R. 7345, S. 637, S. 3139, and S.3142.

This is the second blog post in a series on farmworker employment and wages.

• Part one: How many farmworkers are employed in the United States?

The public discourse around farmworkers’ wages has recently reached a fever pitch, with farm employers and industry associations arguing that wages have risen too quickly and are out of control. As a response, farm employers and industry associations have lobbied Congress to reduce the required wage rates for migrant farmworkers in the H-2A visa program—known as the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR)—and even sued the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) to invalidate a new methodology for setting AEWRs.

But even a cursory review of the basic wage data on farmworkers and the H-2A program reveals that claims about farmworkers being overpaid are not based on any observable evidence, and in fact farmworkers are paid much less than similarly situated workers outside of agriculture. That is not to say that farmworkers’ wages have not increased over the past decade—they have risen in real terms—but farmworker wage growth must be viewed in the context of wage growth for other workers and employer claims of a labor shortage in agriculture.

In light of these claims and recent lobbying efforts, this next blog post in this series will examine the available evidence on farmworkers’ wages and wage growth compared with workers outside of agriculture. In subsequent posts, I’ll review changes in the AEWR over the past 10 years, and analyze the wages of directly hired farmworkers versus those who are employed by farm labor contractors.

The Farm Labor Survey is an important source for data on wages in agriculture

The most reliable data on farmworkers’ wages come from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Agricultural Statistics Service, which surveys farm employers about their directly hired workers and reports the results in USDA’s Farm Labor Survey (FLS) twice a year (with data reported in those reports for reference weeks in January, April, July, and October). 

USDA’s FLS obtains wage data by asking farmers to report the total wages paid and hours worked by type of worker, such as crop, livestock, or agricultural equipment operator. The resulting average hourly earnings or wages reflect the results of many wage systems, hourly wages, piece rates, and wages plus overtime and bonuses, for farmworkers who are hired directly by individual farm employers. (The wages of farmworkers who are not employed directly, which the FLS does not collect, will be discussed in another blog post in this series.)

One thing to note about the FLS is that the accuracy of the results relies on the truthfulness of farm employers. USDA does not review the payroll records of farms or pay stubs from farmworkers to verify the claims of farm employers.

Farmworkers earn very low wages

Despite some documented real increases in wages the past few years, the latest FLS data show the hourly earnings of farmworkers are much lower than the earnings of similarly situated nonfarm workers, as well as compared with the average for all workers in the United States (see Figure A).

Figure A

In 2022, the average earnings of all nonsupervisory farmworkers (i.e., combined field and livestock workers) was $16.62 per hour. This is just half (52%) of the average hourly wage for all workers in the United States in 2022, which stands at $32.00 per hour (see EPI’s Data Library).

The average hourly wage for production and nonsupervisory nonfarm workers—the most appropriate cohort of nonagricultural workers to compare with farmworkers—was $27.56, according to the Current Employment Statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In other words, farmworkers earned just under 60% of what production and nonsupervisory workers outside of agriculture earned. USDA has referred to this wage gap between farmworker and nonfarm worker wages as “slowly shrinking, but still substantial.” In 2022, the farmworker wage gap remained substantial and virtually unchanged from the previous two years.

Farmworkers have very low levels of educational attainment. According to the National Agricultural Workers Survey, 26% completed the 10th, 11th, or 12th grade, and 14% completed some education beyond high school. Farmworkers earn the same or less than the two groups of nonfarm workers with the lowest levels of education in the United States: Nonsupervisory farmworkers earned 10 cents an hour more than the average wage earned by workers without a high school diploma ($16.52), but earned $5.32 less per hour than the average wage earned by workers with only a high school diploma ($21.94).

In sum, farmworkers in the United States continue to earn relatively low wages, and have for many decades, which belies the suggestions from agribusiness that farmworkers are overpaid and that their wages are rising uncontrollably. In the next blog post, I’ll address wages and wage growth in the H-2A visa program, a topic which has been hotly contested and debated by agribusiness, farmworker advocates, and policymakers over the past few years.

Basic facts about the employment of farmworkers, and the wages they earn, are often difficult to obtain and understand. Media coverage and even policymakers working on agricultural issues often mistake or confuse key data points. This is understandable, given that employment and wage data in agriculture must be pieced together from multiple data sets, which are often incomplete and inconsistent and provide information about different segments of the farm workforce.

This blog post is the first in a series that will attempt to address this information gap by providing some basic facts and information about farmworker employment and wages. I begin by addressing one of the most basic yet confusing questions about farmworkers: How many are employed in the United States?

There are roughly 2.4 million farmworkers nationwide

Data from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) show that average annual employment of workers who are employed on farms that report to state unemployment insurance agencies was just under 1.3 million in 2022—essentially unchanged from the previous year. But QCEW also estimated that there were an additional 300,000 “wage and salary” farmworkers not included in their data, suggesting total average employment of 1.6 million in 2022. This is average annual employment, however, which is not the same as the number of unique farmworkers. What that means is that there are 1.6 million jobs that are “full-time equivalent” farms, meaning jobs that would allow a worker to work full-time and year-round.

As a result, that underestimates the number of unique farmworkers due to high seasonality and turnover. For the number of individual farmworkers, we can look to the Census of Agriculture (COA), which asks farm operators and owners how many workers they employ directly; in 2017, farmers reported hiring 2.4 million farmworkers. However, the COA does not report workers who are brought to farms by nonfarm employers such as labor contractors, and can double-count workers employed by two farms, so even the 2.4 million counted by the COA does not provide an exact count of unique farmworkers—although it is likely the best available estimate.

