A new measure of poverty that accounts for health care needs and resources being developed by the U.S. Census Bureau—the Health Inclusive Poverty Measure (HIPM)—shows that poverty affects even more people in the U.S. than the typical statistics estimate. This is particularly true for people of color. This is primarily a function of the limited access to health insurance that Black and Hispanic communities endure. Black and Hispanic individuals, for example, are more likely than peers to be uninsured and to rely on Medicaid for coverage. This is why we warned about the uneven impact of cuts to the program early this year.

Policymakers are currently debating the merits surrounding the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace subsidies that help more than 20 million people afford health insurance and kept nearly 2 million people out of poverty in 2024. These subsidies were introduced through the American Rescue Plan and extended through the Inflation Reduction Act; they increase the accessibility of health insurance by subsidizing the amount eligible individuals pay for the “benchmark”—i.e., the second-lowest tier plan on a sliding scale with income—such that most individuals making near-poverty wages can access these plans for free.

Allowing the ACA premium enhanced tax subsidies to expire will increase health inclusive poverty across groups, but the impact will be felt most heavily by those for whom accessing health insurance was already precarious. These households are disproportionately Black, brown, and working class because those households sit at the margin of health insurance affordability under normal circumstances and have seen the largest increases in insurance rates during the period when the enhanced tax credits have been available.

Communities of color trying to obtain health coverage now face attacks on two fronts. The more economically vulnerable among them face a more financially constrained Medicaid program with more stringent work requirements, purposefully meant to reduce access to health care. And those fortunate enough to afford care via the ACA marketplace now face the rising prospect of being priced out of coverage if the credits are allowed to expire this month. If the subsidies are allowed to expire, those who previously had free access to the benchmark ACA plans would lose it. The poorest eligible families would see the largest percentage increase in their annual health insurance premiums, while families with higher incomes would experience a higher dollar amount increase.

The end result of this two-pronged attack on public health, not to mention the dismantling of the country’s public health infrastructure that the Trump-Vance administration has carefully orchestrated since coming into office, will be an increase in the number of uninsured individuals, higher economic insecurity for families who need health care but can’t afford coverage, and increased poverty. These forces, as we illustrate below, will affect people of color unevenly.

Health inclusive poverty reveals deeper economic pain than monetary poverty—the attack on Medicaid and health subsidies will make things worse

More than 50 million people struggled with health inclusive poverty last year. This means more than one in seven (14.8%) individuals grappled with economic insecurity because they lack the resources to meet their health and broader needs (see Figure A). 

Figure A

The HIPM produced by the U.S. Census Bureau researchers broadens the basket of goods and services that families need to maintain an adequate standard of living beyond the two measures of poverty that the Bureau publishes annually. These two measures include the Official Poverty Measure (OPM) and the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM). While the SPM goes further than the OPM to account for geographic differences in housing costs, tax credits, and government benefits (like SNAP), it doesn’t incorporate health care benefits, subsidies, and expenses like the HIPM. The HIPM therefore enables us to examine the extent to which access to health insurance and key health care subsidies impact the standard of living of individuals and families.

As observed in Figure A, health inclusive poverty has exceeded monetary poverty in the U.S. for the greater part of the last decade. Last year, for example, the prevalence of health inclusive poverty was more than 4 percentage points higher than the incidence of poverty measured by the OPM, and about 2 percentage points higher than the SPM. Access to health insurance serves as a key driver of the differences we observe between estimates of monetary and health inclusive poverty. This is because uninsured individuals have zero health insurance resources to offset the health care needs that the health inclusive measure of poverty introduces to the original poverty thresholds under the SPM.

Recent policy choices under the Turmp-Vance administration are likely to further widen the gap between these measures. The Republican Budget Reconciliation bill is projected to increase the number of uninsured individuals by more than 10 million in the years ahead, and the expiration of health care subsidies under the Affordable Care Act marketplace will quadruple the average net premiums for the more economically vulnerable and increase the number of uninsured individuals by nearly 5 million in 2026.

In 2024 alone, Medicaid kept about 15 million people out of poverty and health care subsidies that made health insurance more affordable for people in the ACA marketplace kept nearly 2 million people out of poverty. Without these support systems, about 17 more million people would have fallen below the poverty line in 2024, pushing the poverty rate from 14.8% to around 19.8%.

Health inclusive poverty affects people of color disproportionately

Black, Hispanic, and American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) individuals are more than twice as likely as their white peers to face economic hardship due to insufficient resources to meet their health and material needs. Last year, more than one in five Black, Hispanic, and AIAN people fell below the health inclusive poverty line (see Figure B).

Figure B

While the prevalence of health inclusive poverty exceeds that of monetary poverty for all racial and ethnic groups, the divide is starkest for Black, Hispanic, and AIAN individuals (as shown in Figure B). Compared with their non-Hispanic white peers, the percentage point difference between health and monetary poverty is more than twice as large for Black individuals and more than five times as large for Hispanic and AIAN individuals. These disparities are driven by unequal access to health insurance, as the uninsured rate is highest for Hispanic, AIAN, and Black individuals. More than one in six Hispanic and AIAN people, for example, lack access to health insurance. These groups are more than three times as likely as their white peers to lack access to health insurance. Slightly narrower, but just as harmful, disparities affect Black individuals. In 2024, more than 3.5 million Black people struggled without access to health insurance.

