Sponsors (12)
Introduced May 7, 2025 by Zoe Lofgren · Last progress May 7, 2025
The bill expands legal pathways, worker protections, housing support, and modernized electronic hiring/verification for agricultural labor—benefiting many farmworkers and improving program administration—while imposing substantial compliance costs, privacy and accuracy risks, fiscal commitments, and implementation complexity that could strain small employers and create transition challenges.
Immigrant agricultural workers who meet work thresholds can obtain temporary lawful status, interim work authorization while applications pend, and a pathway to permanent residence, reducing deportation risk and job insecurity for long‑term farmworkers and stabilizing farm labor supply.
H-2A and dairy workers receive stronger pay, housing, health/safety, anti‑retaliation, and recruitment protections (higher applicable wages, housing/transportation standards, insurance, heat‑illness prevention, contract/pay transparency), improving working conditions and reducing exploitation.
Employers and seasonal workers benefit from modernized electronic systems and faster adjudication—single portals for H‑2A petitions, a national searchable job registry, concurrent agency review, and pilot 'portable H‑2A' features—that speed hiring and improve job‑matching transparency.
Small farms, labor contractors, and other employers face substantially higher and widespread compliance costs (more recruitment, reporting, inspections, bonds, training, IT, and recordkeeping) that could raise labor costs, reduce hiring, and increase food production costs.
Centralizing identity and work‑authorization checks (photo‑matching, consolidated PII, automated verification) raises privacy, surveillance, and accuracy risks that could produce false nonconfirmations, disparate impacts, wrongful job loss, and discrimination despite proposed safeguards.
Stricter H‑2A hiring priorities, numerical caps/reservations, and tighter certification rules risk labor shortages or uneven visa access across crops/regions, potentially raising production costs, disrupting farm operations, and causing regional inequities in labor supply.
Based on analysis of 20 sections of legislative text.
Creates a certified agricultural worker status, restructures H‑2A and verification systems, mandates phased E‑Verify for agriculture, and funds farmworker housing preservation.
Creates a new temporary "certified agricultural worker" status and dependent status for qualifying noncitizen farmworkers, rewrites and tightens the H‑2A temporary agricultural worker program (including a single electronic H‑2A platform and new labor‑condition and recruitment rules), expands and mandates electronic employment eligibility verification for agricultural employers on a phased schedule, and authorizes substantial new funding and program changes for USDA farmworker housing and preservation. The bill also adds employer protections when assisting applicants, sets worker safety and contract requirements (including dairy‑industry rules), creates enforcement tools and penalty structures, and establishes new administrative roles and accounts to manage fees and penalties.