Feds: Washington Farm Used H-2A Visa Program to Import Cheaper Foreign Workers

Executives at a farm in Sunnyside, Washington, allegedly used the H-2A visa program to import cheaper foreign workers and then subsequently paid them below-market wages, federal officials say.

Months ago, the Washington Attorney General’s Office reached a $3.4 million settlement with Ostrom Mushroom Farms for allegedly firing its mostly female farmworkers and replacing them with mostly male foreign workers who arrived on H-2A visas — the federal program that allows United States farms to import a limitless number of foreign workers.

According to the Los Angeles Times, “prosecutors and workers say the company was trying to replace local employees with foreign workers who could be paid less and were willing to work longer hours.”

The Times continued:

It wasn’t long before new workers, mostly men, were bused into the farm in vans, taking the place of the fired women. Some of the new pickers looked like they were no more than 15 years old, several current and former workers at the farm told The Times.

“Little by little, they’re getting rid of the local workers,” said Cabrera, who worried the job she had for more than two years was at risk. “They fired people without saying anything, just gone.”

In one particular case, a foreign H-2A visa worker imported by the farm told the Times that he was 17 years old when he started working at the farm and would work up to 15 hours a day. If foreign visa workers spoke out against their employment conditions, they would be retaliated against, prosecutors claimed.

Last week, the Department of Labor announced that it had secured nearly $60,000 in unpaid wages for foreign visa workers whom Ostrom Mushroom Farms allegedly took from as well as nearly $75,000 in civil penalties for violating the terms of the H-2A visa program.

That Labor Department settlement comes just a week after a New Jersey-based farm was made to pay more than half a million in back wages that the agency claims it stole from foreign H-2A visa workers.

As Breitbart News has chronicled for years, the program is often used to replace Americans and preserve the low cost of agricultural labor.

In 1997, a little more than 16,000 foreign H-2A visa workers were imported to take American agriculture jobs. 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.

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