MONEY MATTERS - Hey, you MAGA maniacs, can you Count?

Written by Drummond Pike

Now I don’t often rely on the Wall Street Journal Editorial page for anything other than an occasional glance at turgid rhetoric spewing from right wingnuts. But here, at the end of August, Sierra Dawn McClain wrote about farm labor and the H-2A guest worker program. It was, uncharacteristically for the Journal, a thoughtful analysis. She starts out with this statistic, “In 2022 a Washington state agency advertised more than 34,000 farm job openings but could place only 11 US-based workers in the roles. That’s up from zero in 2021. The agency placed 2 in 2020 and 19 in 2019.” (WSJ, 8/28/25) That’s a success rate of .0003%. Now it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that if only a dozen or so “Americans” are willing to take a farm job, then someone else needs to fill those positions. And this is where the corrupt thinking of many farmers shows through. Literally since WWII when we had to replace farmer and farmworker soldiers who had gone off to war, the U.S. has been openly and not-so-openly bringing in foreign labor to work our farms, dairies, and ranches.

We have for 80 years been turning a blind eye to what everyone knew was happening, that is until Trump’s campaigns decided to blame undocumented labor for all the ills of our society. The estimated 15 to 20 million workers in the US who don’t have papers authorizing them to be here have lived in the shadows since the Bracero program that was such a failure in the 50s – mostly because like the H-2A program currently, it was expensive, cumbersome and ill-suited to the task for which it was intended. But with what was for years a relatively easy border to cross in either direction, we all got used to the fact that hard-working Mexicans and those from other Latin American countries picked our fruit, tended our milk-cows, and wrestled the dogies on the ranches.

Many years ago, an investigative reporter in Arizona, Don Devereaux, took me into the orange groves just outside of Phoenix. There we met with several dozen workers – all from the same village in Central Mexico – who were living and working among the well-tended orange trees. I admired their outdoor kitchen and cleverly constructed tents, and heard of their regular annual cycle where after the harvest, they would all return to their village for the winter. There were others in that era who would follow the weather north until the late harvests in the North- and Mid-west were done, and then return. But the coming and going served post-war America well with a rapidly expanding agricultural sector that became the envy of the world as we shipped grains and fruits across the globe, in no small part thanks to the hard work at low wages migrant laborers willingly provided. And if low wage workers are available, lord knows other businesses will follow the path big Ag created. And, of course, they did; profit seeking businesses of all sizes love low wage workers however they come by them. Restaurants, nursing homes, hotels, and meat producers have all hired as many as they could find over the years, so now, if you are in the restaurant business and don’t speak Spanish you have a distinct disadvantage in the “back of the house.”

As the years went by, everyone knew we needed to come to grips with the millions of undocumented workers living in the US. The last big amnesty was undertaken by the Reagan Administration in 1986 when bi-partisan legislation reached his desk. Ultimately, 2.7 million undocumented people were granted permanent residency while the rate of immigration declined some but within several years returned to pre-amnesty levels. Notably, even after this reform, employers remained largely untouched when hiring undocumented workers which is especially true in the agricultural sector.

Subsequent reform efforts by Bush II and subsequent administrations all failed and even Senator Lankford’s remarkable effort to push through a bipartisan reform last year failed, primarily due to Trump’s dictate to the GOP not to pass it so it could remain the hot-button issue in the election which it did. So now, with Stephen Miller back in the saddle and a bonkers Fox News railing against an “invasion” of immigrants and a deportation strategy that most now abhor for its cruelty, the idea of actually fixing the problem has virtually no traction.

So, as ICE Barbie and the draconian Stephen Miller toast one another on just how tough and mean the masked ICE enforcers can be, public opinion has dramatically shifted against the administration on this issue. A July Gallup Poll showed a whopping 79% of Americans view immigration as a positive for the country, and an even more dramatic change this year v. last: a drop from 55% to 30% of those wanting immigration reduced. During the campaign Trump promised he was only going after real criminals and voters bought it. But after months of watching innocent and peaceful people snatched off the streets or from courthouses where they were obeying the law to appear, and hearing the stories of courts trying to moderate the administration’s extreme actions (like air-lifting hundreds to a gulag in El Salvador in direct defiance of a court order), people are starting to wonder how all this happened. What’s that phrase, “bought a pig in a poke”?