There are 1.5 farmworkers for every full-time equivalent job in agriculture nationwide

Average employment is often confused with the unique number of farmworkers. In order to better understand it, we can devise a ratio of farmworkers to full-time equivalent jobs, as some scholars have done. Industries where there is seasonality and high rates of turnover are likely to have higher ratios—agriculture is one of these industries, and the results bear that out.

For example, nationwide, if average annual employment in agriculture is 1.6 million (as the QCEW shows) and if we assume that the number of farmworkers is 2.4 million (as the COA shows, although we know the number is likely higher), then we arrive at a ratio of 1.5 farmworkers for every full-time equivalent job in agriculture.

The ratio varies by state, and California is perhaps the best example of a state where we have a better picture of the number of unique farmworkers as compared with jobs, thanks to an analysis from Philip Martin at the University of California, Davis, and two colleagues from the California Employment Development Department. They looked at data on farm employment from unemployment insurance data, which showed that average monthly farm employment in California was 425,400 in 2016.

They then looked at Social Security numbers reported by agricultural employers when paying unemployment insurance taxes and were able to tie each number to the industries each worker was employed in and where they had their highest earnings. Doing that allowed them to identify 989,500 workers with at least one job in agriculture. That means the number of farmworkers was 2.3 times the number of full-time equivalent jobs in agriculture in California (989,500 divided by 425,400).

The H-2A visa program

Another significant segment of the farm workforce is employed through the H-2A visa program, which allows farm employers to hire temporary migrant workers if they anticipate a shortage of U.S. workers to fill temporary and seasonal jobs. Over 90% of H-2A workers are employed on crop farms, according to DOL data. The size of the program has grown rapidly, quadrupling over the past decade, as shown in Figure A. Three federal agencies are involved in H-2A, which is why three separate sources of information are shown in Figure A.

There is no exact count of the number of unique individuals employed with H-2A visas in the United States in a given year. In 2022, there were nearly 372,000 jobs certified by DOL for employers seeking to hire H-2A workers, which is the first step employers must complete. The next step in the process is filing a petition to United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. According to USCIS’s H-2A Employer Data Hub, in 2022 there were over 400,000 petitions approved for H-2A workers, 345,000 of which were for new H-2A jobs. The remaining 55,000 represented “continuing employment” in H-2A, which includes workers who either extended their stay in the United States for an additional season, began working for another employer, or changed the terms of their employment with the same employer. The final step in the process when hiring an H-2A worker is applying for a visa with the State Department. In 2022, the State Department issued almost 300,000 visas to H-2A workers, allowing them to travel to the United States to commence employment.

The best way to estimate the number of H-2A workers is to assume that H-2A visas issued by the State Department represent the number of individual H-2A workers in the United States. But some of the 55,000 USCIS petitions approved for continuing employment are for H-2A workers who remained in the country and should be added to the number of visas issued, though the USCIS data on petitions for continuing employment do not identify H-2A workers who extended their stays.

We can also estimate the share of the farm workforce that is comprised of H-2A workers. We know from DOL certification data that H-2A workers were employed for an average of six months out of the year. If we use a low-end estimate that there were 300,000 H-2A workers in 2022—based on the number of visas issued—who were each employed for six months, that means there were 150,000 full-time equivalent H-2A jobs, and that H-2A workers represented close to 10% of all average farmworker employment but almost 17% of crop employment on U.S. farms.

Figure A

National Agricultural Workers Survey provides information on farmworkers’ demographics, employment, and countries of origin

And finally, the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) does not report the number of farmworkers, but it does report on many of the characteristics of crop farmworkers—excluding farmworkers who work with animals or who are employed through the H-2A visa program. The NAWS contains useful information about the demographics and employment of crop farmworkers. For example, according to the latest NAWS data, nearly half of the non-H-2A crop farmworkers were unauthorized immigrants (44%) while the number of U.S.-born citizens working on crop farms is 30%. The NAWS also provides information about the countries of origin of crop farmworkers, the share who have access to health insurance, levels of education, gender and age, family size, language proficiency, and how long they’ve worked in agriculture.

The WHD protects the rights of all workers in the United States, including migrants employed as farmworkers through the H-2A visa program who fill temporary and seasonal farm jobs. WHD enforces laws that protect workers regardless of their immigration status and can order employers to pay back wages owed to farmworkers, even if workers are undocumented or otherwise not authorized to be employed in the United States. WHD enforcement aims to ensure that the rights of workers are protected and to level the playing field for employers, so that violators who underpay workers or engage in other exploitative or illegal behavior to cut labor costs do not gain a competitive advantage over law-abiding employers.

Wage and hour enforcement is especially important in agriculture, an industry where wages are already low and half of crop workers are unauthorized immigrants. The 300,000 farmworkers employed through the H-2A program can lose their right to be in the United States if they are fired or otherwise lose their jobs because their work authorization is tethered to their employer.3 Many farmworkers are not aware of their labor and employment rights, and even when they know their rights, many are reluctant to complain of labor and employment law violations for fear of retaliation based on their immigration status.

In our 2020 report, we found that farm employers violated the law in over 70% of the investigations that WHD conducted in the agricultural industry.4 This high rate of violations combined with the vulnerability of farmworkers help justify our calls for additional federal efforts to protect farmworkers. However, the latest data show that during the first full fiscal year of the Biden administration, fiscal year 2022, the number of investigations of farms closed by WHD dropped to a record low of 879—the lowest number on record and fewer than any year during the Trump administration, when at least 1,036 investigations a year were closed.

