Billionaires who have been buying up farmland across the country are using a controversial immigration program linked to labor abuses and human trafficking to find low-wage workers for their agricultural investments.
The visa program, which is allowing a growing number of employers to pay rock-bottom wages, has been at the heart of recent modern slavery cases — and one in three workers in the program say the arrangement has limited their ability to leave their jobs.
While the industry claims the immigration program is necessary to help family farms find seasonal workers, companies affiliated with billionaires like Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Stan Kroenke, Phillip Anschutz, and John Malone have used the H-2A visa program to staff their expanding agricultural holdings throughout the United States, according to records reviewed by The Lever.
Records also reveal that one of the world’s largest financial firms, Toronto-based Manulife, owns farm properties in Washington state that hosted H-2A workers. Manulife is among several major financial firms that have gained control of hundreds of thousands of acres of U.S. farmland since the 1980s.
The billionaires’ farms and Manulife properties have only sponsored a few dozen workers at most each year via the H-2A program. But their use of the program demonstrates how some of the wealthiest people in the world are using the employer-sponsored visa system to exploit some of the poorest while putting downward pressure on wages — all in...
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