Contributor: ICE raids and migrant pay cuts are devastating California economies

Alongside the southern stretch of California’s Central Coast, President Trump’s campaign in opposition to immigrants has left a visceral mark. It appears lately that just about everybody there has seen or felt the aftermath of an immigration raid: automobiles with shattered home windows left idling and companies emptied of their typical staff and patrons. The human toll is stark. Raids round Christmas eliminated not less than 100 people from our communities, leaving youngsters with out mother and father and households with out main earners — creating crises that cascade far past the second of enforcement.

The financial penalties of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids are equally extreme. Current farmer surveys have proven that immigration raids and the worry they generate have brought on farmworker shortages, notably in labor-intensive crops resembling strawberries — the area’s most dear agricultural commodity — the place fruit rots on the plant with out the immigrant employees who decide it.

Early research quantifying the economic impact of ICE raids in Oxnard estimates direct crop losses of $3 billion to $7 billion with important spillover into different sectors of the economic system. As households lose earnings to raids — whether or not by way of the direct lack of a working member of the family or within the type of misplaced enterprise manufacturing or gross sales — they spend less in the local economy. The ripple impact signifies that the entire financial influence of ICE raids is far larger than unpicked crops, with hurt most concentrated among the many most weak: farmworkers.

Current modifications to a international employee program threaten to deepen the wound. The federal program, often called H-2A, permits growers and farm labor contractors to recruit momentary international employees to satisfy seasonal labor demand. It has change into the fastest-growing work visa system in U.S. agriculture. It carries with it a well–documented history of wage theft, abuse and trafficking enabled, partially, by H-2A employees’ relative isolation and lack of ability to hunt different employment whereas in the USA.

Till October 2025, the wages paid to H-2A employees have been, though low, not so low as to distort the labor market and drag down the wages paid to home farmworkers. In October, the Trump administration delivered an enormous pay minimize to H-2A employees and, in doing so, undercut wages for farmworkers throughout America no matter visa standing. Trump’s modifications embody each a direct wage minimize in addition to new provisions permitting employers to cost housing charges of as much as $3 per hour labored.

Estimates of the pay that farmworkers will lose due to these modifications vary from $4.4 billion to $5.4 billion, or 10% to 12% of farmworkers’ annual wages. Given these figures, the losses suffered by farmworkers in Santa Barbara County alone — the place I conduct analysis — may vary from $126 million to $152 million yearly, with subsequent decreases in spending and tax income reverberating by way of the area.

With H-2A labor now cheaper relative to home farmworkers, visa holders are more likely to fill not less than one-fifth of all agricultural jobs in Santa Barbara County. This exceeds this system’s 2023 peak within the county, when 18.1% of all agriculture jobs have been stuffed by H-2A, earlier than wage will increase brought on many growers to drop out of this system in 2024 and 2025. Together with housing deductions, employers can now pay H-2A employees $13.90 an hour, considerably under California’s minimal wage of $16.90 an hour. Growers have a robust incentive to substitute resident employees for lower-cost H-2A labor, resulting in local farmworkers losing jobs and income. As well as, due to decreased earnings and employment, extra farmworker households will likely be compelled to depend on profit applications resembling CalFresh, growing authorities expenditures.

The tax and finances penalties of expanded H-2A use ought to be a critical concern for native and state governments. Not solely have Trump’s modifications considerably lowered farmworkers’ taxable earnings, however H-2A employees themselves generate much less native tax income and financial exercise than resident employees would.

H-2A employers and staff are exempt from key payroll taxes, together with Social Safety, Medicare and unemployment insurance coverage. On the identical time, this system’s momentary construction — averaging about six months — means employees remit a bigger share of their earnings overseas to help households they can not carry with them, additional limiting native spending and the gross sales tax base.

Elected officers usually are not powerless within the face of those modifications. A variety of coverage levers may assist stabilize a labor market below mounting pressure, notably people who reinforce a significant wage ground and restrict additional downward strain on earnings. This might embody elevating the agricultural minimal wage, growing the California Employment Improvement Division’s program oversight capability, and bolstering authorized protections for undocumented farmworkers organizing for higher working circumstances.

The United Farm Staff are presently difficult the Trump administration’s pay fee and housing deduction in court docket, arguing they represent one of the largest wealth transfers from workers to employers in the history of American agriculture. In the meantime, Assemblymember Maggy Krell (D–Sacramento) has launched laws to lift the minimal hourly wage for sure agricultural employees to $19.75 — successfully restoring the earlier H-2A fee. However that repair, whereas important, wouldn’t take impact till 2027 and nonetheless must be handed. Within the interim, the state and native governments should act decisively to implement the prevailing wage ground, guaranteeing employers can not use expanded housing deductions to push employees’ pay under the authorized minimal.

These usually are not radical steps; they’re fundamental protections. The choice is to simply accept a race to the underside — on wages, on working circumstances and on the financial stability of the area itself.

Matt Kinsella-Walsh is a graduate researcher with the UC Santa Barbara Group Labor Heart and the Organizing Knowledges Venture. He researches agricultural economics and labor within the North American strawberry business.