This report evaluates the significance of these latest enforcement data. President Biden nominated Julie Su for Labor Secretary5, and we hope the analysis provided here can assist the next secretary and the Department of Labor to improve and expand its efforts to protect the farmworkers across the United States who pick the crops and tend to the livestock that feed every American. Farmworkers are often doing this critical work in difficult and dangerous conditions, all while earning some of the lowest wages in the entire U.S. labor market, with a national average wage of just $16.62 per hour.6

(For this report, we did not assess the possible impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the work carried out by WHD during the final fiscal year of the Trump administration and the first two fiscal years of the Biden administration. Insufficient data or other indicators are available to determine whether, for example, the decline in the number of investigations of agricultural employers was attributable to pandemic-related effects resulting from lockdowns and social distancing mandates.)7
 

Summary of findings, conclusions, and recommendations

The following is a summary of the findings in this report:

1. The number of federal inspections of employers by the Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. Department of Labor hit a record low in fiscal year 2022 under the Biden administration, at just 879—an average of 73 per month, continuing its years-long decline.
2. The low number of investigations means that most farms are never investigated by WHD; fewer than 1% of agricultural employers are investigated per year. However, as our previous report showed, when WHD does investigate an agricultural employer, 70% of the time, WHD detects wage and hour violations.
3. Part of the reason there are so few agricultural investigations is that WHD is underfunded and understaffed. Despite a broad portfolio and a mandate to protect 165 million workers, WHD’s budget in 2022 was roughly similar to its budget in 2006.
4. Another reason there are so few investigations is related to the number of WHD investigators, which is near its record low—at 810.
5. The average number of WHD-covered workers in 2022 was 164.3 million, which amounts to 202,824 workers for every wage and hour investigator. Compare this to 1973, when there were 72,588 covered workers for every wage and hour investigator. Investigators are now responsible for almost triple the number of workers than in 1973 (2.8 times more).
6. In comparing WHD enforcement in agriculture during the Trump administration and Biden administration so far, we found that the Biden administration in 2022 (its first complete fiscal year) detected fewer back wages owed to farmworkers than the average during the three full fiscal years of the Trump administration, but the Biden administration found more in back wages owed per worker and assessed more in civil money penalties.
7. We reviewed the shares of total back wages owed and CMPs assessed (combined) by type of legal violation for the 2000–2022 period and found that H-2A violations accounted for nearly half (46%) of all back wages owed to farmworkers and CMPs assessed over the 23-year period.
8. WHD investigations during the Trump administration found that H-2A violations accounted for roughly half of the back wages and CMPs owed by farm employers during 2017–2020, but the H-2A share rose to 73%, almost three-fourths, during the Biden administration. As a result, WHD investigations that find H-2A violations now account for the vast majority of back wages owed and CMPs assessed.

The following are summaries of the conclusions and recommendations discussed in the report:

1. Inadequate staffing and funding at WHD are the major factors for the drop in the number of WHD investigations during the Biden administration, but an increase in the size of the H-2A program and complexity of H-2A investigations may also be contributing factors.
2. The share of back wages and civil money penalties resulting from H-2A violations may have increased because the size of the H-2A program is growing, and WHD may have decided to prioritize H-2A cases. But there may also be practical reasons, for example, because H-2A applications create more of a paper trail that can assist WHD in enforcement, rather than having to rely on gathering information from farmworkers who may be reticent to speak out about workplace violations due to their immigration status and fear of retaliation. Another contributing factor may be that ever more employers of H-2A workers are farm labor contractors—nonfarm employers that act as staffing firms for farm employers—and have long been associated with high rates of wage and hour violations.
3. Below are a few recommended actions that Congress and the Biden administration can take to protect farmworkers:
   1. Congress can appropriate more funding to WHD to hire more investigators and conduct more investigations.
   2. Absent more funding, WHD can better target currently available resources, issue larger fines and more significant sanctions, and more frequently utilize existing legal mechanisms to encourage compliance.
   3. Congress can pass a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrant farmworkers, which would reduce their vulnerability by allowing them to exercise their workplace rights.
   4. The executive branch can explore ways to provide work authorization to unauthorized immigrant farmworkers through deferred action or parole, which would also reduce the vulnerability of unauthorized farmworkers by allowing them to exercise their workplace rights.
   5. To bolster protections from retaliation, WHD and other federal agencies should issue more letters and statements of interest in support of deferred action for farmworkers in labor disputes, under the recently clarified process at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and coordinate with DHS to facilitate quick adjudications.
   6. The Department of Labor (DOL) and DHS should explore and experiment with options to increase the mobility of H-2A workers, to reduce the indentured nature of the H-2A visa program, including for example, regulations allowing H-2A workers to more easily change employers.
   7. DOL should create a front-end screening process to prohibit employers from hiring through H-2A if they have a track record of violating wage and hour and labor laws.
   8. WHD should require H-2A program violators to submit certified payroll information periodically to give WHD early warning of potential violations.
   9. WHD should develop a mobile app for farmworkers to report their wages and hours, which could also provide workers with a way to anonymously report violations.

The number of federal wage and hour inspections continued to decline and hit a record low in 2022 under the Biden administration

This section analyzes WHD’s aggregate enforcement data. WHD conducted over 34,000 investigations in U.S. agriculture between fiscal years 2000 and 2022, an average of almost 1,500 per year (1,485). The WHD data we use represent investigations that were closed by year (meaning they have been concluded or resolved), which means that some cases may have begun in earlier fiscal years, and some that began in the current fiscal year are not included because they have not yet been closed.

Figure A shows a clear downward trend in the number of closed WHD investigations of agricultural employers over the past two decades, from more than 2,000 a year in the early 2000s to 1,000 or fewer a year during the last two fiscal years, i.e., during the Biden administration. In 2022, WHD closed only 879 investigations of agricultural employers, an average of 73 a month, and just over a third of the 2,431 agricultural investigations closed in 2000, the peak year for WHD agricultural investigations.

