Why American farmers rely on unauthorized workers

More than 40% of hired farm laborers in the U.S. are immigrants without legal status.
President Trump campaigned on a plan for mass deportation. But even he admits — the country can't survive without many of the undocumented workers he promised to remove.

Steve Obert, executive director of Indiana Dairy Producers, an advocacy network of Hoosier dairy farmers. Owner of Obert Legacy Dairy, a sixth-generation dairy farm which has over a thousand cows and also grows corn, soybeans and wheat. Employs 14 foreign-born workers.

Daniel Costa, director of Immigration Law and Policy Research at the Economic Policy Institute. Visiting Scholar at the Global Migration Center at UC Davis.

Andrew Mickelsen, a potato farmer in southeast Idaho.

Mily Treviño-Sauceda, executive director and co-founder of Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, a national farmworker women's alliance representing 15 farmworker organizations and groups.

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI:  Andrew Mickelsen is a seventh-generation potato farmer in eastern Idaho. He farms thousands of acres near Idaho Falls, and for most of the year, Andrew doesn't need more than a few dozen people to run operations. But during the fall harvest, he hires more than 170 temporary workers.

ANDREW MICKELSEN: We have three weeks where we give it everything. We've got six days a week, 12 plus hours a day. That's our window. And if we don't get it done, the frost, the snow, the blizzards, you name it, we could end up losing those crops.

CHAKRABARTI: Andrew says when he was a kid, his high school would have harvest breaks so that students and teachers could help out in the fields.

But these days he cannot find local people to run his machines or irrigate the fields. Andrew offers a base pay of nearly $17 an hour. That's almost $10 more than Idaho's minimum wage, but when he posts job listings and local ads, he rarely gets local responses.

MICKELSEN: The unemployment rate in America is basically zero.

And the people that are unemployed right now are not going to be the ones that are going to show up on a farm and say, Hey, sign me up for manual labor 12 hours a day. We'll get a handful, but we're not getting people just showing up. I'd rather that. It's more efficient for me when I can find somebody local or somebody that already has documentation to work in America, but they're not showing up.

CHAKRABARTI: And since Andrew can't find local people or workers who already have legal documentation, as he says, many of the people who work ... during that crunch harvest season are from Mexico. ... Now Andrew does file an I-9 forum, that's the Federal Employment Eligibility Verification form for every person he hires.

The I-9 requires an employee to present evidence of their identity and employment authorization. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services says, quote, the employer must examine these documents to determine whether they reasonably appear to be genuine and relate to the employee, end quote.

In other words, the federal government makes it Andrew's responsibility to decide whether a document is legitimate or not, and he says that's a challenge.

Since workers frequently present things like fraudulent social security numbers or cards. And that leads to this truth about America's vast agriculture industry.

According to the USDA, more than 40% of America's farm labor force is not authorized to work in the United States.

MICKELSEN: The situation that we're in now has come about from 40 years of immigration problems, where there has been a void, there has been a need.

And there hasn't been a legal avenue to allow those people to come and work.

CHAKRABARTI: Andrew says, Idaho farmers have held trainings on how to spot fake documents, and recently he has denied applications because of blatant forgery. But he wonders if he should really be the one determining a worker's employment status. Because as Andrew says, he's a farmer, not a federal immigration officer.

MICKELSEN: Last time I checked, I do not have a ICE badge. I'm not getting a paycheck from the government. They haven't issued me a gun and a bulletproof vest or anything like that. I'm not an ICE agent. I follow the rules that are given to me, and that's what the majority of agricultural producers across the country have done.

We've followed the rules that were given to us, and we're not the ones to blame here.

CHAKRABARTI: So that's Andrew Mickelsen. He farms potatoes in Idaho. Now, let's go back to that salient fact about U.S. agriculture. 40% of farm laborers in this country are here illegally. There are few other U.S. industries that are so disproportionately reliant on unauthorized workers, and that makes the Ag sector disproportionately sensitive to any immigration reform proposal, whether it be congressional efforts to find a path to citizenship in the distant past, or the Trump administration's current mass deportation efforts.

The agriculture industry says any major reform could hurt farmers, if not done right, it would impact food prices and cost Americans more. So how did the United States get here to a point where this massively important American industry is so reliant on preserving the status quo.

