New Jersey Farm Ordered to Pay Over Half a Million for Skimming Wages of H-2A Foreign Visa Workers

A New Jersey farm has been ordered to pay more than half a million in back wages and fines for skimming wages and not providing sanitary housing for foreign H-2A visa workers it imported to take asparagus-cutting jobs.

In October 2019, New Jersey-based Sun Valley Orchards was found to have violated the terms of the H-2A visa program which allows United States farms to import an unlimited number of foreign workers to take agricultural jobs.

Owners of the farm, though, claimed that the Labor Department administrative judge who made the initial decision in the case did not have the authority to do so. Late last week, Judge Joseph Rodriguez ruled that the administrative judge did have the authority.

Subsequently, Sun Valley Orchards must pay nearly $370,000 in back wages to the foreign H-2A visa workers it was found to have mistreated and more than $212,000 in penalties.

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According to the initial ruling, Sun Valley Orchards skimmed the wages of its foreign H-2A visa workers by charging them $75 to $80 per week for food, failing to provide them with sanitary housing, and not giving them proper transportation to their jobs on the asparagus fields.

Also, the contractor who helped place the foreign H-2A visa workers at Sun Valley Orchards had the workers sign departure forms claiming they were leaving their jobs for personal reasons — even though the statement was knowingly false because the workers were leaving their jobs due to a dispute with one of the farm’s owners.

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The decision comes as a handful of Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee have slipped a massive expansion of the H-2A visa program into a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spending bill, Breitbart News reported.

The $91.5 billion spending bill, which must still go before the full House and Senate, loosens H-2A visa rules so that more industries related to the agricultural sector could import foreign workers, and it rewrites the program so that jobs do not have to be seasonal or temporary.

The latest data shows that in the first half of Fiscal Year 2023, which runs from October 2022 through March 2023, U.S. farms imported nearly 200,000 foreign H-2A visa workers — a 10 percent increase in the program compared to the same time last year.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.