{"id":6299,"date":"2026-04-14T13:48:26","date_gmt":"2026-04-14T17:48:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/?p=6299"},"modified":"2026-04-14T13:48:32","modified_gmt":"2026-04-14T17:48:32","slug":"future-of-h-2a-workers-in-michigan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/index.php\/future-of-h-2a-workers-in-michigan\/","title":{"rendered":"Future of H-2A Workers"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Migrant farm work has boomed in Michigan recently, but feds just cut pay<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

By Claire Keenan-Kurgan
Current Contributor<\/strong>

Every year for the past decade, Jose Abel (29) has traveled more than 2,000 miles from the region of Durango in Mexico to tend to the grapes of Northern Michigan\u2019s famed vineyards.

The money he earns during the nine months that he spends in Michigan allows him\u2014and thousands of other Mexican workers in our state\u2014to have dreams back home.\u00a0

\u201cBuilding a house in Mexico, buying something to live over there, so you don\u2019t have to keep coming here\u2026 starting a business, or having a farm,\u201d he explains.

Now, however, the U.S. federal government has lowered the minimum wage\u2014by as much as $4.50 an hour, or 25 percent, in Michigan\u2014for the exploding number of workers who are here on H-2A visas, like Abel.\u00a0

The decision comes after a couple of years of outcry from some farmers that the cost of labor, transportation, and housing for H-2A workers had become untenable, and that, without locals willing to do the job, small farms would not be able to afford the cost of the harvest season.\u00a0

\u201cThis move is a key step towards modernizing the H-2A program,\u201d Michigan Farm Bureau president Ben LaCross said in an online press release back in October 2025<\/a>. \u201cMore work needs to be done, but this is a great start.\u201d

Others, however, wonder if the new wages will still be able to attract enough farmhands to do the work that locals do not seem to want.

\u201cWe get the same guys coming back every year, and it\u2019s a pretty severe decrease,\u201d says Brandon Evans, a farm manager at the Evans Brothers Fruit Co. in Benzie County. \u201cThey\u2019re used to the wages they\u2019ve been getting paid.\u201d

And for the migrants, themselves, \u201cit won\u2019t be the same as before, with the same visions for the future,\u201d Abel says.\u00a0

Increasing Workers, Increasing Costs<\/strong>
Evans\u2014who grows apples, cherries, and blueberries with his family\u2014says that he and most other apple growers he knows rely on a team of H-2A workers each year.

They post job opportunities locally as the harvest comes around, but \u201cwe just never hear anything,\u201d Evans says. \u201cWe post the job online for the same rate as the H-2A guys, and nobody shows up.\u201d

Of 415,000 total advertised U.S. farming positions during 2025, only 182 received a domestic applicant, according to The New York Times.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n

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Without domestic help, \u201cthe H-2A program has pretty much taken over,\u201d says Tomas Moreno, the vineyard manager at Bel Lago Winery in Cedar, overlooking Lake Leelanau. He also manages a team of H-2A workers who rotate through various vineyards all across the county.\u00a0

Moreno says he brought 24 workers to Michigan last year and plans to bring 30 this year. He says that vineyard owners from all over Northern Michigan have been calling him, ready to pay premiums for him to set up contracts with migrant workers through the H-2A visa process.\u00a0

Michigan is a \u201ctop 10\u201d state for H-2A work. In 2022, 2023, and 2024, around 15,000 people on H-2A work visas tended Michigan farms, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data.<\/a> That is up sharply from just over 2,000 people less than 10 years ago, in 2015.\u00a0

Moreover, that number shot up to 15,984 in 2025\u2014almost 1,000 extra workers in a single year.

As use of the program has grown, the minimum wage for H-2A workers rose, too\u2014at least, until now.

In 2022, the federal government set minimum wages for H-2A workers in Michigan at $15.37 per hour. In 2023, that went up to $17.34, and it climbed to $18.50 in 2024, before going back down to $18.15 in 2025, and now lowering even further for 2026.\u00a0

This wage rate applies to all workers\u2014domestic and foreign\u2014at any farms that use the H-2A program.\u00a0

But for foreign workers, farmers wind up paying much more than the hourly wage per employee, as farmers are responsible for covering the cost of their housing and transportation, as well as the costs associated with getting a visa.\u00a0

Those other costs are all climbing, too, Moreno says.