And how can we change that for the good of farmers, for the good of workers, for the good of all Americans. So let's start with insight from another farmer, Steve Obert. He's executive director of Indiana Dairy Producers and a fifth generation dairy farmer in Fort Branch, Indiana. Steve, welcome to On Point.

STEVE OBERT: It's a pleasure being with here.

CHAKRABARTI: I'm wondering if you could just start with telling us a little bit about your family's history in dairy farming.

OBERT: My mother and father really started to specialize in dairy farming when they began their career. And I and my wife and my brother then as we plan for the next generation to succeed made additional investments in 2010.

Grew our farm towards about 1,200 milk cows. We produce nearly 10,000 gallons of fresh milk every day off of our farm. But my ancestors arrived here around 1840 from Germany. Yeah, we're off descendants of immigrants ourselves.

CHAKRABARTI: Help me better understand where your farm is in terms of the size of a dairy farm these days.

Are you like a large producer, medium sized producer?

OBERT: I think we're on the fringe of medium to large. As our industry continues to consolidate, we see fewer but larger farms. Traditionally, we're large. But in today's terms we're probably closer to being characterized as medium.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay.

Just to, I always find it important for me to understand how the dimensions of a person's business, so that we can better understand the challenges facing them. So talk to me then, Steve, about the kind of the kind of labor and workers that you need to keep the farm running.

How many do you need? What work do they do?

OBERT: Yeah. So on our farm, as I and my brother begin to step back, of course, my three sons provide a lot of the management input, but we also require about 14 non-family employees to keep the farm running appropriately. And of course, a lot of these kind of move into more of a middle management or leadership role.

We need people to feed our cows. We need people milking technicians and a parlor. We have a calf manager. We have those who deal with health issues on the herd. So it's a diverse group.

CHAKRABARTI: You heard Andrew Mickelsen, a farmer in Idaho just a few minutes ago talking about how he was having, or is having challenges finding workers locally to fill the jobs that he needs.

Now they're very seasonal, obviously, as a crop farmer, but do you have the same challenges there in Indiana for your dairy farm?

OBERT: Absolutely. It's been years since we've had a local resident apply for a job on our farm. And in our county, unemployment rate hovers around 3%.

Prior to COVID, it was about, I think it was under 2%. We know most economists feel like 4% is full employment or unemployment. We, yeah, it is very difficult to find people and as our culture and society has changed, we want our kids to go to college and get more professional careers.

And when I was in high school, it was high school kids that picked melons and detasseled corn. That's gone by the wayside a long time ago.

CHAKRABARTI: Steve, do you mind if I ask how long ago high school was for you?

OBERT: (LAUGHS) Yes. No, I don't mind. 1980, I graduated from high school.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. We're not that far apart. I was in 1993 when I graduated from high school.

The reason why I'm asking is because there has been, you just mentioned it, Andrew Mickelsen just mentioned it, about how, what, it was like, let's say just two generations ago, where a lot of the labor for farms was really, truly found locally, but something pretty dramatic has changed.

So for you, if you haven't had a local, basically, let me put it this way, if you've had to rely on foreign born workers for quite some time. Can you talk to me about the process that you have to go through to be sure that they are authorized to work in the country?

OBERT: We're much the same as he described. They have to present documents that are required by the I-9 form. And so we take that very seriously. Our guys normally present a document called I-551, it's permanent residence card along with Social Security. Of course, we observe those documents and if they look legit, we write them down.

Guys cannot work for us unless they present those, and from time to time we'll do internal audits to make sure I-9s are filled out properly. But that's all we really have to work with.

CHAKRABARTI: Tell me more. What do you mean by that? It's just those pieces of paper, literally.

It's all you have to work with.

OBERT: Yeah. That's what we are required to do and that's what we do for every employee. From time to time, you'll get someone who shows up wanting a job, documents just look a little off, or documents that we haven't seen before.

And we just, we don't offer employment to them.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Steve, I really appreciate you giving us insight on like what the realities are day to day in running a farm in the United States right now. Can I just ask you another quick follow up about when you have to do that employment verification for people who come to work for you?

Is it as straightforward as, I'm looking at the I-9 form right now actually. And so like the worker provides their documentation to you. You look at that and you judge whether or not it's not fraudulent. And then you fill out I-9 form and you send it to the government.

Is that kind of how it works?

