The hardline stance on immigration adopted by the Trump administration may not apply to workers in the agricultural industry. This is according to Sonny Perdue, the Secretary of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). The cabinet official told the annual industry conference USDA Agricultural Outlook Forum that the White House supports the notion of farm workers having a separate immigration process.
According to Reuters, Perdue said American workers are not having jobs taken from them by immigrant farm workers and that they are not the ones putting a burden on the nation’s welfare and criminal justice systems. Perdue’s remarks underline the way in which the agriculture sector in the US depends on immigrant labor, with almost 80 percent of workers in the industry being foreign-born, primarily from Mexico, 53 percent of which are undocumented, according to a US Department of Labor survey.
The Trump administration has mooted the idea before that undocumented immigrants who work on farms may receive different treatment, at a meeting between industry leaders and President Donald Trump in May last year. It saw Trump telling farm owners that his administration was focused on the deportation of criminal immigrants rather than farm workers.
Perdue acknowledged that the agricultural industry of the US has been caught up in the debate over immigration but reiterated that the Trump administration continues to support the industry and is not targeting immigrant farm workers.