Bidenomics Beats Up America’s Farmers

W ith the fall harvest just around the corner, farms are scrambling for ways to stay open as they brace for a costly new Biden regulation. Unless Congress overturns this rule, countless farmers will be deprived of needed employees because they’ll be shut out of the H-2A visa program — the only legal avenue available for recruiting agricultural workers from abroad.

As more Americans leave rural areas, farmers have increasingly turned to the H-2A visa to hire seasonal employees. Farmers who use the program must first spend two months trying to recruit Americans for the job, and they must pay both their foreign and domestic workers more than the average wage that employers who don’t use the program offer for the same job in that location.

But under Biden’s new rule, the H-2A program’s historically high wages are skyrocketing to unaffordable levels. Farmers are now forced to miscategorize workers who briefly perform a task that falls under what the government deems a higher-earning occupation. If a sweet-potato farmer in North Carolina needs a harvester to spend an hour driving a truck to transport the potatoes to storage, Biden’s rule forces that farmer to categorize that worker as a truck driver and raise his pay by as much as 80 percent for the duration of his contract.

The Biden administration asserts that this change rightfully raises pay for the 2 percent of H-2A employees who spend most of their time performing duties that fall under higher wage categories than that of a standard farmhand. But the rule also requires that a farmhand who spends even a single second doing a different task be paid these inflated wages. And because the statewide data used to determine these wages are skewed in favor of urban locations, farmers must pay their workers city wages even if they live in areas with much lower costs of living.

Adding to the absurdity is that the rule forces farmers to mislabel all of their employees as workers that perform the highest-paying job listed in the H-2A petition. So not only does the potato-harvester who barely drives get miscategorized as a full-time truck driver — the eleven other field workers harvesting potatoes alongside him must also be labeled as such and receive the same wage despite not driving at all. By my calculation, the sweet-potato farmer would lose more than $100,000 in a single season because the dozen potato-harvesters he hired have miraculously transformed into truckers.

To prevent all their workers from being wrongly categorized, farmers must now submit multiple H-2A petitions for the job categories that require higher wages — a departure from the common practice of submitting one petition with all workers listed. This means that an employer who needs a few of his farmhands to spend time mending a fence, operating a forklift, or performing some other task must pay thousands more in filing fees and legal services and must overhaul his HR software and accounting practices to record every single task his employees do. One farmer reported that the cost of recategorizing two of his H-2A employees will be $44,393.

Large farming operations will be inclined to keep marking up prices to stomach the new rule’s added costs. Other farms, however, will likely scale down their businesses or close altogether. According to a survey of 139 farmers across the country, 65 percent reported that they can no longer use the H-2A program if Biden’s rule remains in place.

As Biden’s H-2A regulation further deprives America of the labor needed to sustain domestic crop production, many U.S. citizens are likely to lose their jobs. Research published recently in the Review of International Economics suggests that for every five H-2A workers employed in agriculture, roughly two jobs for native-born Americans are created on net. By exacerbating labor scarcity and making food more costly and difficult for farmers to grow, Biden’s rule risks pushing prices to greater heights — during a period when working-class households are already spending 30 percent of their disposable incomes on groceries.

To stop the bleeding, Congress should pass the Farm Operations Support Act, a bipartisan bill that reverses Biden’s rule. If lawmakers fail to protect the H-2A program from sabotage, farmers across America — and consumers — will be reaping what Biden sows.