OBERT: No, the I-9 we keep on file so that --

CHAKRABARTI: You keep on file. Okay.

OBERT: Yeah. So if there's an I-9 audit, then you would produce those I-9 forms to the auditor. And then they would scan them and make whatever judgements that they make, but yeah, the responsibility is on the shoulders of the farmer themselves, the employer.

CHAKRABARTI: Do you want that responsibility?

OBERT: That's an interesting question. It's not a problem, right? Unless we know that there are a significant number of these that are not authentic documentation. We don't know that ourselves, but we're told that, and yeah.

I don't know about that. That's a good question.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Now, I'm thinking once again of Andrew Mickelsen, farmer in Idaho, and he told us that he's offering a wage that's way above minimum wage in Idaho, right? It's like close to $17 an hour, which is $10 more than Idaho minimum wage.

And he still really struggles to find people, local folks who are authorized to work in Idaho to fill those jobs. How competitive are the wages that you offer? In comparison to, I don't know, Indiana's minimum wage. What are you paying your folks?

OBERT: Yeah. What is Indiana's minimum wage?

It's $7.50 or $7.75, whatever it is. I don't know what it is, I know producers in Indiana that are starting guys at $18 an hour.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow.

OBERT: So yeah. But again, as we see a shrinking labor supply here in this country with lower birth rates, baby boomers retiring at increasing rates we've got to make up the difference somehow.

And as a good friend says, do we want to import our food, or do we want to bring in labor to produce it right here? And I think most people realize the food safety and quality that is in the United States is not something that we want to see exported to another country.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, interesting. So that's how he sees it, importing more food versus paying more people here. That's a really important dichotomy to understand. Okay. I'm going to put a note on that one there. So I've got to ask you now, Steve, what have you been hearing from your fellow dairy farmers there in Indiana about the immigration raids that the Trump administration is undergoing or launching across the country. Has that had any impact on you and your farmers?

OBERT: I don't know of any farm raids here in Indiana, but I do know across the country, there's a situation in New Mexico recently, which was devastating to that family. They took 60% to 65% of their people, are gone. And we need to realize that when ICE comes onto a farm, a livestock farm, it's not like they're going into, let's say, a bar and taking a drug dealer. When these people, when these guys are milking or caring for the animals, and now they're gone, those animals become at risk.

So it becomes an animal welfare issue. It also becomes a biosecurity issue. As these, our biosecurity protocols are breached because of that. So on this farm there's like vital, important jobs that aren't being done now, health monitoring, maternity care. New baby care gets compromised to some degree.

And we need to realize that if it's a documentation issue, all of a sudden, we have animals that now are at risk and our food supply becomes at risk.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. As you well know, the president himself, pretty recently, his eyes were opened to the importance of these workers in American agriculture.

I'm not sure why he didn't know that before. But he did campaign on this promise of mass deportation of unauthorized workers in this country. But just last week, he was in Iowa, this was on July 3rd, and I mean he agreed with you and a lot of other farmers. He said the raids being undertaken by his own administration are actually hurting industries with many foreign workers, including farming.

DONALD TRUMP: If a farmer's been with one of these people that worked so hard, they bend over all day. We don't have too many people can do that, but they work very hard, and they know 'em very well, and some of the farmers are literally, they cry when they see this happen, if a farmer's willing to vouch for these people in some way, Kristi, I think we're gonna have to just say, that's gonna be good.

We're gonna be, we're gonna be good with it.

CHAKRABARTI: So he's referencing Kristi Noem there at DHS. Now, he's also floated the idea recently, the president has, that unauthorized workers at farms or in the service sector, particularly at hotels, could be allowed to leave the country and then return to the United States legally.

And he also recently proposed expanding temporary visa programs for farm workers. It's a change that President Trump himself admits could be pretty unpopular for some of his base supporters.

TRUMP: Serious radical right people who I also happen to a lot. They may not be quite as happy, but they'll understand, won't they?

Do you think so?

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so let's go back one second to Idaho Farmer Andrew Mickelsen. Because we did ask him about the president's recent seeming shift in his view on the importance of foreign workers in agriculture. And Andrew said that he appreciates that the president is searching for ways to improve the labor system in U.S. agriculture, but he does not agree with continuing raids while the president's shift on what he wants goes on. That farm workforces in some areas have shrunk to the point where for him, crops are actually rotting in the fields.

