WASHINGTON — Saying fewer and fewer native-born Americans want to work for them, Minnesota’s farmers, dairymen and ranchers are increasingly reliant on a foreign-born workforce that is under threat in the new Trump administration.

Minnesota’s robust agriculture industry employs both undocumented migrants and foreign-born workers who are in the United States on a provisional or temporary basis. The largest group of immigrant farmworkers are undocumented. The Center for Migration Studies estimates that 86% of agricultural workers are foreign born and 45% of them are undocumented.

Other Minnesota farmers have found legal ways to hire foreign-born workers who are eager to take jobs Americans have turned down.

Doug Diekmann, owner of Diekmann Farms in Beardsley, Minnesota, needed help to raise hogs and grain but did not want to break the law by hiring undocumented workers. So for the past eight years he’s used the federal H-2A program to hire three foreign-born workers – usually Mexicans – for eight or nine months out of the year.

The H-2A program allows foreign workers to legally work for less than a year on a farm or ranch. That worker can enter into new contracts at other agricultural entities for up to three years.

Some migrate from state to state to honor contracts. Farmers who apply for these workers must post their jobs in a way that Americans have priority in filling them. Only if the jobs still go begging, can the farmer hire an H-2A visa holder.

That farmer must also agree to provide certain benefits and worker protections that elude undocumented farm workers. He or she must agree to provide housing and transportation for an H-2A visa holder, as well as pay the prevailing wage set by the federal government. At Diekmann Farms, that wage is $18.15 an hour.

The prevalence of these undocumented workers often leads to abuse. For instance, last year  a dairy operation that had dozens of farms in central Minnesota was accused of wage theft and of charging their mostly undocumented workers to live in garages, barns and other buildings unfit for human habitation. 

Diekmann’s workers live in three apartments he owns in a nearby town and he must provide them with a vehicle, or pick them up himself, to go to work. He also pays their airfare every year to travel from Mexico to Fargo or Minneapolis.

“It’s not cheap by any means to hire these people,” Diekmann said.

But he said the cost is worth it because “they have more of a desire to work” than Americans he’s tried to employ and they appreciate the opportunity to work on his farm, which sells about 30,000 hogs every year.

The politics of immigration 

There were about 3,500 H-2A visa holders working on Minnesota farms last year and about 380,000 employed in agriculture across the United States.

While farmers say they are needed and major agriculture organizations, including the American Farm Bureau Federation and the National Milk Producers Association, have been lobbying for an expansion of the H-2A program for years, there are concerns about the anti-immigrant politics espoused by President Donald Trump and his political supporters.

Those politics played out on X last month in a very public feud over a similar foreign-worker program, the H-1B visas that are given to highly educated workers who come to the United States to work in technological and scientific fields.

Elon Musk’s employment of these H-1B workers at Tesla was bashed by right-wing activist Laura Loomer and former chief White House strategist Steve Bannon for what they said was an attempt to hire foreigners at lower pay at the expense of Americans who need high-tech jobs.

“H1B Visa Program Should be Zeroed-Out – Used to Constantly Drive Wages Down and Replace American Tech Workers – the Foreign Worker Replacements are Treated Like Indentured Servants …” Bannon wrote in one post.

Diekmann said he’s not concerned the H-2A program would come under fire.

“Americans would not be able to buy food and there would be a lot of farms that would not exist,” if the program were eliminated, Diekmann said. 

John Walt Boatright, chief lobbyist for the American Farm Bureau Federation, said the H-2A program has tripled or quadrupled in size over the past decade.

“Our members are saying that they are not seeing much interest in Americans doing (agricultural) work anymore,” he said.

Yet Boatright said the H-2A program “has its limitations” because “it’s seasonal and temporary by nature.” That means it’s not a good fit for certain agriculture sectors, such as the nation’s dairy industry, that need a year-round work force.

He also said the program is “quite cumbersome” because several federal agencies are involved, including the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Labor Department, and farmers often have to engage farm labor contractors or immigration attorneys to procure the laborers they need.

He said he’s hopeful a new Congress will finally move on H-2A reforms and  said the farm bureau had also spoken to the Trump transition team about the importance of the program.

Meanwhile, Paul Bleiberg, executive vice president of the National Milk Producers Association, said he hoped Congress would  change the H-2A visa program so its holders could work year-round. But he acknowledged the hurdles that attempts to expand a foreign worker program would face.

“The politics around immigration are very challenging,” he said.

Loan Huynh, the chair of the immigration department at the Fredrikson & Byron law firm in Minneapolis, said, under the H-2A program, farmers need to post their jobs at least 75 days before they need a migrant to begin work and a state inspection of the housing provided that worker – a requirement before a visa is granted – must also be completed and could take up to 180 days to schedule. 

She said her firm provides farmers with hundreds of these migrant workers a year, mostly from Mexico.

“As our population grows, we need more workers and our farmers and agricultural workers are finding it harder to find these workers,” Huynh said. “U.S. workers don’t want to do this work.”

Still, Trump and many of his supporters insist that foreign-born workers are taking jobs from Americans who need them. And that might not bode well for the H-2A program, even as American farmers are growing increasingly dependent on it, Huynh said.   

“We are really concerned about an administration that has made it clear that immigration is something they want to decrease rather than increase,” she said.

Anxious about deportations 

The migrant worker program in the United States began with an agreement with Mexico in 1942 that imported Mexican farm and railroad workers into the United States to fill labor shortages during World War II. This “Bracero” program, named after the heavy use of a worker’s arms in manual labor, brought 5 million migrants to the nation before it ended in 1962.

Mary Garcia, the foreign labor supervisor at the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, is tasked with overseeing the modern version of the Bracero program in the state. She makes sure farm jobs are posted statewide and that the H-2A workers have adequate housing and are aware of state programs that could help them. She said she often runs into undocumented workers during her rounds who are anxious about Trump’s vow to carry out massive deportations.  

Some want to apply for  H-2A visas. But Garcia said they cannot because they are undocumented and to qualify a worker must live outside the United States.

“It really puts us in a bind because we want to help everyone,” she said.

There are other programs that farmers use to legally secure immigrant labor. But those are also threatened by Trump’s vows of a crackdown on undocumented immigrants, and some who are here legally as well.

On his first day in office, Trump  issued an executive order ending a “humanitarian parole” program that allowed more than half a million migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to live in the United States temporarily and, in many cases, apply for a work permit. Some of these migrants found jobs on  Minnesota farms.

Another source of foreign-born labor has is the Temporary Protection Status (TPS) program that was created by Congress in 1990 to give nationals of certain countries that are confronting war, environmental disasters or other extraordinary conditions refuge in the United States for a limited time, with the opportunity to renew their applications until the president thinks this protection from deportation is not needed.

According to the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS), there were 4,551 immigrants with TPS protections in Minnesota last year.

Somalis, Nicaraguans, Haitians, Venezuelans, Afghans, Salvadorans, Sudanese, Ukrainians and other nationals are eligible for this status. But Trump has the authority to decline to renew these programs.

The programs are administered nation-by-nation and have different deadlines for renewal. Those with the most immediate deadlines were  Salvadorans, whose TPS program was scheduled to end on March 10 and  Ukrainians and Sudanese whose deadline was April 20.

One of Joe Biden’s last acts as president was to renew the deadline for these TPS recipients for another 18 months.

Ana Radelat

Ana Radelat is MinnPost’s Washington, D.C. correspondent. You can reach her at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter at @radelat.

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