UNITED STATES – U.S. Imperialism has closed a circuit thirty years in the making: having dispossessed millions of Mexican farmers through NAFTA‘s flood of subsidized American corn, the Trump regime is now cutting the wages of those same displaced masses, recaptured as indentured H-2A labor bound to a single employer under threat of losing legal status, while expanding the program 17 percent and dragging down pay for the entire agricultural workforce, migrant and domestic alike, in the process.
Over 90 percent of H-2A workers come from Mexico. The North American Free Trade Agreement, or, NAFTA, signed in 1994, flooded Mexico with subsidized U.S. corn, collapsing the price Mexican farmers received for their own corn by 66 percent and driving roughly two million people off the land between 1991 and 2007. This was an intended consequence of a policy that opened Mexico’s countryside to U.S. agribusiness while destroying the material basis of independent subsistence for millions of the masses. Displaced from the land, that same population became available as migrant labor, first undocumented, increasingly today through H-2A, to work the very U.S. fields that dispossessed them in the first place.
The Department of Labor rewrote how H-2A wages are calculated on October 2, 2025, replacing the survey once used to set pay, the USDA’s Farm Labor Survey, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey, a dataset built for non-farm occupations entirely. The result is roughly two-thirds of the workers whose wages now set the H-2A pay floor under this methodology are hand packers and packagers in non-farm warehouses, workers stocking shelves, not laborers picking fruit. The new methodology allows employers to cut H-2A wages by an average of 20 percent nationally, according to UC Davis’s Migration Dialogue project, the reduction is closer to 21 percent. Combined with a new deduction employers can take for providing worker housing, and the effective cut climbs as high as 32 percent for some workers. The new rates took effect August 3, after a federal judge denied the United Farm Workers’ request to block the rule in May.
A Maryland H-2A worker interviewed by CATA described earning $3 to $4 less per hour than the previous year for the same labor in the same fields. Because H-2A wages set the effective floor for the entire agricultural labor market, the cut drags down pay for farmworkers with legal documentation and without. The Economic Policy Institute estimates farmworkers stand to lose $4.4 to $5.4 billion a year collectively.
This is the standard functioning of imperialism: the dominant power parasitizes and disciplines the weaker power. U.S. finance capital, as the hegemonic imperialist power on the continent, requires precisely the bureaucrat capitalism it has cultivated in Mexico through the old Mexican State, still bound to the decrepit remnants of feudal land relations, since it is exactly this arrested development that produces a dispossessed, desperate population with nowhere else to sell its labor.
The wage cuts are the ordinary mechanism by which an imperialist center then disciplines the masses of the entire continent, extracting twice over, first by dispossession of the countryside and manufacture of the very migration it then criminalizes, and again by importing that displaced labor back as an indentured workforce with no path to refuse the terms offered.
No wage floor, court ruling, or reform passed by either government will resolve this relation built into the very structure of imperialism itself; only its revolutionary overthrow will bring to end this rotten order. Only the organized unity of the masses across the continent, being oppressed and exploited by the same international capitalist class, can smash this system once and for all.
[Bakersfield, Kern County – Photo source FREDERIC J. BROWN]
