Trump-era wage cut slashes pay for thousands of Georgia migrant farmworkers

A Trump administration policy change cut wages of thousands of migrant farmworkers in Georgia.

The federal government slashed minimum hourly wages from $16.08 to $10.52 for the H-2A temporary agricultural workers program, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The program allows migrant workers to come to the U.S. on a temporary visa to work in positions that farmers cannot fill with the domestic workforce. 

A coalition of farmworkers, including one from Georgia, filed a lawsuit last month arguing that cutting wages for the program ultimately cuts wages for domestic agricultural workers. As part of the program’s stipulations, farmers cannot pay domestic workers less than H-2A workers.

The program requires farmers to pay for the H-2A workers’ flight to and from the U.S., their housing while they are here and transportation to the fields every day.

Supporters of the cuts say they are a corrective measure for sizable increases in wages in the past several years, but critics say the move could increase labor abuses and hurt small farmers and farmworkers.

Georgia was number two in the nation for the number of H-2A workers in six of the past eight years, second only to Florida. In 2024, Georgia welcomed 43,436 H-2A farmworkers, according to the AJC.

Diego Iniguez-Lopez is the government affairs director for the United Farm Workers Foundation, which is a nonprofit that supports farmworkers and immigrants and is a plaintiff in the lawsuit. He told the AJC that the policy change only benefits big agricultural organizations.

“Instead of actually complying with the statutory obligation to ensure that the H-2A program does not adversely affect U.S. workers, it’s going the opposite route,” Iniguez-Lopez told the AJC. “It’s going to force Georgia farmworkers and others across the country to take second jobs, make cuts to groceries, gas and other necessities,… and this is already a population that has far too much exposure to food insecurity and poverty, and these wage cuts will deepen that.”