Why Does Biden Insist on Worsening the Border Crisis?

By Jordan Fischetti

Wednesday, December 27, 2023

 

The southwest border is a mess. There have been 5,815,600 apprehensions from February of 2021 through October of this year. That’s 1.35 million more apprehensions at the southwest border during this period than there were in the prior decade.

 

Unfortunately, four GOP presidential-primary debates passed without any mention of how Biden’s hamstringing of American farmers will exacerbate the border crisis.

 

Earlier this year, the administration introduced a wage-rate regulation mandating that farmers who hire seasonal agricultural laborers through the existing H-2A visa program pay all their migrant workers the salary of the highest-paying job listed in their H-2A petition for the entirety of the season.

 

What does that mean? Let’s suppose a farmer hires a dozen sweet-potato farmers in North Carolina. They spend the vast majority of their time harvesting sweet potatoes, but, occasionally, they transport the crop via truck from the field to storage. Truck drivers in North Carolina earn almost twice as much as harvesters earn. Therefore, according to this new regulation, the farmer must pay all his workers, including those who never drive a truck, truck-driver wages for the entire season.

 

Even worse, the statewide data used to determine these wages tend to favor wage rates in urban areas, so the rural farmer in the above example must pay his harvesters city-truck-driver wages. This is as expensive as it is nonsensical. As my colleague Sam Peak recently calculated in National Review — “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.”

 

Farmers can avoid these extra costs only by filing additional, separate H-2A petitions for each job category that requires a higher wage. A 2021 State Department report found that it cost more than $10,000 in application-related, legal, and other expenses to hire just one worker for one season. This was prior to the introduction of this regulation. And after? One farmer estimated that recategorizing just two of his workers would cost an additional $44,393. Unsurprisingly, 65 percent of farmers have said they would stop using the H-2A program if this regulation remains.

 

It gets worse. The Biden administration recently proposed yet another regulation that would impose additional costs on American farmers who hire H-2A workers. This work-site regulation would force farmers to grant labor organizations access to their work sites for up to ten hours each month. It would also force them to share their workers’ phone numbers, addresses, messaging apps, and other contact information without their workers’ consent. As Americans for Prosperity Foundation stated in its public comment against the proposed regulation, this would be a gross violation of both employers’ and employees’ privacy rights.

 

It would also force farmers to publicly state their reasons for refusing to enter into collective-bargaining agreements with labor organizations, which would open the door to unwarranted public attacks against them and punitive work-site visits from labor groups.

 

It would also raise the likelihood of farmers being banned from the H-2A program. That’s because the program already includes more than 200 rules, which are so vague and confusing that different regulating bodies within the Department of Labor provide conflicting compliance instructions. The Biden administration’s proposal would further complicate this regulatory maze and would ban farmers from accessing the program if they violate any labor regulation imposed by any agency, be it federal, state, or local, no matter how minor the violation. Under these circumstances, is it difficult to imagine a labor representative, during his ten hours of monthly work-site access, going on a fishing expedition for negligible infractions?

 

This is unsustainable. These regulations would discourage more and more farmers from using the current, legal H-2A visa program, which might result in their hiring illegal immigrants instead to meet their labor needs. This, in turn, would incentivize even more illegal immigration and cause more chaos at our southwestern border.

 

The history of the Bracero Program, by which American farmers hired Mexican farmhands between the 1940s and 1960s, demonstrates how access to legal pathways for seasonal work lessens pressure on the border and how a lack of such pathways exacerbates it. There were 1,028,246 apprehensions at the southwest border in 1954, the highest level recorded until that year. Then, an increase in immigration enforcement combined with the gradual facilitation of hiring Bracero laborers led to a drop in apprehensions by almost a million in just two years.

 

Apprehensions remained low during the program’s existence. A 1980 Congressional Research Service report acknowledged that the Bracero Program complemented border security by offering aspiring immigrant workers a “substitute legal means of entry.”

 

Alas: Under pressure from labor unions, the government ended that program in 1964. A leaked Border Patrol document predicted what would happen next:

 

Should . . . a restriction [be] placed on the number of braceros allowed to enter the United States, we can look forward to a large increase in the number of illegal alien entrants into the United States.

 

From 1965 to 1970, apprehensions surged by approximately 340 percent, while apprehensions of adult male agricultural workers surged by nearly 600 percent. This suggests that the increase in apprehensions was entirely caused by adult males, who were now crossing illegally to pursue agricultural work.

 

Restricting seasonal migration exacerbated illegal immigration in the 1960s. There’s no reason to think that it won’t do the exact same thing in 2023. Thankfully, the Farm Operations Support Act, introduced in both the House and Senate, would eliminate Biden’s wage-rate regulation. And when the work-site regulation is introduced, it’s imperative that legislation be passed to repeal that, too.

 

But repealing these measures is just the first step. Ultimately, we must facilitate the process by which American farmers and other employers hire seasonal labor. Doing so would benefit American businesses and consumers while lessening Border Patrol’s burden. Of course, this wouldn’t be a panacea, but it would be a very good start. And anything would be better than Biden’s current policy of exacerbating a national crisis.