GOP seeks audit of agriculture guest-worker program

Top House Republicans on Thursday asked for an audit of the government’s agriculture guest-worker program, saying changes President Biden made last year have made it tougher for farms to get the workers they need.

North Carolina Rep. Virginia Foxx, chair of the Education and the Workforce Committee, and Pennsylvania Rep. Glenn Thompson, chair of the Agriculture Committee, asked the comptroller general to figure out if the H-2A visa is still meeting the farmers’ needs.

Employers seeking to hire H-2A workers must prove they need the employees, are ready to pay a fair wage but can’t entice Americans to take the jobs.

The Biden administration last year rewrote how that pay, known as the Adverse Effect Wage Rate, is calculated.

“Employers have expressed concerns about the affordability of employing H-2A workers under the AEWR regulations,” the two committee chairs said. “Many have cited the AEWR methodology and overall cost structure as the number one issue facing their farms, thereby preventing them from using the H–2A visa program.”

They asked Comptroller General Gene Dodaro and the Government Accountability Office to look at the data and report back on the Biden changes and the H-2A program more broadly.

The program is popular for farmers who say they can’t find Americans to do the sort of manual labor they require.

In 2023 more than 21,000 employers applied for visas, and the Labor Department certified more than 378,000 positions that could be filled by H-2A workers. That was up from 243,000 positions in 2018.

The Biden administration said employers were abusing the program, both mistreating the foreign workers and using them to undercut U.S. wages.

Last year’s rules change imposed new standards such as banning employers from confiscating passports and limiting how they can fire H-2A workers.

The H-2A program is run jointly by the Labor Department and Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Employers submit applications to the Labor Department, which then rules on whether the business has truly tried to find willing domestic workers and that bringing in foreign guest workers would not hurt Americans’ wages.

Homeland Security decides which countries’ citizens can win H-2A visas and issues the final passes.