American Agriculture Is Broken, and Tom Vilsack Is Not the Man to Fix It
Biden’s pick for agriculture secretary brings stale solutions to growing crises like climate change and labor inequality.
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Tom Vilsack testifies during a hearing in 2016.
Somewhere on Earth 2, President Boe Jiden, after committing to a thorough review of the groaning, creaking, top-heavy agriculture industry, has decided that the time has come to start fresh. There, the Jiden administration is setting its sights on breaking up the corporations that, during a global pandemic, forced workers back into the aptly named slaughterhouses and demanded their farm laborers work the fields while smoke from the largest wildfire in American history filled their lungs, and that, for decades, have crafted policies that incentivize the consolidation and corporatization that long ago buried the family farm.
Jorge Bautista Sabino (second from right) came to the U.S. from Mexico on an agricultural visa sponsored by a farm labor contractor. After facing wage theft and other abuses, Sabino joined a class action lawsuit with the support of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, for whom he now works. (Photo courtesy of FLOC.)
For years, legal organizations and farmworker advocacy groups have sounded the alarm about the H-2A visa program the most common legal route to hiring foreign agricultural workers. Faced with massive worker shortages, farmers in the South have increasingly turned to foreign laborers, who come to work on temporary employer-sponsored visas.
Introduction
Two fathers and their sons traveled from Mexico this spring to grow and harvest North Carolina’s sweet potatoes, tobacco, Christmas trees and other crops. All four men held temporary H-2A nonimmigrant visas permits U.S. employers use to sponsor foreign guest workers to fill seasonal labor shortages on farms.
In August, one of the fathers died of COVID-19. The other died weeks later. After both were buried in Mexico, their sons dutifully returned to North Carolina to keep working under their visas because they needed the income. The twin tragedies, details of which were confirmed by the Center for Public Integrity through state records and interviews, lay bare the contradictions of the 34-year-old H-2A program.
On the morning of Sept. 15, 2018, 40 farmworkers at Riggs Brothers Farm stood up out of bed into water. Hurricane Florence made landfall in eastern North Carolina the night before, and they were waiting out the storm in their labor camp in Jones County. They scrambled to grab their belongings and waded out the door into waist-high water before spending hours calling 911 and farmworker advocates. Their boss, farm owner Randy Riggs, never showed up.
To rescue them, attorneys and the U.S. Department of Labor had to intervene. When someone finally opened the door, water rushed in even higher, said one worker, Romero, who asked to use an alias to protect his identity because he fears retaliation from his employers. The refrigerator and appliances started floating.
When Flavio first heard about a temporary farm work program in the United States, it sounded like a great deal. Everything from his salary to his housing would be guaranteed in advance by his employer, who would also sponsor his visa. He forked over more than $1,000 to a recruiter in Mexico and was approved in April for an H-2A agricultural visa through a farm labor contractor. These contractors, a small but fast-growing part of the legal migrant worker system, hire laborers directly and then pair them with farmers. They are also notorious for human trafficking, and many have a background in cross-border smuggling, according to the Farm Labor Organizing Committee. Several weeks after his visa was approved, Flavio boarded a bus, chartered by the contractor, that would take him from his hometown in Hidalgo to the farm in North Carolina.