MICKELSEN: I was perfectly fine with the approach of let's go pursue the drug dealers. Absolutely. Let's go get the criminals out. Let's get people that are committing violence out, like that makes sense.

But at the same time, there are good people here and we probably have to find a way to work with them, to keep the good ones.

CHAKRABARTI: So that's Farmer Andrew Mickelsen in Idaho. Steve Obert in Indiana. Especially as your role as executive director of the Indiana Dairy Producers, I'm wondering what you and your fellow dairy farmers think could actually be a good solution to this, that benefits everyone.

OBERT: Yeah, there's several pieces of legislation that are starting to emerge. I know the Farm Workforce Modernization Act has been reintroduced. There's the Dignity Act by Representative Salazar that she has been working, trying to propose. But here's the thing.

I think agriculture supports the president in securing the border, but we also have to secure our current workforce. And so finding a way to have agricultural work Visas here, is going to be critical to his promise to control food inflation as well. Because if we if we deport our Ag workforce, it's assured that food inflation would spike up.

So we have to be careful about that. And I as well applaud the president for his comments recently. And really, he and Congress have an opportunity to do something that no other administration has been able to do in the last 30 or 40 years. And that's defined a legal way to bring workers here, to secure our farm workforce.

Because without a secure workforce, we don't have a secure food supply and without a secure food supply, we don't have a secure nation.

CHAKRABARTI: Steve Obert, executive director of the Indiana Dairy Producers, it's an advocacy network of Hoosier dairy farmers, and he also runs a fifth or sixth generation dairy farm in Indiana.

Thank you so much for joining us, Steve.

OBERT: This is my pleasure.

CHAKRABARTI: Alright, you heard Mr. Obert mention something called the Farm Workforce Modernization Act. An interesting point. It has come up in Congress several times. Most recently, in December of 2022, it was brought before the Senate as the Affordable and Secure Food Act in an omnibus package.

And what happened then is that the Affordable and Secure Food Act was voted down in the Senate after the American Farm Bureau Federation stated its opposition to the bill. Interesting. So let's turn now to Daniel Costa. He's Director of Immigration Law and Policy Research at the Economic Policy Institute, and he's a visiting scholar at the Global Migration Center at the University of California, Davis.

Daniel Costa. Welcome to On Point.

DANIEL COSTA: Hi, thanks so much for having me on.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So let's talk about how we got here, in terms of this massive reliance on not just foreign-born workers, but undocumented workers that the agriculture sector has. Why do you think are some of the major drivers of that?

COSTA: Sure. Agriculture really since time immemorial, has been one of the industry's occupations in the United States that pays the lowest wages and has some very dangerous and difficult conditions. And so many of the workers naturally are low wage workers with low education, and people who are recent arrivals into the United States.

So immigrants. And really, after or before 1986, employers could hire unauthorized immigrants really without any penalties. It wasn't until after the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act will sign in a law that legalized media, unauthorized immigrants, but left about 2 million behind.

That kind of left the core of today's unauthorized immigrant population. And then it created an employer sanction system that was really never meant to work. If you ask me, that would penalize employers if they hired an unauthorized immigrant workers, people without a status.

And your guests, your first guests already explained in part why that doesn't work. Because employers aren't supposed to be immigration agents and it's very difficult for the government to prove that the employer broke the law in any case.

CHAKRABARTI: Daniel, can I just jump in here for a second?

COSTA: Sure.

CHAKRABARTI: I'm so sorry. Sorry to interrupt, but you said something I'd love some clarification on, because I'm not sure I heard you correctly that this act in 1986. Correct me if I'm wrong. In fact, helped create the reliance on undocumented labor that we see now or did I mishear you?

COSTA: I would say that the idea behind the legislation was to legalize the workers who were here, including in agriculture, part of that law was specifically designed for undocumented workers in agriculture, because there was an acknowledgement that many of the workers in agriculture were undocumented. And so it created that, but it also created the H-2A Visa program, which you just mentioned, that was supposed to give employers another option, a legal option rather than hiring the undocumented workers.

CHAKRABARTI: H-2A, we're gonna talk about that more in just a second.

