The editors of the Wall Street Journal observe:
The Trump Labor Department to its credit has taken steps to make it easier and less costly for farmers to hire seasonal guest workers on H-2A visas. Last fall the department relaxed a Biden wage mandate that required farmers to pay guest workers on average $17.74 an hour—and as much as $19.97 an hour in California—in addition to providing housing and transportation.
The United Farm Workers (UFW) sued, arguing that easing the wage mandates for guest workers will undercut pay and demand for American workers. Vice President JD Vance makes a similar argument in support of reducing legal immigration.
and
Restrictionists say farmers could attract more U.S. workers if they increased wages. DOL disagrees: High wage mandates have “not resulted in a meaningful increase in new entrants of U.S. workers to temporary or seasonal agricultural jobs.” Farmers received applications from U.S. workers for only 182 of 415,000 positions advertised in the last fiscal year.
I see no way that we could spend the last 35 years declaiming that everyone needed college educations, that the future belonged to knowledge workers, subsidizing higher education, and discouraging manual labor without its decreasing how appealing American workers find such jobs. Those jobs were performed overwhelmingly by native-born workers relatively recently. It is something that has been happening for a long time and cannot be reversed immediately. While working conditions, seasonality, and geography plainly matter, they cannot by themselves explain the near-total collapse of domestic applications; that points to a deeper shift in perceived status and life trajectory. Or the timing, which coincides nearly perfectly with the sharp decline in native-born manual laborers. In multiple regions and across decades, the pattern has been consistent: when native-born agricultural workers attempted to organize, they were rapidly replaced often within a single season by more vulnerable labor pools. The difference is the enduring and persistent propaganda program in which we have engaged, misguidedly in my opinion.
Higher wages might increase the number of applicants at the margins but their very low number strongly suggests something else at work.
We also need to recognize that there are some economic activities in which we have no absolute advantage, which are unsustainably costly to do here, and which should not be performed domestically. From my point of view that implies closer, friendlier relations with neighboring countries, particularly Mexico.
It also highlights something I have advocated repeatedly: the need for a true guest worker program especially for Mexican workers without paths to citizenship or other embroidery.