Statistically meaningful differences between both poverty measures are largest in Southern states, where communities of color make up a relatively larger share of the population. States where social and economic policy have historically been rooted in racism are also less likely to have expanded access to Medicaid. Census researchers find that states with expanded access to Medicaid coverage have health inclusive poverty estimates that are more than 2 percentage points lower than states without expanded access.

Black and brown people, as well as the working class and uninsured, skip or postpone needed health care due to cost

The U.S. health care system is designed such that access to adequate and timely care is based on a person’s ability to pay and often based on whether they are employed. Access to health insurance mediates access to health care, and employment is a major mediating factor for access to both health insurance and the income necessary to pay any out-of-pocket costs associated with care. In greed-driven health care systems like ours, poorer workers and their families often forgo or delay treatment that could improve or extend their lives because they can’t afford it.

Black and brown households are more likely to be uninsured, to report difficulties with reporting health care costs, and to report skipping or postponing needed health care within the past year than their white and Asian counterparts. Lack of access to adequate and timely care has long-term economic and health implications for Black and brown families and communities. Policies that threaten the already tenuous connection that marginalized groups have to the health care system, e.g., allowing the ACA premium tax credits to expire and restricting access to Medicaid, will contribute to the persistence of economic and health inequities across race and class.

HIPM underscores the economic and public policy imperative of expanding health care access to prevent poverty

The HIPM captures the impact of overlapping economic and public health policies—or lack of effective policies—on households’ exposure to poverty. It shows how policies like Medicare, Medicaid, and expansions to the Affordable Care Act protect families from financial distress and uncertainty. Racial and geographic differences in the HIPM highlight the variation in adequacy different groups experience across our patchwork health care system. It also helps us identify the impact that recent and ongoing policy choices will have on public health and equity.

The federal cuts to Medicaid that President Trump signed into law this summer, as well as the potential expiration of ACA health insurance subsidies, will disproportionately impact communities of color. Cuts to Medicaid will hurt Black and Hispanic adults and children most, as they are more likely than their peers to rely on Medicaid and CHIP for health insurance. The potential expiration of ACA subsidies will undoubtedly compound health inequities, pushing more than 2 million people of color into ranks of the uninsured. With both private and public options for health insurance falling further out of reach for the most disadvantaged, the administration’s attack on the country’s public health infrastructure will worsen health outcomes, widen disparities, and deepen the growing economic vulnerability of families struggling under Trump’s affordability crisis.

This is part 2 of a two-part series analyzing the impact of an amendment to the House Homeland appropriations bill on the H-2A and H-2B visa programs. Read part 1 here.

Key takeaways:

• The government funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may include a rider amendment that would establish a new methodology for setting the H-2B visa program’s annual numerical limit. This amendment (originally known as Amendment #1 but later dubbed the Bipartisan Visa En Bloc amendment) would result in a cap of at least 252,000 visas in fiscal year (FY) 2026.
• H-2B visa extensions and job changes are not counted against the annual cap, but after adding them to the updated cap of 252,000, the total number of H-2B workers employed in FY 2026 would be 282,000, which is almost 113,000 greater than the total number of workers in 2024 and 2025.
• The rider would move 12,000 H-2B workers employed at carnivals, traveling fairs, and circuses to the P visa, which lacks any numerical limit on the number of visas, further expanding the number of exploitable workers in H-2B industries.
• The rider would restrict the already limited ability of H-2A and H-2B workers to change employers, leaving them more exploitable and vulnerable to workplace violations.
• This amendment in Congress would mainly benefit employers by allowing them to gradually hire an exponentially higher number of workers they can control, while undercutting labor standards for all workers.

In part 1 of this two-part blog post series, I provided background and discussion on a rider amendment that the Homeland Security subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee proposed and passed over the summer. Originally known as Amendment #1 but later dubbed the Bipartisan Visa En Bloc amendment, it would make major changes to the H-2A and H-2B visa programs through the appropriations process, while completely circumventing the committees that should have subject matter jurisdiction in the House and Senate. Part 1 focuses on the changes and impacts in the H-2A program; this post will briefly explain the components of the rider that would make changes to the H-2B visa program and the impact of those changes, as well as one change that would affect both programs.

The H-2B program has been expanded through appropriations riders every year since fiscal year 2016

Two of my previous reports provide a fuller explanation of the background on the size of the H-2B program and a history of the legislative riders in appropriations bills that have been used to expand the size of the H-2B program. A quick recap here is warranted. In fiscal year 2016, Congress authorized a “returning worker” exemption through appropriations legislation to fund the operation of the U.S. government. The legislation exempted H-2B workers from the annual H-2B cap of 66,000 that is set in law, for fiscal year 2016, if the workers hired were previously in H-2B status in any of the preceding three fiscal years. There was no cap on the number of returning H-2B workers under the exemption.

In each year since FY 2017, Congress has, through appropriations riders, given the executive branch the discretionary legal authority to roughly double the number of H-2B visas available. Rather than specify the level of increase for the H-2B program, appropriators have passed the buck instead to the executive branch—perhaps because they didn’t want the responsibility or criticism that may come from setting a specific number—by directing the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in consultation with the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), to determine how many additional H-2B visas are appropriate, if any. DHS has interpreted the rider language as allowing them to issue up to 64,716 “supplemental” visas in the corresponding fiscal year. In total, it has been 10 years (FY 2016–2025) since Congress first permitted increases to the size of the H-2B program through an appropriations rider. The Biden administration in 2023, 2024, and 2025 used the full authority granted to the executive branch in the legislative riders, raising the total H-2B annual limit to 130,716.