Figure A

Few investigations mean that most farms are never investigated by WHD

The Census of Agriculture (COA) reported over 513,000 U.S. farms with labor expenses for directly hired workers in 2017,8 and 112,134 agricultural establishments were registered with state unemployment insurance agencies in the third quarter of 2022, according to the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW).9

At 879 WHD-closed investigations of agricultural employers in 2022, and using the QCEW number of establishments in 2022 as a reference for the number of agricultural employers—which includes only farms registered in the unemployment insurance system—the probability that a farm will be investigated for violating federal wage and hour laws in a given year is less than 1%: 0.7%.10

Despite the low number of investigations, when WHD investigators inspect an agricultural employer, they nearly always detect violations of wage and hour laws. As we reported in 2020, WHD detects violations 70% of the time they conduct an investigation—a sign that many agricultural employers are violating the law. Among the 70% of investigations that detected violations between 2005 and 2019, almost 40% found one to four violations on the farm and 31% found five or more.11

DOL’s Wage and Hour Division is underfunded and understaffed

Why are there so few investigations of agricultural employers? A major reason is too little funding and staffing, a topic we have addressed before.12 The Wage and Hour Division is responsible for enforcing provisions of several federal laws related to minimum wage, overtime pay, child labor, federal contract workers, work visa programs, migrant and seasonal agricultural workers, family and medical leave, and more. Yet, despite this broad portfolio and the nearly 165 million workers who are covered by these protections,13 funding for WHD has not kept pace with the growth of the U.S. labor force.

Figure B shows that, in inflation-adjusted 2022 dollars, WHD’s budget in 2006 was $241 million, and in 2022, $246 million—an increase of just $5 million over nearly two decades. Lack of funding for WHD reflects the general decline in overall labor standards enforcement spending across the federal government from $2.4 billion in 2012 to $2.1 billion in 2021 (in 2021 dollars).14

Figure B

Yet, in addition to the lack of funding and the nearly 165 million workers WHD has a mandate to protect, the number of WHD investigators that the agency employs, who are primarily responsible for ensuring that federal wage and hour laws are obeyed by employers across all 50 states and U.S. territories, is near an all-time low.

Figure C shows that there were only 810 WHD investigators at the end of November 2022 to enforce all federal wage and hour laws, two fewer than in 1973, the first year for which data are available, and 422 fewer than the peak year of 1978, when there were 1,232 WHD investigators. Meanwhile, the number of workers that WHD has a mandate to protect has increased sharply. The average number of WHD-covered workers in 2022 was 164.3 million, which amounts to 202,824 workers for every wage and hour investigator. Compare this to 1973, when there were 72,588 covered workers for every wage and hour investigator.15 Investigators are now responsible for almost triple the number of workers than in 1973 (2.8 times more).

Figure C

Another issue related to the funding and staffing challenges has reportedly been WHD’s “issues with recruiting and retaining employees.” Bloomberg Law reported in December 2022 that WHD has “struggled to recruit new investigative staff” and WHD’s overall back wages recovered, employees who received back wages, and total number of hours spent on investigations “all dropped in fiscal year 2022 compared to the year prior” according to WHD data.16 Despite WHD’s stated intention to hire 100 new investigators in the Biden administration, a heavy workload and inadequate funding from Congress appear to be hindering WHD from hiring enough staff for the tasks at hand.

So far, the Biden administration has detected fewer back wages owed to farmworkers but assessed more civil money penalties than the averages during the Trump administration

Figure D shows the back wages owed and civil money penalties assessed in agriculture between 2000 and 2022. (Back wages are the amount that WHD assesses is due to be paid to the workers by their employers as the result of an investigation. Civil money penalties, or CMPs, are additional monetary fines levied by WHD to punish and deter employers from violating wage and hour laws.) Both back wages and CMPs have been on a generally upward trend over the 23-year period, although there was a significant dip in back wages in 2022. Back wages peaked at $9.7 million in 2013 during the Obama administration, the same year that civil money penalty assessments peaked at $9.2 million. (All amounts are adjusted to constant 2022 dollars.)

Figure D

To compare enforcement during the Trump and Biden years, we looked at the past six fiscal years. The federal government’s fiscal year runs from October 1 to September 30 of the following calendar year—for example, the 2024 fiscal year begins on October 1, 2023, and ends on September 30, 2024. Any new presidential administration begins in late January, four months into the fiscal year. Hiring new agency staff and implementing the administration’s priorities can take half or more of the first fiscal year of a presidential term.17 Given this reality, while we first compare WHD data for all fiscal years during the Trump and Biden administrations, we then make comparisons that exclude the first fiscal years of the Trump and Biden administrations, comparing averages of the second through third years of the Trump administration with the second year of the Biden administration.

As Table 1 shows, during the four Trump years, WHD found that $26 million in back wages were owed to 36,466 farmworkers, an average of $6.5 million owed to an average of 9,117 farmworkers a year, and an average $717 owed per affected farmworker. By contrast, during the first two years of the Biden administration, Table 2 shows that a total of $15 million in back wages was owed to 18,639 farmworkers in 2021 and 2022, an average of $7.5 million owed to an average of 9,320 farmworkers per year, an average $791 per worker. There were 1,136 farm investigations per year on average under Trump, and 940 investigations per year under Biden.

The average of $791 in back wages owed to each farmworker during the first two years of the Biden administration was $74 more per farmworker compared with the four-year average during the Trump administration. An average of just over 200 more farmworkers per year were owed back wages during the first two years of the Biden administration compared with the average during the Trump administration.

