One administration, two wage policies
The same government whose enforcement doubled Florida framers' pay also wrote a rule cutting the legal farm wage floor — a rule its own Labor Department valued at $2.46 billion a year moved from workers to employers, and a federal court has now ruled illegal for undercutting American workers. The rule is being rewritten under a December 30 deadline. Who shows up for the rewrite decides what replaces it.
- Oct. 2, 2025: the Labor Department's interim final rule rebuilt the H-2A wage floor (the AEWR) on a cheaper formula — 'entry-level' priced at the average of the lowest-paid third of workers, minus a housing deduction. Florida's experienced field rate came out the lowest in the nation, about $12.77-$13.41, down from $16.23.
- Labor's own estimate, confirmed in the GAO's report on the rule: $2.46 billion a year in transfers from workers to employers, $17.29 billion over ten years — and about 119,000 additional H-2A hires because the labor got cheaper. The rule covers roughly 22,000 farms and 371,000 workers.
- Aug. 26, 2026: a federal court ruled the rule violates the statute's one command — the program must not adversely affect U.S. workers' wages. The cut stays in effect during the rewrite; the deadline is December 30, 2026, and employers have been notified they may owe backpay for the gap period.
- Scale: 398,258 H-2A positions certified in fiscal 2025, up 185% in a decade. Florida is the most reliant state: 56,934 positions, 14.3% of the national total. The growers' hardest fact: only 182 of more than 415,000 advertised positions drew a domestic applicant.
Start with two facts about one administration's labor policy. In Jacksonville, framing carpenters' pay has roughly doubled — from about $20 an hour to $40 or $45 — because immigration enforcement removed the cheap labor supply the building industry had priced itself on. It works the way its supporters said it would.
Here is the other arm. On October 2, 2025, the Department of Labor issued a rule rebuilding the wage floor for the H-2A farm guest-worker program. The new formula priced 'entry-level' farm work at the average wage of the lowest-paid third of workers, then subtracted a housing deduction from the guest workers' rate. Florida's rate for experienced field workers — the rate that had been $16.23 an hour — came out at roughly $13, the lowest in the nation. Mississippi's entry-level rate is $8.84.
The Labor Department priced its own rule, in its own filing: a transfer of $2.46 billion a year from workers to employers, $17.29 billion over a decade — and, because cheaper guest labor gets used more, an estimated 119,000 additional H-2A workers hired. The rule covers about 22,000 farms and some 371,000 workers. Whatever else it was, it was not an accident or a rounding error. It was a deliverable.
It helps to know who ordered it. America's grower lobbies — the National Council of Agricultural Employers, the Farm Bureaus, Florida's own Fruit & Vegetable Association — had campaigned for years against the old wage survey, which had driven some states' rates up more than 30% in three years. In August 2025 the pieces fell in sequence: a Louisiana judge, in a case brought by sugar cane growers, vacated the previous rule; three days later, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins discontinued the Farm Labor Survey itself, eliminating the data the fallback rule would have needed, while calling the old wages 'artificially inflated.' Five weeks after that, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer issued the replacement. The farm groups thanked her by name — 'her decisive action,' said one congressman; 'finally, we have an administration that listens,' said the employers' council.
Chavez-DeRemer is the detail that gives the story its tension. She was the administration's pro-worker face at Labor — a former congresswoman with a union-friendly record, a onetime co-sponsor of the PRO Act. The enforcement-first wing of this coalition argues, with the framers as Exhibit A, that the way to raise American wages is to cut off the supply of labor that undercuts them. The farm-labor rule does the opposite with the legal workforce: it lowers the legal floor, expands the legal supply, and calls it relief. Both policies carry the same administration's signature.
The courts have now weighed in on the second one. The statute behind the H-2A program contains one clear command: the program must 'not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of workers in the United States similarly employed.' On August 26, 2026, a federal judge ruled the 2025 rule violates exactly that — it undercuts U.S. workers by design. The cut remains in effect while Labor writes a lawful replacement, under a court deadline of December 30, 2026. Employers have been formally notified they may owe backpay for the period the illegal rate was in use; whether they actually will is still to be argued. The growers' best argument remains on the record and it is a real one: in fiscal 2025, of more than 415,000 advertised H-2A positions, only 182 drew a domestic applicant. The workforce this debate is about protecting largely does not apply for these jobs at any wage — which is either proof the floor does not matter, or proof of how completely the industry was rebuilt around not needing it to.
Florida, for the record, is the most H-2A-reliant state in the country: 56,934 certified positions in fiscal 2025, 14.3% of the national total — and one cushion most states do not have: employers must pay the highest applicable wage, and Florida's $15 minimum now sits above the gutted federal floor. In Mississippi, there is no such net.
So the scoreboard reads: enforcement raised the framers' wages; a rule cut the field workers'; a court has sided with the statute against the rule; and the rewrite is underway right now, on a deadline ten weeks out. Rules like this one are not handed down from the sky. The growers got theirs by spending years telling Washington, in comments and lawsuits and lobby visits, precisely where they stood — and being counted. The replacement rule will be built the same way, out of whoever shows up to be counted. When it posts, the comment docket is open to everyone the wage touches: the growers, the workers, and the public that eats. Silence gets counted too. It is counted as consent.