Sanctuary or Scrutiny? How Immigration Policy Shapes the Agricultural Guestworker Market

• In Event: Immigration Enforcement and Its Ripple Effects: Labor Markets, Mobility, and Health

Abstract

The U.S. agricultural sector increasingly depends on temporary migrant labor, particularly through the H-2A visa program. While prior research has examined how local immigration enforcement and sanctuary policies shape the volume of employer demand—often using aggregate data at the county or hub level—far less is known about how these policies affect the composition, timing, and geography of the labor supply itself. This paper shifts the focus from employers to workers, analyzing how immigration policy environments influence who becomes authorized to work in U.S. agriculture, how quickly, through which legal channels, and where.
Using administrative data on work authorization requests from 2010 to 2022, the analysis investigates how variation in immigration enforcement intensity and sanctuary protections across jurisdictions has influenced the flow and composition of the legal agricultural workforce. In addition to assessing differences in timing and demographic characteristics, we examine how policy environments affect the legal trajectories of workers—specifically, how initial status at entry (e.g., as parolees, non-immigrants, or entrants without status) interacts with local policy conditions to shape transitions into formal employment authorization. This dimension provides insight into how fragmented immigration regimes facilitate or inhibit access to legal work over time.
To address these questions, we implement a quasi-experimental framework that leverages spatial and temporal variation in local immigration policies. Dynamic treatment specifications allow us to estimate how changes in enforcement or protection policies affect not only the number of workers authorized but also who gains access, how quickly, and under what legal circumstances. By doing so, we highlight how local policy environments act as gatekeepers to legal status transitions—potentially delaying or filtering access in ways that have remained largely invisible in aggregate analyses.
Finally, we explore whether policy-driven shifts in the location of legally authorized workers affect agricultural employment among native-born and other foreign-born populations, using American Community Survey data. This allows us to assess whether reduced access to legal authorization opens opportunities for native workers or results in unfilled labor gaps, offering new insight into the displacement and substitution dynamics shaped by immigration policy.
By centering the worker side of the H-2A process—including legal pathways into authorization—this study provides a deeper understanding of how immigration policy reallocates labor market activity, not just across space, but across statuses, demographic groups, and time.

Authors

• Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes, UC Merced
  Presenting Author

• Chunbei Wang, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University
  Non-Presenting Co-Author