Farmworker Fear of a General Strike Sheds More Light On Trump’s Stranglehold on Migrants
Some farmworker advocates in California fear migrants can be “replaced in a heartbeat.” Photo/Stock
By Joe Maniscalco
This week, California farmworkers protesting the recent death of 57-year-old Jaime Alanís García after he broke his neck fleeing militarized ICE agents in Ventura County on July 10, chose to observe the “Huelga para la dignidad,” or “Strike for Dignity.” Most, however, did not.
And the reason they did not has everything to do with Trump administration policies designed to perpetuate an unrepresented class of workers in this country consigned to a state of virtual slavery.
The Trump-directed raids on poor California farmworkers makes zero economic sense when you consider the current president’s supporters in agribusiness simply cannot do without the cheap, exploitable labor that makes their profits possible.
Getting rid of all those workers and field hands is just bad business. Or it would be if they weren’t so disposable.
Jose Lopez is interim executive director of the Food Chain Workers Alliance. The FCWA is a coalition of worker-based groups representing some 375,000 food workers in the United States and Canada. According to Lopez, hard-pressed farmworkers now being terrorized by ICE in California are just way too vulnerable to strike.
“Workers here in the U.S. could be replaced by H-2A workers in a heartbeat,” Lopez told Work-Bites earlier this week.
What exactly are H-2A workers? H-2A workers are foreign nationals brought into the United States by agribusiness bosses to fill temporary agricultural jobs. Most of the workers come from Mexico. In 2019, the U.S. Department of Labor approved 257,000 H-2A work visas. Last year, agribusiness employers brought in a reported 384,000 H-2A workers.
“What has been happening with H-2A workers is this administration has been using these workers to replace local workers in each state,” Lopez explained. “We've seen it a lot in Washington State. H-2A workers come from Mexico with a work permit. Their work permit is then given to the employer—so, the employer holds this person. We've seen so many injustices—but the worker is stuck there because at that point the farmer, or whoever is their employer, is holding their work permit. This administration is just using workers, and the injustices are happening every day—and they’re worse because workers are not able to organize, and they don’t know what their rights are.”
Trump’s assault on farmworkers began during his first trip to the White House when his administration started accelerating the H-2A visa program during Covid, loosening labor protections, and relaxing rules meant to give preferences to U.S. workers.
“The Trump Administration has gone out of its way to make it easy for agricultural employers to bring in guest workers during the pandemic,” Bruce Goldstein president of Farmworker Justice, told me in 2020. “They’ve eased certain processes. And yet the Trump administration has refused to require safety protections during transportation to the U.S. in housing or in the workplace.”
That same year, another migrant advocacy rights organization called Centro de los Derechos del Migrante (the Center for Migrant Rights) published a five-month-long study interviewing H-2A workers across Mexico in which “one hundred percent of those surveyed reported at lease one illegal abuse of their rights.”
“Ninety-six-percent of them,” CDM’s Maria Perales Sanchez told me, “reported three or more.”
Under existing H-2A visa program rules workers can only work for the employers that hired them—and bosses can fire and deport migrant workers any time they like.
Just last month, the Department of Labor scrapped a 2024 rule which had actually been enacted under the previous administration to afford some protections to farmworkers in the H-2A visa program.
But this time around, the Trump administration isn’t limiting itself to what amounts to modern day slavery to make sure growers maintain a steady flow of migrant workers no matter how many people ICE grabs and deports off the streets.
No, they’re not insisting agribusiness pay living wages and sustainable benefits to attract American citizens to do farm work. Instead, they are counting on robots to take over, while at the same time paving the way to make farm work a prerequisite for Medicaid and other federal aid.
"Ultimately, the answer on this is automation, also some reform within the current governing structure,” U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins told reporters last week. “And then also, when you think about, there are 34 million able-bodied adults in our Medicaid program. There are plenty of workers in America.”
Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” also contains language mandating all able-bodied adults as old as 64 and without children, to complete at least 80 hours of work, volunteering, education, or job training each month in order to maintain their eligibility for Medicaid.
Meanwhile in the migrant community, Lopez says workers remain terrorfied as ICE agents continue to grab people off the streets, drag them out of their cars, and even barge into their homes and arrest them.
“When he was trying to become president, [Trump] was saying he was going for, as he said, ‘the bad hombres—the rapist, the criminals.’ And we're not seeing that—it is the total opposite,” Lopez said. “If somebody is a person of color, if somebody has an accent, if somebody just looks Mexican or Latino—from there they're being stopped and detained. We see that happening at Home Depot work centers. [ICE] is there. They don't care anymore. They're forcing themselves into people's private homes to detain people that they don't have a warrant for.”
And yet, despite the fear and urgency, Lopez said his organization is still not pushing for any kind of general strike.
“We are not pushing for a strike just because a strike takes months and years to organize and to work,” he said. “What we are doing right now is making sure employers, members of the community, workers themselves, know their rights.”
Other worker organizations, however, are planning to hold a farmworkers strike on Aug. 12. MyNewsLA.com and Payday Report’s Mike Elk quote SEIU 721 Organizing Director Martin Manteca supporting the Aug. 12 job action saying, “We need to send a strong message that this country runs on immigrants.”