The appropriations rider would create a new methodology to expand the H-2B cap by at least 100,000

The rider takes a different approach to allowing a higher number of H-2B visas to be issued in FY 2026. The language of the amendment states that for every employer who has had any H-2B positions certified in the past five fiscal years (2021–2025), the highest number that they had certified in those years will be the number of H-2B workers they may hire who will not count against the annual cap of 66,000. In other words, if an employer had 10 jobs certified in 2021, 15 in 2022, 20 in 2023, 100 in 2024, and 50 in 2025, they would be allowed to hire 100 H-2B workers in 2026 without them counting against the 66,000 cap.

To calculate how many workers could be hired in 2026 under this formula, a colleague and I matched employer records from DOL and identified the employers who had at least one approved H-2B job in each of the years between 2020 to 2024. (Full year data for 2025 were not available at the time of writing, so 2020–2024 are used as a proxy.) Altogether, 186,342 H-2B workers would have been exempted from the annual cap under this formula. This is almost certainly a low-end estimate because the number of H-2B jobs certified in 2020 was lower than normal because of the bureaucratic shutdowns and slowdowns caused by the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Table 1 shows an estimate for 2020–2024 that serves as a proxy for our estimate on the number of new H-2B workers who will be exempted from the cap in 2026 and also lists the number of new H-2B workers who will be permitted under the regular annual cap of 66,000. Altogether, the regular cap plus the supplemental cap for H-2B in 2026 would permit at least 252,342 new workers if the language in the rider becomes law. That’s an increase of almost 100%, relative to the total cap in 2023–2025, and a 282% increase, relative to the original H-2B cap of 66,000.

It’s also important to note that the annual caps and total number of workers will grow exponentially in the following years after 2026 if Congress reauthorizes the same language in the rider year after year, as they’ve done with past H-2B riders. This will occur because employers will have an incentive to apply to DOL for labor certification for as many H-2B jobs as possible because that will increase the size of their exemption from the cap for the following year.

Table 1 Total number of H-2B workers would reach 282,000 in 2026 if the rider becomes law

In a recent report, I showed that in 2024, when 64,716 supplemental H-2B visas were added to the statutory cap of 66,000, for a total cap of 130,716, there were a total of 169,177 H-2B workers. This was up from 75,122 total H-2B workers just a decade earlier. The nearly 170,000 total in 2024 included 139,541 H-2B workers with newly issued visas from the State Department, and 4,580 H-2B workers who had their employment extended with the same employer. An additional 25,056 were H-2B workers who changed employers. Workers who extend their H-2B status or change jobs are not counted against the annual cap. (In 2025 the cap was identical to the previous year; thus, final numbers for 2025 are likely to be very similar to 2024.)

To get a better sense of the total number of H-2B workers who would be employed in 2026 if the rider became law, I estimated that the same number of workers who extended their status or changed jobs in 2024 would also do so in 2026, and added that total to the 2026 total cap that would result from the rider. This is illustrated in Figure A, which shows the total number of H-2B workers from 2017 to 2024, and projections for 2025 and 2026. The annual cap plus the supplemental cap, together with H-2B extensions and job changes, will result in nearly 282,000 H-2B workers being employed in 2026—almost 113,000 more workers than were employed in 2024 and 2025.

Figure A The rider would move 12,000 H-2B jobs to the P visa, which is not administered by the Department of Labor

The other notable change in the rider when it comes to the H-2B program is that H-2B workers employed at carnivals, traveling fairs, and circuses would be moved to the P visa program. According to DOL, in FY 2024 there were 12,398 H-2B jobs certified in the “Amusement and Recreation Attendants” occupation, which is the relevant occupation that would be moved to the P visa. There would be no annual cap on the number of amusement and carnival workers who could be employed in the P visa program.

At present, the P visa is a little-known program intended for use by professional athletes and coaches, members of an internationally recognized entertainment group, or persons performing under a reciprocal exchange program or as part of a culturally unique program. At present, the P visa program has no wage rules or worker protections and is administered exclusively by DHS, which has no staff or expertise on worker rights. This is extremely troubling, given that H-2B workers employed at carnivals and traveling fairs work grueling hours and in terrible conditions, making them some of the most exploited H-2B workers—as advocacy groups have pointed out. These workers are often paid below the minimum wage and are not paid for overtime hours. Yet DOL would no longer have any formal oversight role to ensure they are protected.

The rider language says that employers hiring H-2B carnival workers through the P visa “shall be subject to the same program requirements” of the H-2B program, which are administered by DOL. It also directs DHS and DOL to each separately publish regulations to implement H-2B carnival workers being moved to the P visa program within 180 days and finalize them within one year.

The legislators who support this amendment have provided no explanation or rationale for why it makes sense to create an entirely new process and set of regulations to move one of the biggest H-2B occupations from DOL into DHS—an agency that will be given primary responsibility over the P visa and protecting carnival workers, but which has no mandate or expertise on labor standards and employment laws. The most obvious explanation is that this legislative maneuver is simply a new way to expand the H-2B cap even beyond 252,000, in a way that gives carnival employers an unlimited supply of workers who can be exploited and underpaid. It also seems absurd to put a low-paid traveling carnival worker into the same visa category—where there’s no labor oversight—as a professional baseball player coming from abroad to sign a multimillion-dollar contract with a major league team, or a world-famous singer, dancer, or painter.

