H-2A’S BIG BANG Why 2026 Could Be the Year Growers Go All In By Jason Resnick, Senior Vice President and General Counsel
Instead of betting on a single policy shift, growers should watch what happens when two trends move at the same time: a tighter labor market driven by enforcement and border dynamics, and a federal wage framework that suddenly makes H-2A more competitive. Either trend alone would be manageable. Together, they could change hiring decisions across the West in a single season. That’s why 2026 has the makings of an inflection point for H-2A usage in California, Arizona, Colorado and beyond. Two developments—one on enforcement, one on wages—are combining to make the “status quo” labor model less available, while simultaneously making the legal guestworker alternative more economically workable. Enforcement is tightening the labor spigot—whether agriculture is targeted or not Immigration enforcement doesn’t have to target agriculture to squeeze agriculture. It only has to reduce the flow of unauthorized individuals turned falsely documented workers and increase the perceived risk of living and working in the shadows. Employers then face the same hard reality: fewer applicants, higher turnover and more volatility in the workforce. The Trump administration has officially declared that the southern border is “the most secure in history.” In a year-end review released by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in late December 2025, the Administration stated that it had “secured the border in record-time.” This sentiment has been echoed by President Trump in recent press conferences and official proclamations, often highlighting that his executive actions have effectively “closed” the border to illegal crossings. At the same time, DHS has removed more than 622,000 undocumented persons and 1.9 million more have self-deported, and 70 percent of those arrested by U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are criminal aliens who have been charged or convicted of a crime in the U.S., according to the same DHS report. This tracks with Administration’s statements that ICE is focused on arresting and removing the “worst of the worst” criminal aliens. At the same time, ag worksite enforcement has been muted. It’s important to note that just because agriculture hasn’t been affected yet doesn’t mean it can’t be. Policies might shift rapidly and not align with harvest schedules. And even when farms aren’t the focal point, pressure
in adjacent rural areas can still disrupt local farm labor availability. When the domestic labor market becomes less reliable and the legal alternative becomes less expensive, for many operations, H-2A starts to look less like an emergency tool and more like the only scalable way to staff a crop. AEWR reform changed the math For years, many growers in the West treated H-2A like a generator you hope you never have to use: indispensable in an emergency, expensive and complicated in normal times. The single biggest reason has been cost, starting with the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR). Growers can manage housing (if they can find it) and transportation if they must. But when the wage floor sits several dollars above the next best alternative—especially in a state already carrying high labor and compliance costs—the program becomes hard for many to justify except in periods of acute shortage. Then came the Department of Labor’s October 2025 Interim Final Rule (IFR), which overhauled how the AEWR is calculated for most H-2A non- range occupations. In general terms, the rule shifts the wage methodology away from USDA Farm Labor Survey (FLS)-based rates and toward Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data, with added “skill level” concepts that, in practice, are expected to classify many common H-2A jobs as entry-level. Moreover, an “adverse cost adjustment” (ACA) of $1.00 to $3.00, depending on the state, may be reduced from the AEWR to account for the cost of providing housing free of charge to H-2A workers. Layer on the fact that employers still must pay the highest applicable wage floor (which can include minimum wage), and the result is a meaningful reshuffling of what “H-2A labor” costs in many Western states. None of this eliminates the program’s non-wage costs. But it does compress the wage spread in a way that can turn H-2A from “last resort” into something closer to a default plan. Three Western-state examples California remains the easiest illustration, because the delta is dramatic. California Under the pre-IFR baseline that growers were budgeting against, California’s AEWR for 2025 was $19.97/hour.
10 Western Grower & Shipper | www.wga.com January – March 2026
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online