To fill those positions, employers have turned to temporary visa programs that recruit workers in Mexico and Central America. Since 2016, the number of U.S. agricultural visas has grown from 165,000 to 242,000, a record high,
according to the Labor Department. Amid an intractable debate over immigration and border security, America’s labor force is quietly being transformed, as many employers see no choice but to shift from illegal to legal labor.
Visa recruiters are now driving into remote villages in Mexico, broadcasting their hiring sprees on portable radios, loudspeakers and Facebook ads. In rural America, farmers are
converting hotels into dormitories for visiting Mexican apple-pickers.
Despite his claim that immigrants take jobs away from Americans, President Trump has touted the guest worker program, acknowledging the difficulty in finding American manual laborers and pledging to make it easier for farmers to hire workers legally.
There is no such limit for workers on agricultural visas, and U.S. employers apply to bring in workers for up to 10 months per year on unskilled visas for agriculture, known as H-2A visas.
“Without them there would be no broccoli or lettuce,” said Tony Tew, an area manager for Foothill Packing, a labor contractor in Yuma, Ariz. “They want to come here to work, and they work hard.”
There is perhaps no better example of the confluence of border security and America’s labor supply than Yuma, known as the “Winter Salad Bowl” of the United States, where lettuce and broccoli are grown a few miles from the border fence. Before the government increased its enforcement — with fencing, additional agents and harsher jail sentences — farmers there once relied on a steady stream of undocumented workers. But this harvest season, there are an estimated 3,800 H-2A workers in the city, almost all from Mexico, up from 2,858 in 2016, according to Yuma officials.