Would crops rot and Americans lack fruits and vegetables without foreign farm workers?
An America First labor policy should aim to Americanize every aspect of the labor market—including agriculture. This means providing farm work opportunities to American citizens first and legal permanent residents second. Visas for seasonal farm workers should be capped and gradually reduced until they fall to a level that prioritizes American labor.
The U.S. is in the middle of an epoch-defining political realignment. Thanks to President Donald Trump’s policies, polling from the conservative League of American Workers consistently shows most voters see the Republican Party as the “party for workers.”
But whether the Republican Party takes advantage of the Trump bump remains to be seen. Doing so will require sacrificing short-term political capital with big business and big agriculture for long-term moral and political victories to transform American labor just as Trump has transformed workers’ perception of the GOP.
Restoration News has already exposed the threats posed by illegal aliens, sanctuary cities, and foreign tech workers—H-1B visa holders. But seasonal farm workers and the jobs they take from Americans remains a seldom-discussed aspect of mass immigration.
The H-2A seasonal visa for agricultural workers originally aimed to address labor shortages but instead created a permanent dependency that reduces incentives for farmers to innovate in 3 key ways:
- Recruiting American workers
- Investing in mechanization
- Switching to less labor-intensive land use.
Many mistakenly view seasonal foreign visas as indispensable to the agricultural industry and the country’s food supply. But like all jobs, farm work hinges on supply and demand. If the supply of cheap, experienced foreign farm labor remains high, farmers will have no incentive to hire Americans.
Meanwhile, millions of undereducated American adults and hundreds of thousands of rural teenagers are unemployed or have given up trying to find work. Others remain stuck in jobs that pay less than what farmers spend on seasonal foreign workers. These and other cohorts of Americans form a pool of millions of working-age Americans, untapped labor that farmers would have to recruit if the option of hiring experienced foreign workers were permanently reduced.
There is a way to fix this problem in 7 years, less than two presidential terms. Doing so would strengthen rural Americans’ communities and culture and help cement the America First platform as the dominant worldview for generations.
Jacob Grandstaff 