WASHINGTON/SAN FRANCISCO—President Donald Trump said he would seek to keep his tough immigration enforcement policies from harming the U.S. farm industry and its largely immigrant workforce, according to farmers and officials who met with him.
At a roundtable on farm labor at the White House last month, Trump said he did not want to create labor problems for farmers and would look into improving a program that brings in temporary agricultural workers on legal visas.
“He assured us we would have plenty of access to workers,” said Zippy Duvall, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, one of 14 participants at the April 25 meeting with Trump and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue.
During the roundtable conversation about agriculture, farmers and representatives of the sector brought up labor and immigration, the details of which have not been previously reported. Some farmers told Trump they often cannot find Americans willing to do the difficult farm jobs, according to interviews with nine of the 14 participants.
They said they were worried about stricter immigration enforcement and described frustrations with the H-2A visa program, the one legal way to bring in temporary seasonal agricultural workers.
The White House declined to comment on the specifics of the discussion, but described the meeting as “very productive.” The U.S. Department of Agriculture did not respond to a request for comment on the April meeting.
About half of U.S. crop workers are in the country illegally and more than two-thirds are foreign born, according to the most recent figures from the U.S. Department of Labor’s National Agriculture Workers’ Survey.
During the roundtable, Luke Brubaker, a dairy farmer from Pennsylvania, described how immigration agents had recently picked up half a dozen chicken catchers working for a poultry transportation company in his county.
The employer tried to replace them with local hires, but within three hours all but one had quit, Brubaker told the gathering at the White House.
Trump said he wanted to help and asked Secretary Perdue to look into the issues and come back with recommendations, according to the accounts.
While other issues such as trade, infrastructure and technology were also discussed, participants were more positive after the meeting about the conversation on foreign labor “than about anything else we talked about,” said Bill Northey, a farmer and Iowa’s secretary of agriculture.