Table 1

Table 2

Next, we compare these data after excluding the first year of the Trump and Biden administrations. We compared the second year of the Biden administration with the second, third, and fourth years of the Trump administration (Table 3) and see that the average number of closed WHD investigations during 2018–2020 was 1,079, which was 200 more than the 879 in the second year of the Biden administration.

The WHD under Trump found an average $6.6 million a year in back wages owed to farmworkers during 2018–2020, while WHD in the second year of the Biden administration found that $5.8 million were owed to farmworkers, or $834,000 less. During 2018–2020, the WHD under Trump found that an average of 9,721 farmworkers a year were owed back wages, compared with 8,260 during the second year of the Biden administration, nearly 1,500 fewer. The average of $704 in back wages owed to each farmworker during the second year of the Biden administration was $20 more per farmworker than the annual average owed to each farmworker during 2018–2020 of the Trump administration.

There was a significant difference in CMPs assessed. Table 3 shows that during years two through four of the Trump administration, an average of $7.4 million a year in CMPs was assessed against agricultural employers, but in 2022 during the Biden administration, the WHD assessed $8 million in 2022, the second-highest amount on record, other than the peak year in 2013. The highest amount of CMPs during the Trump administration was in 2018 at $7.6 million. (It’s important to note that back wages and CMPs assessed by WHD have not necessarily been actually paid yet to farmworkers or to the federal government; they show what WHD investigations have assessed them as owed).

Table 3

Violations in the H-2A visa program account for a growing share of back wages owed and civil money penalties assessed in agriculture—rising to nearly three-fourths during the Biden administration

WHD’s aggregate data on enforcement in agriculture list separately the violations detected when enforcing the three major federal employment laws and regulations covering farmworkers: (1) those that govern the H-2A visa program; (2) the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act (commonly referred to as MSPA), the major federal law that protects U.S. farmworkers; and (3) the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) along with all other wage and hour laws that WHD enforces.18 FLSA is the law that requires minimum wages and overtime pay and regulates the employment of workers younger than 18.

In order to have a better sense of which laws are being violated, we summed the back wages owed and the CMPs assessed for the 23-year period for which data are available (fiscal years 2000–2022), for violations of H-2A, MSPA, and FLSA et al. (FLSA plus all other violations).19 We divided the sum of back wages and CMPs under each law by the sum of total back wages and CMPs assessed by WHD for the entire 23-year period, which gave us the relevant shares of back wages and CMPs that correspond to each law. These calculations appear in Table 4. (Note that employers often violate several wage and hour laws at once; WHD categorizes cases by the three major laws, and they may overlap, but the sum of the three major categories corresponds closely with the total back wages and CMPs assessed by WHD.)

Table 4

We found that violations of H-2A rules account for much higher shares of back wages owed and CMPs assessed than violations of other laws, and now account for an overwhelming share of the back wages owed and CMPs assessed.

Table 4 shows the shares of total back wages owed and CMPs assessed (combined) by type of legal violation for the 2000–2022 period. H-2A violations accounted for nearly half (46%) of all back wages owed to farmworkers and CMPs assessed over the 23-year period, and their share rose sharply during the two years of the Biden administration. As Table 4 shows, WHD investigations during the Trump administration found that H-2A violations accounted for roughly half of the back wages and CMPs owed by farm employers during 2017–2020, but the H-2A share rose to 73%, almost three-fourths, during the Biden administration. As a result, WHD investigations that find H-2A violations now account for the vast majority of back wages owed and CMPs assessed.

Conclusions and recommendations

Analysis of WHD enforcement data highlights four facts. First, the low number of WHD investigations in agriculture, including the record low in 2022, makes the probability of a farm being investigated very low, less than 1% for any farm employer in any year. Second, even when farms are investigated, seven in 10 are found to have violated federal wage and hour laws, including 31% where five or more violations are found.

Third, the amounts that WHD found were owed in back wages were less in fiscal year 2022—the first full year under the Biden administration—than the annual averages during the three full fiscal years under the Trump administration (2018–2022), while average back wages owed per worker and total CMPs assessed were higher in 2022 under Biden than the average in the Trump years. Fourth, violations of the H-2A visa program accounted for roughly half of the back wages owed and CMPs assessed by WHD during the Trump administration—similar to the average for fiscal years 2000 to 2022—but the H-2A share rose to three-fourths during the Biden administration.

What accounts for the drop in the number of WHD investigations during the Biden administration? Several factors may explain fewer investigations in agriculture, in addition to the overall recent decline for WHD in terms of concluded cases, back wages assessed, the number of workers owed back wages, and the total number of hours spent on investigations, which was discussed above.20 The number of WHD investigators remains very low, and agricultural investigations are often time- and labor-intensive to complete, given the locations of worksites and high levels of turnover among a constantly changing and moving seasonal workforce. In addition, the data on investigations reflect only closed investigations, so we do not know if WHD opened more investigations in 2021 and 2022 that are ongoing. The closed investigations in 2022 likely include some investigations that were opened in earlier years, including during the Trump administration.

Another reason for fewer investigations may reflect the expansion of the H-2A program, which now accounts for three-fourths of back wages owed and CMPs assessed. H-2A investigations may be more complicated because of the need to ensure that employers abide by the more than 20 assurances they provide when they are certified by DOL to recruit and employ H-2A workers. Employers must offer and pay the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR) to H-2A workers, which is set by DOL regulation,21 and to any U.S. farmworkers who are considered to be in “corresponding employment.”22 Since the AEWR is higher than the federal minimum wage, employers may try to separate H-2A and U.S. farmworkers and pay the U.S. workers lower wages, as is alleged in a recent case from the Mississippi Delta.23 Complicated H-2A cases likely require more WHD investigators and more time to complete, resulting in a lower total number of closed cases.