Now, to be fair to the agriculture industry, I mean they have a specific set of circumstances which make hiring labor perhaps a greater challenge here. I was looking actually at about a decade old report, or an economic study from the American Farm Bureau itself, and they point out that given the cost of labor and given the kind of labor they need, that as a whole, 40 to 50% of production costs in say, fruit, vegetables and horticulture has to do with labor specifically itself.

Then there's also the issue of, as we heard from, for example, Andrew the potato farmer in Idaho, they really need time sensitive workers who are available sometimes for that intense seasonal labor.

And then they don't need those folks anymore. And in addition, the locations in the United States where a lot of this need is concentrated are, it's not across the country. It's in select states, and also within select areas within those states. Oftentimes, there just isn't that big of a labor pool in and of itself.

So I'm wondering, I'm like, these are actually the concrete realities that farmers face when they're seeking people to work on their farms, isn't it?

COSTA: I would say I understand the realities of farmers. I grew up and mostly live in a dairy town in central California.

And my father and his brothers and my grandfather, when they first moved to the United States, their first job was on a dairy farm. Where they all worked. And that helped them integrate into the country. And I realize that, but at the same time, you have to question why it's so difficult for them to hire workers.

And I think you have to look at the conditions and the wages in the industry. I know that you were saying that some of these jobs pay more than whatever the local minimum wage is, or the federal minimum wage, which is still only $7.25 an hour, but agriculture is still one of the lowest paid jobs in the United States.

Farm workers earn 60% of what comparable production workers outside of agriculture makes. So it's one of the most dangerous jobs. It is low paid work and many of the workers actually, as you said, because of the seasonal nature of the work, don't work a full year. Even if they're getting $18 bucks an hour, they're mostly working six months out of the year. So that really leaves them, in most cases, below the poverty line. So it's not the wages are so high that they're making a killing.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Daniel, we're going to hear from the voice of someone who works directly with some of these farm laborers in just a second here.

But I wanted to run something by you, and that is, we often hear it said that Americans just won't do these jobs. I like to, as often as I can, put data and numbers and actual evidence to statements like that. And I found one, it's a little old. It's from about, from 2010, but I think it's really revealing, because back then in 2010, the National Council of Agricultural Employers did a survey.

And the survey was of what happened to H-2A authorized Visas. And so those are those temporary farm worker Visas you talked about earlier? So in 2010 they found out that 36,000 domestic workers, so these are legal domestic workers in the United States, at state agencies referred to employers.

68% of them did not accept the jobs offered to them. They just didn't want those farm jobs. And 5% of referred workers, only 5% of the referred workers worked through the contract period. So their conclusion back then in 2010 was, to your point, a lot of farm work is low paid work. Far more Americans, this is a quote, far more Americans are willing to accept even lower paid jobs rather than work in agriculture.

Can you talk to me about that? What do you think?

COSTA: First of all, I would say consider the source and then consider what the law requires, and then consider what the numbers show. This is, you're citing a study form the industry and the industry always makes the claim that it's very difficult to hire workers.

The law, in H-2A, employers are required to recruit, recruit for U.S. workers before they can hire an H-2A worker, but there isn't really a system in place of enforcement to ensure that they hire the workers that apply. And we've seen a number of cases that these have been reported on, in investigative journalism as well as cases from the EEOC where employers actually prefer to hire.

H-2A workers and give U.S. workers who apply the runaround or simply just don't respond to their applications. There's a lot of cases to that and the law really needs to be changed around that. And then to your point about U.S. workers, the data show, labor department survey data show that 30% of all crop farm workers are in fact U.S.-born citizens.

So you cannot say that U.S. workers are not doing these jobs, because they are, in fact, almost a third of them. Almost a third of the jobs are actually filled by U.S. workers. So if conditions were better, if wages were better, you probably would attract some more workers. I still think immigrants would play a very, a big role in this industry. But it's not true that U.S. workers won't do these jobs.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so let me ask you then. I referred earlier to the show of the December 22nd, 2022 revised version of the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, which could have taken steps towards getting closer to a resolution about this reliance on undocumented labor. But the American Farm Bureau of Federation itself publicly opposed that bill.

And that was one of the things that sort of put a spike into it at that time. Do you see the agriculture industry as a whole as having had an active influence in preventing meaningful immigration reform when it comes to the farm labor force?