\u201cIt used to be that the chemicals that you spray on the trees was a farm\u2019s biggest expense, and now\u2026 the labor is, by far, the biggest expense,\u201d Evans says. \u201cPeople were starting to get worried\u2026 that the smaller farms weren\u2019t going to be able to continue to handle the cost of the labor, and they\u2019re going to get bought up by big farms, and the small family farms were going to just disappear.\u201d

Lowering Wages<\/strong>
In May 2025, Michigan Representative John Moolenaar (R-2nd District) told the U.S. Secretary of Labor at a federal hearing<\/a> that farmers were \u201cunder tremendous financial stress\u201d and \u201cjust can\u2019t make it anymore.\u201d

So when the U.S. Department of Labor announced in October a new method<\/a> for calculating the pay rate for H-2A farm work, many farmers breathed a sigh of relief.\u00a0

For the first time, farmers will be held to two minimum wage rates\u2014one for entry-level workers and another for workers with more experience. The rate will drop in Michigan from $18.15 per hour down to $17.47 for \u201cskill level two\u201d workers and down further to $13.47 for \u201cskill level one\u201d workers.

Zachariah Rutledge\u2014assistant professor of agricultural, food, and resource economics at Michigan State University (MSU)\u2014says that the H-2A wage, officially referred to as the \u201cadverse effect wage rate\u201d or AEWR, was initially designed to protect domestic American workers.

\u201cWhat [the wage rate] is supposed to do is create a wage for H-2A workers that\u2019s high enough that it doesn\u2019t depress the wages of domestic workers\u201d or incentivize farmers to bring in workers from abroad, he says.

But most farmers say that the cost of subsidizing housing and transportation for foreign workers accomplishes that already.\u00a0

Rutledge says it remains to be seen how farmers will respond to the changes for 2026.\u00a0

\u201cAre they going to be able to get the same workers to come back to their farms that have been coming back for years [if they offer a lower wage]?\u201d he wonders.\u00a0

Scared, Concerned<\/strong>
Meanwhile, migrant workers wonder what is in store for them this growing season.

Moreno, the vineyard manager at Bel Lago Winery, says that many of the workers on his team found out about the possible wage drop through word of mouth or on social media last fall, before he had a chance to figure out how farmers in our area plan to respond.\u00a0

\u201cThey were getting scared, concerned,\u201d he says. \u201cThey\u2019re already doing the math of how much they\u2019re gonna be earning and, you know, how much they\u2019ll be sending back home.\u201d

Many of the workers on Moreno\u2019s team would qualify for the higher wage rate, he says, because many of them have returned to Michigan for several years in a row.\u00a0

He says that he told them:\u00a0

\u201cI\u2019ll talk to farmers. And I\u2019ll keep the highest pay rate that I can for you guys as possible.\u201d

Abel, the Mexican worker from Durango, will likely qualify for the higher category of H-2A wages in Michigan, and he does plan to return this coming season.\u00a0

\u201cUnfortunately, there\u2019s barely any work in Mexico,\u201d he says, at least in the smaller town where his family lives, and it is getting more and more common for people from his town to work in the United States on an H-2A visa. \u00a0

When asked about workers who would make that lower entry-level wage, he says:\u00a0

\u201cI\u2019d guess that coming here\u2014however low the wages turn out to be\u2014it would still help, compared to staying in Mexico, where it\u2019s hard to get a job.\u201d

Still, he says, he thinks that the wages should have stayed the same, instead of decreasing for 2026.

\u201cFarm work is hard, and not everyone is willing to do it,\u201d he says. \u201cEven if it\u2019s raining, or snowing, we get it done anyway, and I think the salary we get is fair for what we do.\u201d

Claire Keenan-Kurgan is a reporter for Interlochen Public Radio (IPR).<\/strong> This reporting is made possible by the Northern Michigan Journalism Project\u2014led by Bridge Michigan<\/strong> and IPR<\/strong>\u2014and is funded by Press Forward Northern Michigan.<\/em>

Featured Photo Caption: <\/strong>Tomas Moreno, vineyard manager at Bel Lago Winery in Leelanau County, tends a row of pinot grigio grapes, which were later picked by a team of workers from Mexico that Moreno hired through months-long temporary agricultural work visas, called H-2A visas. Photo by Claire Keenan-Kurgan\/IPR.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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