Why is the share of back wages and CMPs resulting from H-2A violations on the rise? One reason is straightforward: The H-2A program is growing, with the number of jobs certified to be filled by H-2A workers rising over 10% per year recently, and the total number of H-2A workers quadrupling over the past decade.24 As more employers use the program and hire more H-2A workers, there are more opportunities for the law to be violated. However, it should be noted that H-2A farmworkers only represent roughly 10% of total average farm employment and 15% of average crop employment, which suggests that WHD may have made enforcing H-2A rules a priority because it is a government-run program and WHD is responsible for ensuring its integrity.

There may also be practical reasons for the shift to H-2A enforcement, given WHD’s limited enforcement staff and resources. For example, because of the disclosures and paperwork that employers must submit to federal agencies to be certified to employ H-2A workers, WHD investigators have ready access to key information about H-2A employers that allows comparisons between what employers have promised (for example, the AEWR) to what they actually paid workers (for example, by looking at payroll data and pay stubs). The paperwork on H-2A employers available to WHD may mean that investigators can rely less on gathering information from farmworkers—who, because of their immigration status and fear of retaliation, may be reticent to speak out about workplace violations—meaning that obtaining worker complaints and statements is less of a hindrance to an investigation.

Another contributing factor may be that ever more employers of H-2A workers are farm labor contractors (FLCs)—nonfarm employers that act as staffing firms for farm employers and have long been associated with high rates of wage and hour violations. As we showed in our report, FLCs account for the highest share of wage and hour violations in agriculture, 24% of all wage and hour violations in agriculture nationally, and roughly half of all violations in the two of the biggest farm states, California and Florida.25 In 2022, nearly half of all requested H-2A jobs certified by DOL were from FLCs.26

What should be done to improve farm employer compliance with wage and hour laws and better protect farmworkers? The first step is more investigators to detect more violations, which will require Congress to appropriate more funding to WHD. Outgoing Labor Secretary Marty Walsh recently expressed a similar sentiment to The Washington Post, noting that he hoped Congress would provide “more money for enforcement officers…[because] you can’t handle the number of complaints if you don’t have the number of officers.”27 For fiscal year 2024, WHD has requested $81 million in additional funds compared with their 2023 funding level, which would result in an increase of 398 full-time staff across the agency (not just WHD investigators).28

Absent more funding from Congress, WHD will need to better target currently available resources, issue larger fines and more significant sanctions, and more frequently utilize existing legal mechanisms to encourage compliance, such as using the joint employment standard under the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Migrant and Seasonal Worker Protection Act, to hold farms accountable for FLC violations.29 If farm operators are jointly liable for violations committed by the FLCs that bring workers to farms, farm operators will have incentives to police their FLCs to ensure they comply with the law. The concept of joint employment is longstanding, but DOL could use it more often and strengthen H-2A regulations to make clear that farm employers will be held jointly responsible for the actions of their FLCs.

In addition, when serious violations of FLSA are found, WHD can file a lawsuit asking a federal court for an injunction that seeks to prohibit the shipment and distribution of goods produced in violation of FLSA’s minimum wage, overtime, or child labor requirements, with what’s known as the “hot goods” provision.30 This supply-chain approach can be very effective because it sends a message to all businesses that they must not facilitate or acquiesce in wage and hour violations, and was used by former WHD administrator David Weil.31

Third, Congress and the Biden administration must recognize that the farm workforce of 2.4 million is becoming more vulnerable and in need of additional protection32—which requires both legislative and administrative action. About 70% of U.S. farmworkers were born in Mexico,33 and they include two very vulnerable groups: the unauthorized immigrants who arrived in their 20s and 30s in the 1990s—and are now in their 50s and may lack the language ability and skills to find nonfarm jobs—and temporary migrant H-2A workers who are tied to their employers by contracts, which means that they lose their right to remain in the United States if they lose their jobs. Most of the 5% of farmworkers from Central America are likely to be in a similar situation and facing similar challenges.34 Children and indigenous workers who hail from Latin America are also laboring in the fields and need protection.

A path to citizenship for unauthorized farmworkers, which would require legislation from Congress—or work authorization through deferred action or parole, which could be accomplished through the executive branch—could reduce the vulnerability of unauthorized farmworkers by allowing them to exercise their workplace rights. Options to increase the mobility of H-2A workers, such as regulations allowing them to more easily change employers, could be explored. The recent announcement by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) clarifying how migrant workers in labor disputes can access immigration protections can bolster worker protections from retaliation.35 WHD and other agencies within the Labor Department should issue more letters and statements of interest in support of deferred action for farmworkers and coordinate with DHS to facilitate quick adjudications that reflect the unique pressures faced by unauthorized and H-2A farmworkers.

And fourth, absent additional funding and resources to conduct more investigations, WHD should strategically target for enforcement the employers most likely to violate wage and hour laws, including the farm labor contractors who account for the largest share of violations 36 and employers who hire farmworkers through the H-2A visa program. Among the farms found to have committed wage and hour violations, as we showed in our previous report, repeat violators account for a significant share of the violations found in particular commodities and regions, which suggests the need to develop enforcement strategies that identify and monitor farm employers whose business models seem to be based on violating the law.

Creating a front-end screening process to prohibit employers from hiring through H-2A if they have a track record of violating wage and hour and labor laws, for instance, could make a significant impact and lessen the burden on WHD’s investigators.37 Requiring program violators to submit certified payroll information periodically and developing a mobile app for farmworkers to report their wages and hours could give WHD early warning of potential violations as well as provide workers with a way to anonymously report violations.