COSTA: We can talk about why the agricultural industry doesn't like that bill. And I should say this is a, that bill, which was recently introduced, again not too long ago, is a compromise bill between employer, some employer groups, not all of them. And some farm worker and the UFW basically, but not other farm worker unions.

And there is, I think, split support for it on both sides of those coalitions, in part because yes, it would create a path to citizenship for many undocumented farm workers, which I think is the number one thing that has to happen to really stabilize and improve conditions in the fields.

But it also expands H-2A in many ways and makes it easier for employers to hire. And so what the industry doesn't like about that bill is, one, it doesn't think that it gives them enough H-2A workers to work in year-round jobs. There are about 450,000 year-round Ag jobs in dairy and in greenhouses and mushroom farming jobs like that.

And they want more of those. And that bill didn't give them as many as they wanted. And the other thing that they have cited, and I testified in the Senate with employers who said this explicitly is because H-2A workers on H-2A visas would get the right to sue their employers if their employers break the law.

Farmers who are not, farm workers who are not H-2A workers have that right. But H-2A farm workers do not. And so those have been the main hurdles to support from the farm industry. And those are really, I think just ridiculous demands to not allow H-2A workers to sue.

There were only, in 2022, I believe, there was only 33 cases of farm workers suing their employers through the law that allows them to do that. Really it is just really shocking that would be what holds it up.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So Daniel, this is the perfect place to hear from someone who's actually done this work with her own two hands.

Mily Treviño-Sauceda is the daughter of farm workers who immigrated to the United States from Mexico, and she started working in the fields of California when she was eight years old.

MILY TREVIÑO-SAUCEDA: I used to work picking lemons. Or citrus and the sacks that we would have to carry when they're full, it's already 70 pounds.

The first two weeks, your whole body is swollen. Why? Because it's a lot of very hard labor. You try to do like between an eight-to-10-hour shift, you have to be drinking a lot of water. You have to be resting.

CHAKRABARTI: Mily says, farm workers face poor conditions beyond the simple fact of the backbreaking work.

The equipment they use often doesn't work and the pay is low, as we've discussed, and facilities are dirty.

TREVIÑO-SAUCEDA: Some companies do provide toilets. But the majority of the time, they only bring 'em clean on that Monday and they don't clean 'em until you know that following Saturday and you have a crew of 30 to 40 workers going to the restroom during the week.

It's not healthy.

CHAKRABARTI: Mily now heads Alianza, an advocacy group for women farm workers, and she says the current system of temporary and often unauthorized labor benefits agricultural companies because they are not required to maintain their workplaces as they would be if they employed exclusively U.S. citizens or authorized workers.

And workers she works with are scared to report wrongdoings because of deportation risks. And unionizing is difficult in an environment with so many transient workers.

TREVIÑO-SAUCEDA: Because workers do not know their rights. They don't know this country, they don't know how it works. And even us that know this country know that injustice has become a norm.

CHAKRABARTI: Mily says conditions have only grown worse since Donald Trump's reelection. The agencies that track and investigate workplace violations have seen staffing cuts.

TREVIÑO-SAUCEDA: To us, it's creating a lot of threats. It's creating a lot of fear. It's creating a lot more exploitation and we know it's going to get worse because there's not going to be money.

For the country to be able to survive the way it's supposed to survive. And what I can say is I have found, yes, socially responsible companies, but the majority are not socially responsible companies.

CHAKRABARTI: Now Mily also says she is hearing much more about immigration raids, to the point where laborers are frightened, they're scared to even go to work.

TREVIÑO-SAUCEDA: The raids that have been happening, most of the time they happen in apartment complexes where eyes will know that the majority are farm workers or people that are profiled as Latinos. Start knocking or at the entrance of the places, they just, they're parked there and then asking everybody for their papers or at times they just knock.

And if people don't understand or don't know, they open the door and then they start arresting.

CHAKRABARTI: Mily says the raids are not only tearing families apart, it's going to lead to long-term issues for the farm workers and the communities in which they live.

TREVIÑO-SAUCEDA: And you always hear people crying and all very afraid of what's going to happen with them, what's going to happen with their family, what's gonna happen?

Are they going to be in the same place? Are they gonna all be deported together? Are they going to be separated? And what is that creating, that's creating more issues with farm girls having less earnings. There's more poverty, there's more needs, there's more health issues, there's more mental problems happening.