House Homeland Security appropriations rider would defund the H-2 modernization rule, restricting the ability of H-2 workers to change jobs and leave abusive employment situations

One other notable section in the rider that impacts both the H-2A and H-2B programs would prohibit DHS from spending funds to implement a regulation that took effect in January 2024—often referred to as the H-2 modernization rule. The rule, among other things, requires additional scrutiny of applications from employers that have violated the law, makes it easier for H-2 workers to be eligible for green cards through existing pathways, and expands the ability of H-2A and H-2B workers to change employers (this is referred to as visa “portability”), making it easier to leave an abusive employment situation. The regulation is far from perfect. As EPI and other advocates have pointed out, the portability provisions require additional measures to make visa portability a more practical reality, rather than just a right that exists on paper and one that can be hijacked by employers seeking to circumvent the annual cap.

Nevertheless, these three provisions in the H-2 modernization rule can undoubtedly help some workers, reducing the indentured nature of the visa programs by tilting the balance of power ever so slightly in the direction of workers. And that’s likely the exact reason that the employers and legislators pushing for the rider included this provision to defund the rule.

The H-2B program needs reforms to improve labor protections and provide H-2B workers with a pathway to citizenship

The appropriations committees in the House and Senate should not continue using parliamentary tactics to make changes to the H-2B program that would likely not pass in Congress through regular order. Instead, Congress should work with the executive branch to reform the H-2B program in the following ways: 

• ensure U.S. workers are considered for open temporary and seasonal jobs 
• craft updated wage rules that protect U.S. wage standards for all workers in H-2B industries
• provide migrant workers with new protections and allow them to more easily change jobs
• provide migrant workers with a quick path to a green card and citizenship
• prohibit lawbreaking employers from hiring through the H-2B program

As EPI and other advocates have long said, these genuine reforms are the only way to ensure that the workers playing vital roles in the U.S. economy are not being exploited and underpaid and that their employers are not able to use visa programs as an employment law loophole that ultimately erodes job quality for all.

 

Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has vetoed a bill that would have extended the number of hours that employers can schedule 14–15-year-olds to work on school nights, in violation of federal law. DeWine vetoed the bill last week after advocates from a long list of child health and welfare, education , organized labor, and economic justice organizations publicly urged him to oppose the bill.

DeWine’s decision reflects conclusions backed up by decades of research and public policy experience. As his veto message emphasizes, existing work hour guidelines—providing young teens (under 16) opportunities to gain work experience “after school up to 7 p.m.”—have been “in place, across this country, for many years” and have “served us well” and “effectively balanced the importance of 14- and 15-year-old children learning to work, with the importance of them having time to study.”

If enacted, the Ohio bill in question (SB 50) would have allowed longer, later work hours—up to 9 p.m. on school nights for children as young as 14—that can interfere with young teens’ education, sleep, health, and development. Studies have consistently shown that intensive work at a young age is associated with poor academic outcomes; longer hours raise the risk of work-related illness and injury; and work later into the night exacerbates sleep deprivation that in turn can interfere with teens’ education and well-being. Allowing employers to schedule young teens to work until 9 p.m. also increases the likelihood of nighttime driving for new drivers (minors can be permitted to drive at age 15.5 in Ohio), an additional risk factor for accidents. Motor vehicle crashes are already the leading cause of death for teens and young adults, who are three times more likely to die in a car accident than adults over 20. For all these reasons, federal law limits the maximum number of working hours for young teens to three hours per night or 18 hours a week and prohibits work past 7 p.m. on school days.

At a moment when the U.S. faces a reemerging crisis of rising child labor violations and when Ohio is taking steps to decrease teen driving fatalities, DeWine’s veto is a sensible, informed response to harmful legislation. It also marks a hopeful next stage in ongoing state-level struggles to maintain and strengthen essential child labor protections in the face of a coordinated, industry-backed campaign to weaken child labor standards—first at the state level, and eventually nationwide.

Veto spares Ohio employers from confusing conflict between state and federal law, while threats to erode federal child labor standards still loom

Governor DeWine also appears to have taken to heart and, wisely, acted on lessons his fellow policymakers learned the hard way in other states where similar legislation has been proposed or enacted in recent years.

Ohio’s SB 50 would have allowed employers to schedule 14–15-year-olds to work until 9 p.m. on school days, two hours later than allowed under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Because states can legislate above FLSA standards but not below, the proposed new state standards would have conflicted directly with federal law, sowing confusion for parents, teens, and employers, and putting employers at risk of being charged with federal child labor violations if they chose to follow weaker state guidelines.

This exact scenario played out recently in Iowa when, despite strong warnings from labor advocates and U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) officials, Governor Kim Reynolds signed a 2023 bill that included multiple provisions conflicting with federal child labor law. Once the Iowa bill went into effect, information from state agencies and employer groups (including the Iowa Restaurant Association) sowed confusion by suggesting that employers could now abide by weaker new state standards. Then, after a number of restaurants faced federal child labor investigations and fines for violating the FLSA in 2024, Governor Reynolds publicly defended the illegal employer practices—in part with (unsubstantiated) claims that the businesses were being unfairly targeted by the DOL, and by calling on the federal government to stop enforcing existing child labor laws and instead “look to Iowa as an example” of how to handle child labor.

