Growing Modern American Guestworkers: The Increasing Supply of Temporary H-2A Agricultural Workers*

The U.S. temporary work program (TWP) for lower skilled jobs, the American nonimmigrant H-2 visa, has been admitting foreign workers for agricultural jobs for the past half century. While US policy is widely seen as having failed to control illegal entry, employer use of the H-2A program has, nevertheless, substantially increased over the past fifteen years. I describe the growth of the H-2A workforce since the 1990s with available data and benchmark it against trends in flows of migrants from Mexico. Estimates are also generated for state-level H-2A workforces from 2006 to 2009. As for why the H-2A has grown, this paper dismisses the policy or regulatory facilitation as the primary cause. And it would be premature to see the growth of the H-2A as a substitute for decreasing unauthorized migration, although some of the analysis suggests that possibility. In the same vein, it seems unlikely that the H-2A program is primarily responding to increasing shortages of domestic agricultural labor in the United States. Rather, it seems that growth of the H-2A has coincided with offsetting factors in the agricultural marketplace, as well as migrant networks and the development of a professionalized recruitment sector. These are preliminary results of research in progress which will add an additional year of data, improve measurement of some variables, and specify a more robust regression model. JEL No. J21, J41, J43, J58, J61