Monitoring working conditions in the fields has always been challenging and is becoming increasingly difficult. The Wage and Hour Division needs more investigators, funding, and effective strategies to protect farmworkers. This vital support needs to be bolstered by political will in the legislative and executive branches to overcome opposition from those who believe that farm employers are above needing to follow basic workplace laws. This is driven by a narrative of agricultural “exceptionalism”—the belief that agriculture is such a different industry with unique operations that it lies outside of, and thus should not be regulated by, the usual labor and employment law framework. This view has a well-established and harmful foothold in our laws and politics, resulting in legal carveouts of farmworkers from many of the bedrock labor standards protections that have covered workers outside of agriculture for decades at the federal and state level. Over the past half century, public acceptance of agricultural exceptionalism has finally begun to erode, but the job is far from complete. Additional enforcement resources are needed to ensure that farm employers play by the rules and that all farmworkers are guaranteed their basic rights for fair pay and working conditions.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Bruce Goldstein, David Dyssegaard Kallick, and Samantha Sanders for their insightful comments, observations, and suggestions provided during the drafting of this report, as well as Katherine deCourcy for research assistance and fact checking. However, no one mentioned here is responsible for the report’s content, and the authors are solely responsible for any errors or omissions.

Notes

1. Daniel Costa, Philip Martin, and Zachariah Rutledge, Federal Labor Standards Enforcement in Agriculture: Data Reveal the Biggest Violators and Raise New Questions About How to Improve and Target Efforts to Protect Farmworkers, Economic Policy Institute, December 2020. Zach Rutledge is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics at Michigan State University.

2. Economic Policy Institute, “Actions the Biden Administration and Congress Can Take to Better Protect Farmworkers,” panel discussion streamed live on February 10, 2021.

3. See for example, Daniel Costa, “The Farmworker Wage Gap Continued in 2020: Farmworkers and H-2A Workers Earned Very Low Wages During the Pandemic, Even Compared with Other Low-Wage Workers,” Working Economics Blog (Economic Policy Institute), July 20, 2021; Daniel Costa, Philip Martin, and Zachariah Rutledge, Federal Labor Standards Enforcement in Agriculture: Data Reveal the Biggest Violators and Raise New Questions About How to Improve and Target Efforts to Protect Farmworkers, Economic Policy Institute, December 2020.

4. Daniel Costa, Philip Martin, and Zachariah Rutledge, Federal Labor Standards Enforcement in Agriculture: Data Reveal the Biggest Violators and Raise New Questions About How to Improve and Target Efforts to Protect Farmworkers, Economic Policy Institute, December 2020.

5. The White House, “President Biden Nominates Julie Su for Secretary of the Department of Labor” (press release), February 28, 2023.

6. The number represents the 2022 annual average combined gross wage for field and livestock workers for the United States, as reported in National Agricultural Statistics Service, Farm Labor [survey and report], United States Department of Agriculture, November 23, 2022.

7. In addition, the fact that most agricultural work is done outdoors, combined with data showing that the number of agricultural establishments remained steady, increasing slightly between 2019 and 2022, suggests that any impacts from COVID-19 were likely minimal. The fact that more agricultural investigations were closed in 2020, the year when the the bulk of pandemic shutdowns and slowdowns took place, as compared to 2021 and 2022, also supports this theory

8. National Agricultural Statistics Service, 2017 Census of Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture; and see discussion in Rural Migration News, “COA Farm Labor Expenditures 2017,” University of California, Davis, September 9, 2019.

9. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, QCEW Searchable Databases [databases], Series Id: ENUUS00020511, Series Title: Number of Establishments in Private NAICS 11 Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting for All establishment sizes in U.S. TOTAL, NSA, NAICS 11 Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting, Owner: Private, All establishment sizes, U.S. Department of Labor, accessed May 2023.

10. This number is derived by taking the number of WHD inspections of agricultural employers in fiscal year 2022 (879) and dividing by the QCEW number of agricultural establishments in the United States. The QCEW data include workers hired directly by farmers and those brought to farms by labor contractors and other nonfarm employers; the 513,000 number reported in the COA includes only farms that hire workers directly; almost 196,000 farms, often many of the same farms that reported direct-hire labor expenses, reported expenses for contract labor. Also, it is important to note that since the QCEW’s number of agricultural establishments includes only those required to register and pay unemployment insurance taxes, the number represents only one-fifth of the farms with labor expenses in the COA, so the true probability that a farm will be investigated in any given year is likely less than 0.7%. Rural Migration News, “COA Farm Labor Expenditures 2017,” University of California, Davis, September 9, 2019.

11. Daniel Costa, Philip Martin, and Zachariah Rutledge, Federal Labor Standards Enforcement in Agriculture: Data Reveal the Biggest Violators and Raise New Questions About How to Improve and Target Efforts to Protect Farmworkers, Economic Policy Institute, December 2020.

12. Daniel Costa, Philip Martin, and Zachariah Rutledge, Federal Labor Standards Enforcement in Agriculture: Data Reveal the Biggest Violators and Raise New Questions About How to Improve and Target Efforts to Protect Farmworkers, Economic Policy Institute, December 2020.

13. For background on WHD’s mandate and the number of workers protected by laws WHD enforces, see Wage and Hour Division, “About the Wage and Hour Division,” fact sheet, U.S. Department of Labor.

14. Daniel Costa, Threatening Migrants and Shortchanging Workers: Immigration Is the Government’s Top Federal Law Enforcement Priority, While Labor Standards Enforcement Agencies Are Starved for Funding and Too Understaffed to Adequately Protect Workers, Economic Policy Institute, December 15, 2022.