A concurrent resolution accompanying the Ohio bill, which was adopted by both chambers, similarly called on Congress to weaken the FLSA by adopting Ohio’s proposal for longer school-night hours for young teens as the new federal standard. By repeatedly proposing—and in some cases implementing—standards that conflict with federal law, legislators in states like Iowa and Ohio have attempted to chip away at the already fragile federal floor for workplace protections. Federal child labor standards are also under direct threat. The Project 2025 policy agenda closely followed by the Trump administration recommends lifting prohibitions on hazardous child labor and allowing states to opt out of the FLSA entirely.

In light of continuing threats, states have a critical role to play in defending and strengthening child labor standards

Ohio’s SB 50 and its 2023 predecessor were both sponsored by the same state senator with the support of industry groups whose members would benefit from weaker child labor laws—the Ohio Restaurant and Hospitality Alliance, National Federation of Independent Business in Ohio, and the Pickerington Chamber of Commerce—as well as Americans for Prosperity, a right-wing, billionaire-backed dark money group that has coordinated state-by-state legislative campaigns to weaken child labor laws across the country, often alongside the right-wing think tank Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA).

Governor DeWine now joins a growing number of governors and state legislators who have stood up in opposition to these attacks. For example, Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers vetoed an FGA-sponsored bill last year that would have eliminated the state’s effective, commonsense youth work permit system. Some have even gone further to propose or support legislation that strengthens state child labor standards, with lawmakers in more than a dozen states proposing legislation or administrative rules to protect minors from hazardous or exploitative work, deter child labor violations, and increase accountability for law-breaking employers.

Governor DeWine, after hearing the voices of numerous parents, educators, health care, and driving safety experts, concluded that a veto of SB 50 was “in the public interest.” Given evidence that industry campaigns to weaken child labor laws are continuing (and the very real risk that aspects of federal child labor protections could face similar threats from the same forces), more states should pursue critical opportunities and responsibilities in 2026 to—at the very least—defend the long-standing, minimal floor set by the FLSA and, wherever possible, to strengthen state standards that ensure young teens who work can do so without damaging their health or education.

This is Part 1 of a two-part series analyzing the impact of an amendment to the House Homeland appropriations bill on the H-2A and H-2B visa programs.

Key takeaways:

• The government funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security may include a rider amendment that would expand the H-2A visa program for seasonal farm jobs. This amendment (originally known as Amendment #1 but later dubbed the Bipartisan Visa En Bloc amendment) proposes to open the H-2A visa program to year-round occupations.
• There were 410,000 year-round jobs in agriculture and 353,000 seasonal H-2A workers in 2024.
• The Trump Department of Labor has issued a new 2026 H-2A Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR) to set H-2A wages. Based on their own estimates, the 2026 H-2A AEWR will result in a $24 billion pay cut for H-2A farmworkers over 10 years and incentivize growth in the H-2A program to 500,000 jobs a year. EPI has estimated that U.S. farmworkers will lose $2.7 to 3.3 billion in wages per year.
• If employers are allowed to use H-2A visas for year-round jobs via the House Homeland appropriations rider, farmworkers in those jobs will see massive pay cuts of $20,000 to $40,000 per year, starting in 2026.
• The Trump DOL wage reductions combined with H-2A visas for year-round jobs could expand the H-2A program to 900,000 workers in 2034, meaning that workers on temporary visas would account for 42% of average annual employment in agriculture.
• This rider in Congress and the proposed regulation at DOL would only benefit farm employers, allowing them to hire workers they can control for as little pay as possible. These changes would drastically lower pay for all farmworkers and lead to job losses for U.S. workers, a complete reversal from the Trump administration’s original claims that U.S. workers would fill the farm jobs left open due to deportations.

For well over a decade now—time and time and time and time again—Congress has been making policy changes to temporary work visa programs not through the normal process of debating and passing legislation, but through a backdoor process. This involves amendments to annual appropriations legislation (known as “riders”) that fund the U.S. government. Riders that make policy changes are much more likely to pass without much public notice, debate, or pushback relative to dedicated legislation, since they are smaller parts of larger, must-pass legislation to fund the whole U.S. government. The significant changes proposed or passed in riders over the past decade have all pushed temporary work visa programs in the same direction: expanding and deregulating the H-2A and H-2B visa programs, which benefits employers at the expense of U.S. workers and hundreds of thousands of migrant workers who will continue to see reduced wages and poorer working conditions. It’s already clear that low-wage work visa programs won’t be improved during the Trump administration; instead, they’ll be made much worse.

This fiscal year, there is a particular urgency around the riders to expand and deregulate the H-2A and H-2B visa programs, in light of the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort that is arresting and deporting workers at a breakneck pace, as well as canceling temporary immigration protections that provided work authorization to millions. The Trump administration got the ball rolling on this effort with a new proposed H-2A wage regulation issued by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) on October 2, 2025. This proposed regulation contains a stunning admission: The administration’s mass deportation effort is likely to raise food prices. DOL’s solution to this problem of the administration’s own creation is an irrational and anti-worker solution. Instead of pushing the administration from within to stop their campaign of mass deportation, DOL proposes to lower farmworker wages by $24 billion over the next 10 years.

