CEDAR — Every year for the past 10 years, Jose Abel has traveled more than 2,000 miles from the region of Durango in Mexico to northwest Michigan to tend to the grapes at the region’s famed vineyards.
The money the 29-year-old earns during the nine months he spends in Michigan allows him, and thousands of other Mexican workers in the state, to have dreams back home: “Building a house in Mexico, buying something to live over there so you don’t have to keep coming here … starting a business, or having a farm,” he told IPR in Spanish.
This reporting is made possible by the Northern Michigan Journalism Collaborative, led by Bridge Michigan and Interlochen Public Radio, and funded by Press Forward Northern Michigan.
Now, however, the federal government has proposed lowering the minimum wage — by as much as $4.50 an hour, or 25%, in Michigan — for the exploding number of workers here on H-2A visas, like Abel.
The decision comes after a couple of years of outcry from some farmers that the cost of labor, transportation and housing for H-2A workers had become untenable, and that without locals willing to do the job, small farms wouldn’t be able to afford the cost of the harvest season.
“This move is a key step towards modernizing the H-2A program,” Michigan Farm Bureau President Ben LaCross said in an online post. “More work needs to be done, but this is a great start.”
Others, however, wonder if the new wages will still be able to attract enough workers to do the work local workers don’t seem to want.
“We get the same guys coming back every year, and it's a pretty severe decrease,” said Brandon Evans, a farm manager at the Evans Brothers Fruit Co. in Benzie County. “They're used to the wages they've been getting paid.”
And for the migrants, themselves, “it won’t be the same as before, with the same visions for the future,” Abel said.
‘People were starting to get worried’
Evans, who grows apples, cherries and blueberries with his family, said he and most other apple growers he knows rely on a team of H-2A workers each year.
They post job opportunities locally as the harvest comes around, but “we just never hear anything,” Evans said. “We post the job online for the same rate as the H-2A guys, and nobody shows up.”
Without domestic help, “the H-2A program has pretty much taken over,” said Tomas Moreno, the vineyard manager at Bel Lago Winery in Cedar, overlooking Lake Leelanau. He also manages a team of H-2A workers who rotate through various vineyards all across the county.
Moreno said he brought 24 workers to Michigan this year and plans to bring 30 next year. He said vineyard owners from all over northern Michigan are calling him, ready to pay premiums for him to set up contracts with migrant workers through the H-2A visa process.
In 2022, 2023, and 2024, around 15,000 people on H-2A work visas tended Michigan farms, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services data. That’s up sharply from just over 2,000 people less than 10 years ago in 2015. Michigan is a top 10 state for H-2A work.
As use of the program grew, the minimum wage for H-2A workers rose, too. In 2022, the federal government set wages for H-2A workers in Michigan at $15.37 per hour. In 2023, that went up to $17.34 per hour and it climbed to $18.50 per hour in 2024 before going back down to $18.15 in 2025.
The wage rate applies to all workers — US and foreign — at any farms that use the H-2A program. But for foreign workers, farmers wind up paying much more than the hourly wage per employee, as they’re responsible for covering the cost of their housing and transportation along with the costs associated with getting a visa. Those other costs are all climbing, too, Moreno said.
“It used to be that the chemicals that you spray on the trees was a farm's biggest expense, and now … the labor is by far the biggest expense,” Evans said. “People were starting to get worried … that the smaller farms weren't going to be able to continue to handle the cost of the labor, and they're going to get bought up by big farms, and the small family farms were going to just disappear.”
‘Just can’t make it anymore’
In May, Michigan Congressman John Moolenaar told the US Secretary of Labor at a federal hearing that farmers were “under tremendous financial stress” and “just can’t make it anymore.”
So when the US Department of Labor announced a new method for calculating the pay rate for H-2A farm work in October, many farmers breathed a sigh of relief. For the first time, farmers will be held to two minimum wage rates — one for entry-level workers and another for workers with more experience. The rate will drop from $18.15 down to $13.47 for “skill level one” workers, and down to $17.47 for “skill level two” workers.
Zachariah Rutledge, assistant professor of agricultural, food and resource economics at Michigan State University, said the H-2A wage rate, officially referred to as the “adverse effect wage rate,” was initially designed to protect American workers.
“What (the wage rate) is supposed to do is create a wage for H-2A workers that's high enough that it doesn't depress the wages of domestic workers” or incentivize farmers to bring in workers from abroad, he said.
But most farmers say the cost of subsidizing housing and transportation for foreign workers accomplishes that already. Rutledge said it remains to be seen how farmers will respond to the change.
Offering a lower wage, “are they going to be able to get the same workers to come back to their farms that have been coming back for years?” he said.
‘Scared, concerned’
Meanwhile, migrant workers wonder what’s in store for them.
Moreno, the vineyard manager at Bel Lago Winery, said many of the workers on his team found out about the possible wage drop through word of mouth or on social media before he had a chance to figure out how farmers plan to respond.
“They were getting scared, concerned,” he said. “They're already doing the math of how much they're gonna be earning and, you know, how much they'll be sending back home.”
Many of the workers on Moreno’s team would qualify for the higher wage rate, he said, because many of them have returned to Michigan many years in a row.
He said he told them, “I'll talk to farmers. And I'll keep the highest pay rate that I can for you guys as possible.”
Abel, the worker from Durango, will likely qualify for the higher category of H-2A wages in Michigan next year, and plans to return next season.
“Unfortunately, there’s barely any work in Mexico,” at least in the smaller town where his family lives, he said, and it’s getting more and more common for people from his town to work in the United States on an H-2A visa.
For workers who’d make that lower entry-level wage, he told IPR in Spanish, “I’d guess that coming here, however low the wages turn out to be, (it) would still help compared to staying in Mexico where it’s hard to get a job.”
Still, he said he thinks the wages should stay the same.
“Farm work is hard, and not everyone is willing to do it,” he said. “Even if it’s raining, or snowing, we get it done anyways, and I think the salary we get is fair for what we do.”
Public comment on the new wage rates is open until December 1.
