Original piece in the Wall Street Journal 

WSJ Commentary by Sierra Dawn McClain

August 28, 2025

Red Tape Is the Biggest Crop on Some Farms

Bureaucrats made the H-2A guest worker visa program costly and onerous. Trump and Congress can fix it.

Blaine Smith advertises every year for workers to pick apples, pears and cherries on his farm in Wenatchee, Wash., three hours east of Seattle. And every year the response is the same: Few U.S. citizens or permanent residents apply, though Mr. Smith pays well above the state’s minimum wage.

He isn’t alone. Americans aren’t lining up to do strenuous farm jobs, and agricultural employers are struggling to find workers. In 2022 a Washington state agency advertised more than 34,000 farm job openings but could place only 11 U.S.-based workers in the roles. That’s up from zero in 2021. The agency placed two in 2020 and 19 in 2019.

Mr. Smith estimates that if his crops weren’t picked in a particular year, he would lose $2 million, the amount he spends annually to grow the fruit. A loss of that magnitude would devastate his business, which operates on narrow margins. In recent years he has turned to imported labor to fill the gaps. He uses the H-2A guest-worker visa program, which brings foreign laborers into the U.S. legally and temporarily to work on farms.

The program, however, is costly and onerous for farmers because of its complex requirements and paperwork. “It’s not sustainable with all the overregulation and red tape,” Mr. Smith says. The Biden administration added more than 3,000 pages of regulations to the H-2A program, according to Enrique Gastelum of the Worker and Farmer Labor Association, an organization of agricultural employers. Congress and the Trump administration could make the program more user-friendly through legislation and regulatory reform.

The administration has already taken a step in the right direction. The Labor Department recently suspended enforcement of a Biden-era rule that guaranteed labor organizers access to farms and gave union rights to foreign farmworkers. The rule dodged the National Labor Relations Act, which exempted farmworkers from certain labor activities because Congress didn’t want them to go on strike, leaving crops to rot during harvest. The rule got tangled up in courts, and the Trump administration brought clarity by shelving it. The administration could build on this success by reviewing the remaining Biden regulations. 

The current H-2A program is inflexible. Under most circumstances, an H-2A worker must return to his home country for two months after 10 months of work in the U.S. This makes it difficult for farms that need year-round work, such as dairies that milk cows daily, to hire legal workers through the program. Many dairies hire illegal immigrants instead. It would be easier if an H-2A worker had to leave for only a few weeks each year, enabling employers to stagger absences. Another option would be to create a year-round H-2A visa subcategory.

H-2A paperwork is especially burdensome. “It’s so complicated,” says Mr. Smith. To request guest workers, a farmer must fill out lengthy online and paper forms—often more than 100 pages per contract—with multiple agencies. Officials could solve this by creating a short online master application. Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemerhas expressed interest in streamlining the application process.

For a single contract, a farmer often spends thousands of dollars in administrative costs, Mr. Gastelum says. The farmer must fill out a separate application for each team he requests—for instance, one contract for workers to plant in the spring, another for workers to harvest in the fall—and each application is expensive. Allowing a farmer to put both team requests on one application, a practice called “staggered entry,” would cut administrative time and costs.

The program’s wage and labor rules make it even more costly. Mr. Gastelum says farmers often spend $1,000 or more on travel and hotels for each worker. Once the work starts, farmers must pay the H-2A worker at what’s called the “adverse effect” wage rate to prevent H-2A workers from being employed at lower wages than U.S. workers. This wage rate varies by state and is generally higher than the minimum wage. It’s $19.82 an hour this year in Washington state. Farmers are also required to provide housing, transportation and benefits, totaling another $5 to $10 an hour.

The required minimum wage rate relies on prevailing-wage data that fall short of federal statistical standards. The data are often drawn from small survey samples and from the “peak week” of activity—the harvest—when laborers work overtime. As a result, the next year’s minimum wage may reflect the highest wages paid during the peak rather than the average over a growing season. This has dramatically increased labor costs in recent years, pushing some family farms out of business.

Members of Congress from agricultural districts are looking for solutions. The Farm Workforce Modernization Act of 2025, a bipartisan proposal, would accommodate the need for year-round workers, streamline the application process, allow employers to request staggered entry, cap the percentage by which wages can increase annually, and require a re-evaluation of the wage formula.

Some on the left criticize the bill for expanding the H-2A program, which they liken to indentured servitude even though it offers worker protections and upward mobility for laborers from developing countries. Some on the right take issue with a provision of the bill that would allow undocumented farmworkers to earn legal status through continual agricultural employment.

The bill would stand a better chance if Mr. Trump got behind it. The president recognizes the need for a steady supply of workers for U.S. farms, and he has hinted at creating a framework that would let illegal farmworkers gain legal status. In a February interview with the Journal, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins acknowledged that the H-2A program “needs a significant overhaul.” She signaled that Mr. Trump would likely be open to immigration reform once the border was secure and illegal crossings went down. With those conditions met, the time for that conversation has arrived.

Even if Congress can’t reach an agreement on the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, other options are on the table. To get H-2A reform over the finish line, lawmakers could pass a stand-alone bill focused on the visa program and tackle legal status for illegal farmworkers in a separate bill. Farm-district lawmakers are open-minded about the packaging.

For farmers like Mr. Smith, change can’t come soon enough. “We need to revamp and reform this guest-worker program,” he says. “It’s the only path to saving agriculture.”

Ms. McClain is an assistant editorial features editor at the Journal.