The Trump administration, this month, proposed expanding access to the federal H-2A visa program, a move that could make it easier for dairy farms to hire workers.
The program, which was created in the 1980s, allows U.S. farmers to hire foreign workers when there are not enough domestic workers available. For decades, the program has been limited to temporary or seasonal agricultural jobs, excluding most dairy operations because they require labor year-round.
Under the proposed changes, dairy farms could gain broader access to the guestworker program, potentially easing longstanding labor shortages in the industry. At the same time, the H-2A program has long been plagued by reports of abuse and fraud.
Teresa Mares, a University of Vermont associate professor of anthropology, Gund faculty fellow, and director of the graduate program in food systems at UVM, studies labor in the food system including Vermont’s dairy industry. We asked her about the current program, what the changes might mean for agricultural workers, and what the new proposal could look like on the ground at Vermont dairy farms.
What’s H-2A?
The H-2A program is the only agricultural visa program in the United States that allows for seasonal agricultural workers to come in, largely for crop production harvesting, on a temporary basis, to address supposed local labor shortages. The blueprint for the program was largely the Bracero program during the World War II period, and it's now the only pathway for people born outside of the United States to obtain employment in agriculture in the United States.
What might change under this proposal?
At this point, the H-2A visa program is only a seasonal program. It doesn't allow year-round workers to come in. A significant labor need on dairy farms is milking, which is not seasonal work, so few dairy farms have sought out H-2A workers. My research has demonstrated that as of now, there is no legal pathway for farm workers who do the milking work in the dairy industry to qualify for the H-2A visa program. The clarification issued specifies that dairy farm owners could be eligible to apply for H-2A workers, but only for seasonal employment.
What potential upsides do you see to the proposed changes?
Based on many years of doing research in this area, the only upside would be that workers who are currently undocumented might have a small amount of protection with an agricultural visa. However, the majority of undocumented workers in dairy are not doing seasonal work.
How about potential downsides?
The H-2A program is really flawed in a number of ways. When you look at who has been against and for this kind of change to the H-2A program, there are a number of local and regional farm worker groups who have been very adamantly opposed to expanding the H-2A program in the dairy industry.
Research shows that the H-2A program has proven to be a place where a lot of worker abuses can and do happen. One of the main policy arrangements within the H-2A program is that workers are hired to work with one employer and cannot change employers, which opens up a number of possibilities for worker exploitation and abuse. If there is any kind of worker abuse or pay withholding or poor working conditions, once an H-2A worker is in the system, they cannot simply quit and go to a different employer. That's one of the main reasons that farmworker advocates have argued that the H-2A program shouldn't be the model that we use for increasing authorization for workers in U.S. agriculture from outside of the country.
What might this proposal mean for Vermont specifically?
Even as local dairy industry plants are closing down in northern Vermont, we know that dairy has been a key piece of the Vermont economy for many years. It’s a really volatile industry that has faced a number of challenges, including issues of scale as well as consolidation and industrialization of the dairy economy.
In 1940s Vermont, the majority, if not all of the dairy, was produced on small, largely family-operated farms, but Vermont has a very different reality now: most of the dairies that are still in business have gotten pretty large as a result of farms buying out other farms. While they still may be family-run, that doesn't mean that all of the employees are family members. Our farms are still very small by national standards, but the farms that are still afloat have tended to get bigger and bigger over time, and those larger farms are hiring workers born outside of the United States. Like all other states that depend heavily on dairy, the dairy economy here is really highly supported by workers largely from Mexico, and the vast majority of Vermont's milk is produced on farms that hire migrant farmworkers. This means that anything that has to do with the experiences of those farmworkers would have very large impacts on the state.
Is this a new idea?
This isn't the first time there's been a proposal to do this within the Farm Worker Modernization Act, which did not ultimately get passed. Part of that broader act was a provision to expand H-2A to include dairy. That set off a really interesting debate within the farmworker activism community, with large national organizations like the United Farm Workers very much in support of that act, and other groups like Migrant Justice and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, really against that expansion.
Dr. Teresa Mares is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Vermont and is the Director for the Graduate Program in Food Systems.
