I'm not going to respond to numbnuts directly, this is more for the group for when you all inevitably see mention of H-2A brought up as a legal alternative for farm workers. The reason it's not used more is that's it a bullshit program where the temporary labour gets abused at basically every turn. With that said, it's still used by hundreds of thousands of farm workers per year.
First, it's a difficult program to navigate, so the largest intake is through "agencies" that do their paperwork to get the temp working visa, most H-2A holders enter the country in debt to these agencies that needs to be worked off.
Once in the country it operates exactly as most temp labour programs do. Minimal to no oversight from anyone who would get in the way of all sorts of abuse from the companies using the program can dish out. The program is pretty notorious for rampant worker abuses. Unsafe work, unsanitary living conditions, bait and switch payment terms (or straight up wage theft that goes unpunished even when reported) and obviously the company can fire a worker at any time so the workers are obviously super empowered to speak up in the face of abuses.
and that's the nice stuff:
The incident that left a farmworker injured is also raising questions about whether the H-2A visa program meant to help U.S. farmers fill employment gaps with migrant workers needs to be re-examined.
www.nbcnews.com
So yeah, there's lots of reasons for farm workers to want nothing to do with the program. The very nature of being undocumented is way, way better protection than anything provided by entering legally under a H-2A. Working conditions are dangerous? Leave and find other work. Housing is unsanitary? Leave. Wage theft? Leave.
So without massively overhauling the legal intake system to attract these workers, you're just not going to have access to them once thrown out of the country and food prices will go up significantly. This is a mutually beneficial relationship and always has been. The US has politically failed to put a solution in place to provide an easy system that provides adequate protections or it likely would be used a lot more.