15. To derive this estimate, the number of covered workers in 1973 and 2022 was divided by the number of WHD investigators in those years. The number of covered workers is derived from the annual averages reported for the total civilian labor force, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey, Series Id: LNU01000000, Not Seasonally Adjusted, Series title: (Unadj) Civilian Labor Force Level, ages 16 and over [data tables], U.S. Department of Labor.

16. Rebecca Rainey, “Wage Division Enforcement Declines Again in Wake of Hiring Woes,” Bloomberg Law, December 28, 2022.

17. For example, President Biden’s nominee for DOL Secretary, Marty Walsh, was confirmed by the Senate in late March 2021, almost halfway through fiscal year 2021.

18. In our 2020 report, we analyzed the data in those tables for the 2000–2019 period in more detail. See Daniel Costa, Philip Martin, and Zachariah Rutledge, Federal Labor Standards Enforcement in Agriculture: Data Reveal the Biggest Violators and Raise New Questions About How to Improve and Target Efforts to Protect Farmworkers, Economic Policy Institute, December 2020.

19. Wage and Hour Division, “Agriculture” [data tables], U.S. Department of Labor, accessed March 2023.

20. Rebecca Rainey, “Wage Division Enforcement Declines Again in Wake of Hiring Woes,” Bloomberg Law, December 28, 2022.

21. Employment and Training Administration, U.S. Department of Labor, Adverse Effect Wage Rate Methodology for the Temporary Employment of H-2A Nonimmigrants in Non-Range Occupations in the United States, Final Rule, 88 Fed. Reg. 12760 (February 28, 2023).

22. See for example, Wage and Hour Division, “Fact Sheet #26: Section H-2A of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA),” U.S. Department of Labor, February 2010.

23. See for example, Miriam Jordan, “Black Farmworkers Say They Lost Jobs to Foreigners Who Were Paid More,” New York Times, November 12, 2021; Rural Migration News, “Midwest, Northeast, Northwest,” University of California, Davis, January 2023.

24. Rural Migration News, “H-2A: 372,000 Jobs Certified in FY22,” University of California, Davis, December 19, 2022.

25. Daniel Costa, Philip Martin, and Zachariah Rutledge, Federal Labor Standards Enforcement in Agriculture: Data Reveal the Biggest Violators and Raise New Questions About How to Improve and Target Efforts to Protect Farmworkers, Economic Policy Institute, December 2020.

26. Farmworker Justice, “INTERACTIVE: Analysis of FY2022 H-2A Jobs (Data from U.S. Dept of Labor),” see figure titled “Is Employer an H-2A Labor Contractor?” Accessed March 2023.

27. Theodoric Meyer, “An Exit Interview with Labor Secretary Marty Walsh,” The Washington Post, March 3, 2023.

28. U.S. Department of Labor, FY 2024 Department of Labor Budget in Brief, accessed April 2023, citing budget tables for Wage and Hour Division.

29. See for example, Wage and Hour Division, “Fact Sheet #35: Joint Employment and Independent Contractors Under the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act,” U.S. Department of Labor, revised January 2020.

30. See for example, Wage and Hour Division, “Fact Sheet #80: The Prohibition Against Shipment of “Hot Goods” Under the Fair Labor Standards Act,” U.S. Department of Labor, October 2014.

31. David Weil, “Testimony of Dr. David Weil, Wage and Hour Administrator, Wage and Hour Division, U.S. Department of Labor, Before the Subcommittee on Horticulture, Research, Biotechnology, and Foreign Agriculture, Committee on Agriculture,” U.S. House of Representatives, July 30, 2014.

32. Philip Martin, The Prosperity Paradox: Fewer and More Vulnerable Farm Workers, Oxford University Press, January 9, 2021.

33. Authors’ rough estimate taking the reported 63% of non-H-2A crop farmworkers who are born in Mexico as reported in the National Agricultural Workers Survey combined with 93% of the 300,000 H-2A farmworkers who are Mexican nationals as reported by the State Department. See Amanda Gold, Wenson Fung, Susan Gabbard, and Daniel Carroll, Findings from the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) 2019–2020: A Demographic and Employment Profile of United States Farmworkers, prepared for the Employment and Training Administration, U.S. Department of Labor, January 2022; and Bureau of Consular Affairs, Nonimmigrant Visa Statistics [data tables], U.S. Department of State, last accessed May 2023.

34. Estimate of farmworkers born in Central America as reported in Amanda Gold, Wenson Fung, Susan Gabbard, and Daniel Carroll, Findings from the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) 2019–2020: A Demographic and Employment Profile of United States Farmworkers, prepared for the Employment and Training Administration, U.S. Department of Labor, January 2022.

35. See Department of Homeland Security, “DHS Announces Process Enhancements for Supporting Labor Enforcement Investigations” (press release), January 13, 2023; Daniel Costa, “The Department of Homeland Security Took a Positive Step by Clarifying and Streamlining the Process to Protect Migrant Workers in Labor Disputes,” Working Economics blog (Economic Policy Institute), January 13, 2023.

36. Daniel Costa, Philip Martin, and Zachariah Rutledge, Federal Labor Standards Enforcement in Agriculture: Data Reveal the Biggest Violators and Raise New Questions About How to Improve and Target Efforts to Protect Farmworkers, Economic Policy Institute, December 2020.

37. See for example, discussion of a similar proposal for a front-end screening process of employers in the H-2B visa program in Daniel Costa, As the H-2B Visa Program Grows, the Need for Reforms That Protect Workers Is Greater Than Ever: Employers Stole $1.8 Billion from Workers in the Industries That Employed Most H-2B Workers over the Past Two Decades, Economic Policy Institute, August 18, 2022