Part Two: The is the second in a two-part series featuring an interview with farm labor expert Ray Starling, focusing on H-2A.
By Clint Thompson
A domestic workforce for agricultural work in the Southeast is almost non-existent. Bringing in foreign workers to work on the farm is a necessity but also a costly one.
Those are two facts that Ray Starling, general counsel for North Carolina Chamber of Commerce, emphasized at the Southeast Regional Fruit and Vegetable Conference in Savannah, Georgia, in early January. It is why more support should be shown to Southeast farmers who are forced to utilize the H-2A program.
“If you’re currently working in ag and you’re a U.S. citizen or an American worker, we do not want to displace you with ‘cheap foreign labor.’ But at this point, anyone that uses the H-2A program is going to look at the bottom line and what it costs to bring a worker in and say, that is not ‘cheap foreign labor.’ The other thing they’re going to tell you is, there is very little domestic workforce, particularly for the seasonal temporary kind of work that we have to do in fruits and vegetables,” Starling said.
Important Stats
According to the National Center for Farmworker Health, Inc., 70% of ag workers were foreign born in 2020; while 63% of all ag workers were born in Mexico. According to the American Farm Bureau Federation, more than 400,000 H-2A positions were requested in fiscal year (FY) 2025. Only 182 positions out of more than 415,000 advertised received a domestic applicant in FY 2025.
“Think about the way the U.S. economy is different today than it was 20 or 30 years ago. Think about the opportunities your kids will have to work in the summer versus the opportunities that were there when I was coming along,” Starling said.
“At the end of the day, we respect that congressional intent, we respect that statutory intention which is we don’t want to have a negative effect on the domestic workforce that’s already in agriculture, but in reality, if you look at the numbers, that group of people is almost non-existent that are at least coming forward to take these sorts of jobs.”