U.S. History with Guest Farm Workers

John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath described the harsh working conditions of migrant farm workers from the Midwest. More than 70 years later, agricultural work in the United States is still often harsh and wages are low. But the composition of the farm labor force has changed. There are no more Okies. Instead, farm workers come from places like the Mexican states of Guanajuato and Michoacán. The majority of hired farm laborers in the United States are unauthorized immigrants, and most unauthorized workers are from Latin America—particularly Mexico. Spanish is the lingua franca of farm labor; 71 percent of farm workers identify it as their primary language.¹

U.S. agriculture has long been a point of entry into the labor market for immigrants, and the agriculture sector has been dependent on immigrant labor for more than a century. In the 1880s, 75 percent of seasonal farm workers in California were Chinese. In 1882, in response to pressure from working-class whites, Congress passed the first of a series of anti-Asian immigration laws that barred the entry of laborers from China. Field labor positions were subsequently filled by new waves of Asian immigrants:  first Japanese and Filipinos, then laborers from British India. On the East Coast, French Canadians, Caribbean Islanders, and European immigrants, in addition to low-income native whites and African Americans, were part of the agricultural workforce.²

With the passage of legislation restricting immigration from Asia, farmers increasingly relied on a source of field labor that caused them much less grief. Mexico was a nearby source of workers, eager to escape poverty in their home country and often already familiar with farm work. The proximity of Mexico made it easier to expel these workers than Asians or Europeans.

During World War II, in response to reported labor shortages, the U.S. government made efforts to recruit Mexican farm workers. These efforts included a bilateral agricultural guest worker program which set the stage for the emigration of millions of Mexican agricultural workers (authorized and unauthorized) to the United States, both during and after the war.³

Although the program was initially slated to end after World War II, U.S. growers used their political clout to advocate for the program’s continuation, claiming that eliminating it would cause labor shortages and end in disaster for U.S. agriculture.⁴ The program eventually ended in 1964, after 22 years, in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement and under pressure from organized labor, the U.S. Catholic Church, and Mexican-American organizations that denounced exploitation and abuse within the program.⁵

Beginning in the early 1980s, economic crises in Mexico caused a surge in immigrant farm workers in the United States. The H-2A Temporary Agricultural Program was created in 1986, partly as a response to the increasing numbers of unauthorized farm workers. Today, H-2A remains the only legal means of employing foreign agricultural workers.  The H-2A program places no numerical limit on guest workers. In practice, about 100,000 long-season farm jobs—10 percent of all such jobs—are filled through the program.⁶ H-2A has been growing in recent years; more growers are using this legal channel in response to the pressure created by more aggressive immigration enforcement.

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