Having seen this proposed rule, employers who are heavily reliant on migrant laborers—especially those in the hospitality, construction, and agricultural industries—can now be confident they have a friendly administration willing to dismantle labor standards and are lobbying furiously for more work visas that allow them to employ a vulnerable workforce. Employers are making the case that H-2 visas are “a workforce issue, not immigration,” as well as an essential service that must continue to function even during the recent government shutdown. A number of lawmakers and the Trump administration seem to agree.

The latest legislative vehicle that has a chance at furthering these goals is a rider that the Homeland Security subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee proposed and passed. It was originally known as Amendment #1 but was later dubbed the “Bipartisan Visa En Bloc” amendment. As Politico Pro reported, “House appropriators from both parties came together…to back big changes to visa policies that would boost the number of seasonal workers who can come to the United States.” The rider was cosponsored by three Republicans and one Democrat (but the Democrat was Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), the recent recipient of a pardon from Trump for federal bribery charges). However, it’s worth noting that because rider passed by a voice vote, there is no on-the-record vote tally showing who voted for it.

The rider still has a long way to go before becoming law and will also depend on whether an omnibus government spending bill is ultimately passed for fiscal year 2026. As of the time of publication, the Senate has not yet released their version of a Homeland Security appropriations bill. To become law, the Senate would also have to adopt the same rider provision for it to become part of the broader omnibus appropriations legislation. Nevertheless, the rider is a statement of intent from legislators who are willing to go to bat for employers seeking new exploitable and underpaid migrant workers to replace their long-term immigrant workers who have been deported or lost status.

Below is a summary of the four major changes that the Bipartisan Visa En Bloc rider amendment would make to the H-2A and H-2B visa programs. Only the first major change is discussed in this explainer, but a follow-up to this blog post will discuss the other three changes. Under the rider:

• Employers would be permitted to hire H-2A farmworkers to fill year-round jobs.
• The H-2B visa program would be expanded by at least 100,000 workers relative to its size in 2024.
• H-2B workers employed at carnivals, traveling fairs, and circuses would be moved to the P visa program, a program that has no wage rules or worker protections and over which DOL has no formal oversight role.
• DHS would not be permitted to spend funds to implement the January 2024 regulation that incrementally improves rights and protections for H-2A and H-2B workers. This regulation allows them to be eligible for green cards through existing pathways and helps them more easily change employers, reducing the indentured nature of the visa programs, and requires additional scrutiny on employer applications if they’ve committed certain violations.

The H-2A program has expanded rapidly and is rife with abuse

Employers use the H-2A visa program to fill seasonal and temporary jobs in agriculture, after employers go through a (mostly pro forma) process to prove that they could not find an available U.S. worker to hire. There is no annual limit on the number of H-2A workers that can be hired, and H-2A has in recent years been the fastest-growing U.S. work visa program, tripling over the past decade. Figure A shows the three available data sets on H-2A job certifications, petitions, and visas, as well as an estimate of the total number of H-2A workers between 2015 and 2024, with 352,682 H-2A workers estimated to have been employed in the United States last year. The vast majority of H-2A workers are employed on crop farms, picking fruits and vegetables, and the average duration of an H-2A job is roughly six months.

Figure A

There have been countless exposés from journalists and advocates that reveal how H-2A farmworkers are indentured to their employers, frequently robbed, exploited, victimized, and trafficked, and how the main source of wage and hour violations on farms comes from employers breaking H-2A rules.

The rider adopted in the House would allow H-2A workers to be employed in year-round jobs—which is currently prohibited—expanding the scope of the program and allowing H-2A workers to fill jobs on dairy, livestock, and poultry and egg farms, as well as in nurseries and greenhouses and other nonseasonal agricultural occupations. This would be a major change to H-2A, and it has long been a demand of agribusiness.

Making H-2A year-round raises three key questions:

• How many permanent, year-round jobs might be impacted?
• How will farmworker wages be impacted?
• How much will the H-2A program expand?

There are 410,000 year-round jobs in agriculture

For an answer to the first question, see Table 1, which lists four of the major agricultural industries employing farmworkers year-round, the largest of which are greenhouse and dairy jobs. Together they total nearly 410,000 full-time equivalent jobs. The industries listed do not include the many year-round (or nearly year-round) jobs that can be found on crop farms, including equipment operators and supervisors. In total, it’s possible that up to one-third of the total 1.6 million full-time equivalent jobs in agriculture could be year-round.

Table 1 DOL’s new Adverse Effect Wage Rate will result in a pay cut for H-2A workers and U.S. workers that will line the pockets of employers by billions

Next, let’s consider what would happen to the wages of farmworkers in year-round occupations if the H-2A visa program were expanded to include them.

The wages of nearly all H-2A farmworkers are set by the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR), unless the federal, state, or local hourly minimum wages are higher, or if there is an applicable local prevailing wage or collective bargaining agreement in place. The purpose of the AEWR is to ensure that H-2A workers are paid a wage that is consistent with U.S. wage standards and prevent adverse impacts of H-2A employment on the wages of farmworkers in the United States.

On October 2, 2025, DOL issued an interim final rule laying out a new AEWR methodology. A recent EPI post describes in detail how the new Trump AEWR will cut wage rates dramatically by using an inferior data set for agriculture and creating two artificial “skill levels,” which set H-2A wages at the 17th percentile of wages surveyed for farm occupations (skill level 1) and at the 50th percentile, which is the median of wages surveyed (skill level 2).