CHAKRABARTI: So that's advocate Mily Treviño-Sauceda. Daniel, I'm wondering what you think about what you just heard there, and especially in the light of President Trump recently in Iowa saying, Hey, like maybe we should not be doing mass deportation orders on American farms.

COSTA: Yeah. If I could just make two quick points based on what everyone just heard.

Is that one, H-2A workers in practice have very few rights. They don't have equal workplace rights to U.S. workers. They can't easily change jobs because employers own and control their Visa status and most of them arrive in debt that they paid just to get that temporary job.

So when you add up 40% who are undocumented workers and 10 to 15% of the farm workforce, who are H-2A workers, that's more than half of the workforce that does not have rights in practice and are too afraid to complain to labor agencies.

And then the second point is that when you talk about the labor agencies that are supposed to be the backstop to protect worker rights, it's mainly the wage and hour division at the U.S. Department of Labor, they have record flow numbers of investigators.

Right now, they have 611 investigators to police a labor market of 170 million people. And in 2024, they conducted a record load number of investigations in agriculture, 659. The average in previous years is over 1,000. And their funding, they're underfunded, their funding is basically, has been flat since 2006 after you adjust your inflation.

So that's who's supposed to be protecting workers, but that low number of investigation means that less than 1% of farms are ever investigated in a given year. And that means that farmers can basically act with impunity, violate the law, and know that they're never going to get investigated or in trouble.

And now that the Trump administration is taking over and making cuts to the labor department, and we'll probably deprioritize these types of cases and things are only gonna get much worse.

CHAKRABARTI: I just wanna spend a minute talking about, again, what the industry says would be some of the impacts of various kinds of immigration reform proposals that we've seen in the past and what's going on now.

For example, again, this is from this labor study from the American Farm Bureau Federation. In this particular study, they said, look, if we just have deportation only of undocumented workers, that farmers stand to lose at least 50% of their workforce pretty quickly. And then that would be devastating to farmers.

They say if there's an additional sort of immigration reform and not just deportation path to citizenship, as you talked about earlier. They have this very wide range of predicted wage increases that would have to come along with that. In this report they're saying, hey, could boost farm wages from 70 to 146%.

That's a wide range. The implication being that would make it very difficult, if not impossible for farmers to keep their farms running.

COSTA: Look, there are a number of studies about the wage gain of getting citizenship from being undocumented, and most of those estimates are in the 15 to 20% range.

We also at EPI, we published a piece a few years ago that studied what it would cost to give farm workers a 40% raise. We look, we picked 40% because that was the famous UFW contract that they won many years ago, gave them a 40% raise. So to do a 40% raise for farm workers, it would cost each household about $25 extra in annual fruits and vegetable costs.

That all could go to the consumer or that could be shared between the consumer and the farmer. And a 40% raise would literally be the difference in many cases from taking workers from not being below the poverty line to going just above it. And so 40% of $19 was the average farm wage last year.

That is not, that doesn't seem unsustainable to me.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. I think the farm industry says that relatively smaller increase in food costs at the end of the system at people's tables is because they can't, due to the way the food pricing works, they can't actually transfer all the cost to end consumers.

COSTA: That a bigger issue that I do think Congress should tackle. There's been a lot of consolidation among grocery stores who are the end consumers, at Walmart, that buys a lot of fresh fruits and produce from farmers. That's another issue that has to do maybe with antitrust.

And other issues that could be dealt with. But even if you, as I said, even if all the cost goes to consumers, it's still a very low cost to improve their wages.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, so it seems we've been stuck so long in this status quo though, and I don't know if I have confidence in America's political polarization at this moment to make things any different.

Are there long-term solutions that are workable? Daniel?

COSTA: It requires, it really requires political will in Congress and the Republicans in Congress right now have no will to create any new green cards. We have not seen that. And so how are you going to get people a path to citizenship? It would require some sort of executive action to protect workers.

And obviously the Trump administration is not looking at that. If anything, they're going to water down rights and water down wages for farm workers and not protect them.

Editor's note: An earlier version of this article stated that Mickelsen hired 'many' farmworkers without authorization. To be clear, the majority of his harvest workers are on the H-2A program and have consulate approved authorization. And everyone he has ever hired has proper documentation. Issues with document fraud and unauthorized work, however, remain prevalent throughout the agriculture industry.

The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.