So back to agriculture. If you are a good old farmer voting along with most of your fellow rural Americans for Trump, how’s it all working out for you? One hears stories from fruit farmers in the Ventura area that finding workers to harvest their ripe fresh fruit this fall is almost impossible. Trump briefly sympathized and called off the dogs, but within a few days relented and is now sending ICE to raid places of work, farms, meat processers, and, of all things, a large, legal “grow” (cannabis) outside LA. Gloves are off for Stephen and Barbie as they gleefully produce propaganda videos with the massively increased DHS budget (10 times previous). Oh, and they pay $50k signing bonuses and forgive student debt if you’ll just sign up to wear a mask and frog march farm workers to the nearest ICE airport. And about that ripening fruit? Perhaps a big mac instead?

The Feds are basically taking a big stick to farm labor with basically NO way to mitigate the damage. And, make no mistake, there ARE problems with the farm labor system as it has evolved under Congress over the years. Here’s further detailing by the Journal:

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…

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 [a Washington State farmer]. 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-DeRemer has 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 to harvest in the fall – and each application is expensive.

Perhaps most salient: there’s no provision for year round work that is needed on many farms and ranches. One shouldn’t wonder too hard about why farmers continue to hire the undocumented. From their perspective, it’s called good business.

It will be interesting to see what happens next year as the worker crisis in agriculture comes more into focus and the decimation of Medicaid leads to mass closures of rural hospitals. Will the MAGA stranglehold over rural voters continue? The answer to that question, of course, implies that ICE thugs allow us to vote or declare some sort of emergency precluding an election – a distinct possibility according to some. Adding on to all this, the economist Paul Krugman is suggesting that stagflation may be just around the corner.

No one would argue Krugman is friendly to either Trump or MAGA. They literally hate him. If offered a chance, they might even burn him in effigy on the now nearly plant free “Rose Garden” Trump recently paved over. One reason is that Krugman keeps calling out that the “economic Emperor” is wandering around in his underwear when it comes to economic policy. Krugman among others frequently points out that tariffs – Trump’s most favorite word in the English language – have never worked as a stimulus to the American economy and more often do the opposite. (Check out the Panic of 1893 if you’d like to understand this.) Krugman, of course, doesn’t stop here; his critiques of Trump and Secretary of the Treasury Bessent are unrelenting, as was his analysis of the Budget bill. But his prognostications about “stagflation” are what has caught my eye.

As a “boomer” born in the late 40s, the term “stagflation” is imprinted in my brain. I graduated from college in 1970 as the US was enduring Nixon’s first term, his failed promise to “end the war” (Vietnam) with “honor,” mass demonstrations, and an ongoing economic expansion. Then came Watergate, Nixon’s ignominious departure from office, and the advent of the Arab Oil Embargo. Sparked by the failed ’73 Yom Kippur War when Egypt and Syria attempted to retake territory lost to Israel in the ’67 Six Day war, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia led oil producers in the boycott of all countries that had supported Israel. By the time the embargo was lifted in 1974, the price of oil had risen 300% from $3/barrel to $12/barrel. This “oil shock” as it was called ended the post WWII economic boom in the west and was a central component of the resulting period of stagnant growth and inflationary prices. If you were lucky enough to have cash in the bank, they paid you more than 10% - hardly even imaginable these days. So when Krugman asserts a realistic fear that we may be entering a period of stagflation, it registers flashing red lights among my generation. It was a strange period where costs kept going up and jobs were hard to come by, at least ones that paid decently. It also led to our first TV star being elected President. It is quite possible, though, that the huge demand for farmworkers and other jobs sporting large numbers of undocumented laborers will help stave off economic stagnation. When we see the Proud Boys out working in the fields, we’ll know Krugman was off on this one. How likely would that be? I don’t think Vegas has odds that low, or, put differently, I’d bet against a Proud Boy ever doing farm work for $19/hour.