In the new AEWR, the Trump DOL also removes the previous H-2A program requirement that employers pay for 100% of housing costs for H-2A workers. In its stead, the new AEWR deducts a set amount out of every hour of an H-2A worker’s pay, to compensate the employer for H-2A housing costs. This shifts housing costs to H-2A workers who will have the added burden of paying for housing costs out of the already-low wages they earn. The housing deduction is subtracted from the AEWR—lowering a low wage even further—so low that in many states, the state minimum wage will be higher and become the de facto AEWR.

In total, DOL estimates that over $1.7 billion will be transferred from H-2A workers’ pockets back to farm employers under the new wage rule in 2026, amounting to $24 billion over the next 10 years as the program grows to over 500,000 jobs. EPI’s own estimates are that H-2A workers will see a wage cut of between $1.7 billion and $2.1 billion in 2026, depending on how state minimum wage laws are enforced. Reducing the AEWR for H-2A workers will also lower wages for U.S. farmworkers—one-third of whom are U.S.-born citizens, according to the latest DOL survey. A fall in the H-2A wage will increase demand for H-2A workers, since employers can save significantly on labor costs if they hire them. As a result, it will become relatively more expensive to hire non-H-2A U.S. farmworkers. Employers will therefore reduce demand for U.S. farmworkers, putting downward pressure on their wages, with U.S. farmworkers seeing wage reduction of $2.7 to $3.3 billion in annual pay.

This would represent a shocking upward redistribution of income away from some of the country’s most underpaid and essential workers for the food system.

Under the new AEWR, H-2A farmworkers in year-round jobs would be paid tens of thousands of dollars less annually compared with what U.S. farmworkers earn now

The wage cuts from the AEWR described above currently apply only to H-2A farmworkers, who can only be employed in seasonal jobs. However, if the rider to make H-2A year-round goes into effect, farmworkers in year-round jobs will see the biggest pay cuts.

Table 2 lists a sample of some of the main year-round agricultural industries in major agricultural states, along with average annual employment, which together accounts for about 15% of the total year-round full-time equivalent jobs in agriculture. Table 2 shows how much farmworkers earned annually, on average in 2024 in those industries and states, and compares the annual earnings of farmworkers in 2024 with what H-2A workers would earn in 2026 if they had worked in the same jobs and had been paid the corresponding 2026 AEWR at skill level 1 for the entire year (40 hours per week for 52 weeks), minus the annualized amount that will be deducted from hourly wages for housing according to the 2026 AEWR.1

The final column in Table 2 shows a few examples that illustrate the difference between what year-round U.S. farmworkers in the selected industries earned in 2024 and what H-2A workers at skill level 1 would earn if they were paid the annualized AEWR in 2026. Table 2 shows that the reduction in wages for H-2A farmworkers in year-round jobs could range from an annual pay cut of nearly $21,000 for farmworkers on hog and pig farms in North Carolina to a pay cut of almost $44,000 for farmworkers on poultry and egg farms in Texas.

Outcomes such as these—in which farmworkers paid the 2026 AEWR would earn tens of thousands of dollars less than what U.S. farmworkers earned in major year-round jobs in 2024—are egregious and in violation of the spirit and letter of the AEWR and the H-2A statute, but will be the norm and allowed if the year-round H-2A provision in the rider becomes law. This would hurt some of the most vulnerable and lowest-paid workers in the U.S. labor market and create an almost unstoppable incentive for employers to replace their current farmworkers who now fill year-round jobs with H-2A workers who can’t easily switch employers or effectively complain when their wages are stolen and when they’re forced to work in unsafe conditions.

Table 2 The year-round H-2A rider with the new AEWR rule could triple the current size of the H-2A program and cause wages to drop sharply for farmworkers

The ultimate result of the new H-2A wage rule combined with making the H-2A program year-round would be a likely tripling of the size of the H-2A program to about 900,000 workers, which includes the complete decimation of job quality for the 410,000 jobs in agriculture that can provide stable year-round employment and sometimes a living wage for U.S. farmworkers.

How would this occur? The Trump DOL’s new wage rule estimates that the lower pay for farmworkers it institutes will encourage farms to rapidly increase hiring through the H-2A program, estimating that 515,000 H-2A workers will be employed in 2034. If those low wages remain in effect and the year-round H-2A rider becomes law and is renewed yearly (as the H-2B riders have been every year), employers are likely to ramp up hiring for year-round jobs until nearly all are filled by H-2A workers who can be paid extremely low wages and, because of their precarious immigration status, have little bargaining power or the ability to complain in the face of employer lawbreaking.

For context, the 410,000 H-2A workers in year-round jobs plus the estimated 257,500 year-round equivalent jobs done by H-2A workers in seasonal jobs (i.e., 515,000 H-2A workers employed in 2034 for six months out of the year), would equal 667,500 full-time equivalent jobs in agriculture, or roughly 42% of all annual average employment in agriculture.

Instead of ballooning the H-2A program, policymakers should create a pathway to citizenship for farmworkers to ensure their rights on the job

Policymakers and the public must reject the harmful and unjustified proposals coming from Trump and Congress to pay less to farmworkers who already live on the margins of society, and to keep more of them indentured through the H-2A program. This rider is another example that reveals the truth about the Trump administration’s immigration agenda: They have no real interest in protecting jobs or pay for American or “native-born” workers, only in giving employers what they demand.

Using H-2A, a problematic temporary work visa program—in which workers are virtually indentured to their employers and that accounts for most of the wage and hour violations that take place on farms—to fill permanent, year-round jobs should give pause to all members of Congress. It makes no sense, unless the goal is to keep the workers employed in those jobs from having equal rights and fair pay. If migrant workers are filling true labor shortages in permanent, year-round jobs, then those workers should always get lawful permanent residence (i.e., green cards) that puts them on a path to citizenship.

If members of Congress want a reliable, healthy, and stable farm labor force that can continue to produce food domestically for Americans, they should pass legislation that legalizes undocumented farmworkers and reforms the H-2A program so that all migrant farmworkers have equal rights, fair wages, and a quick path to permanent residence and citizenship. That’s the only way to ensure that the workers who sustain the food supply chain will be treated with the dignity and respect they deserve and that honors their contributions to the U.S. economy.

1. The amounts have not been adjusted for inflation. The 2026 AEWR provides two “skill levels” for farmworkers—which are set at specific percentiles along the distribution of OEWS wages surveyed. Skill level 1 is the 17th percentile while skill level 2 is the median of wages surveyed, which is also the 50th percentile. For this calculation, I am only calculating the wage differentials for H-2A workers in year-round jobs who are classified by employers at skill level 1, which DOL estimates will account for 92% of all H-2A workers.

 

In normal times, today would have been a jobs day. However, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has been forced to delay the release until December 16 due to the lingering impacts of the Trump administration radically restricting BLS operations during the government shutdown. Further, BLS has announced that we will never have data from the monthly survey of households for October. This means that valuable information for that month—like the overall unemployment rate or the unemployment rate for various demographic groups—will never be known. During the last federal shutdown in 2018–2019, BLS did not suspend its activities and released its employment situation report as normal. In fact, this is the first time in 12 years that a jobs report was delayed and the first time a month of household data will be missed completely.

Federal statistical agencies (FSAs) like BLS and the Census Bureau provide the gold standard data that are crucial for understanding the labor market. The monthly jobs report provides policymakers, businesses, and the public with the most rigorous and timely labor market data they need to make high-stakes decisions. Unfortunately, without a timely release, the Federal Reserve will meet next week without the best data on the state of the labor market. This will materially harm their ability to make a data-informed decision on interest rate policy.

This is not the first time the Trump administration has sought to weaken FSAs. In August, Trump fired the BLS commissioner for accurately reporting data that the administration found politically inconvenient. Amid these historically unprecedented threats, we assembled a new Data Accountability Dashboard that tracks next-best data from other (non-federal) data sources—including ADP employment data, job cut announcements from the Challenger report, and consumer sentiment reports.

These are clearly inferior to the datasets that have historically been collected and analyzed by the nonpartisan, expert professionals who work at FSAs, but they still provide some insights into the direction the economy is moving. This data would also—over time—provide some potential signal if official FSA data were being manipulated or suppressed to hide an economic downturn. Updates to those next-best data this week suggest some weakening in the labor market. Whether this is supported by the FSA data coming back online in coming weeks is a key question people should be watching.

On Wednesday, ADP’s monthly National Employment Report showed a loss of 32,000 jobs in the private sector in November. Our dashboard uses a three-month moving average to remove some volatility and, in making this adjustment, tracks BLS private-sector employment a bit more closely. As shown in Figure A below, ADP employment has dipped below zero for the first time since the pandemic. BLS data available only through September show a similar slowdown. It is possible that Trump administration attacks on immigrant communities have sharply reduced labor supply and driven some of the radical slowdown in job growth. However, even with reduced immigration, the U.S. economy still needs non-zero job growth to keep the labor market from deteriorating. I’ll be looking closely at the official data for October and November released on December 16 to see if they reflect the trends shown here.

Figure A

On December 9, the BLS will release data for September and October from the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS). Currently, the latest JOLTS data are only available through August. Data from Indeed on job postings (Figure B) and data from Challenger on job cuts (Figure C) provide some insights into job openings and layoffs, given the current lack of gold standard data. Indeed data are provided on a daily basis but are aggregated into a monthly average, which we use here to compare with JOLTS job openings data. So far, the latest data suggest little change in job openings.

Job cut announcements, while volatile, appear to be slowly rising. The official layoffs rate released as part of the JOLTS data has not yet reflected this rise. But it is concerning given that the hires rate remains depressed, a rate similar to the immediate aftermath of the Great Recession. That makes the downside risk of higher layoffs all the greater if laid-off workers have less opportunity to find another job. Put simply, the only reason the unemployment rate has been able to stay relatively low in the last year even as hiring has been depressed is because layoffs have been extraordinarily low. If layoffs pick up while hiring remains weak, unemployment will quickly spike. This makes layoffs a key indicator to watch when the JOLTS data are released next week.

Figure B Figure C   Once the official FSA data are released and hopefully return to a normal schedule, our Data Accountability Dashboard will still be useful to make sure those gold standard data are not being compromised either because of staffing shortages or for political gain. The first and best line of defense against data manipulation escaping public notice will be whistleblowers from FSAs who are dedicated professionals and will not want it degraded. But if data are being manipulated and whistleblowers emerge, the dashboard can provide useful data accountability checks. For more next-best data, check out the entire dashboard for all nine metrics we are tracking as new data become available.