“I had never worked with mushrooms before,” Luis mentioned, reflecting on his time in Chester County’s mushroom business. “But my family has always worked in agriculture, so I like it. I’m used to hard work.”
Luis, whose identify is a pseudonym to give protection to his identification, is a part of the most recent wave of immigrant employees who’ve, for many years, come to Chester County to paintings in Pennsylvania’s US$1.1 billion mushroom business. He’s a Venezuelan migrant who was once granted Brief Secure Standing, or TPS, below the 2023 designation. TPS permits overseas nationals already within the U.S. to stay for 6, 12 or 18 months – without reference to how they entered – if their domestic nation is deemed too bad for them to go back.
In February 2025, President Donald Trump terminated TPS for Venezuelans who won coverage below the 2023 enlargement. In line with the Division of Fatherland Safety, this designation had allowed roughly 348,000 Venezuelans to stay within the U.S. legally, with many eligible for paintings authorization. In the meantime, Venezuelans who had been granted TPS below the sooner 2021 designation can retain their standing till Sept. 10, 2025. This offers brief aid however leaves their long-term standing unsure.
We’re rural sociologists – a Penn State professor and a Ph.D. candidate – who find out about hard work, migration and agriculture within the U.S. Our analysis examines how industries similar to mushroom farming deal with a strong team of workers. One in every of us lately printed an editorial within the peer-reviewed magazine Rural Sociology that highlights how Pennsylvania’s mushroom business was once already suffering with a hard work scarcity.
The termination of TPS for plenty of Venezuelans, together with President Donald Trump’s broader immigration insurance policies – together with stricter border enforcement, larger deportations and tighter restrictions on paintings allows and asylum protections – will most probably shrink the pool of to be had employees in Pennsylvania’s mushroom business and different agricultural and meals industries.
Kennett Sq., Pa., expenses itself because the ‘mushroom capital of the world.’
Nolabob/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
Converting face of the mushroom team of workers
The mushroom business in Pennsylvania has been formed and sustained through main waves of U.S. immigration because the overdue nineteenth century.
William Swayne, a Quaker florist, is credited with starting mushroom cultivation in Kennett Sq., a small borough in Chester County, within the Eighties.
On the other hand, it was once Italian immigrants, who started arriving within the early twentieth century, who remodeled Kennett Sq. into the “mushroom capital of the world.”
These days, Pennsylvania produces 69% of all mushrooms offered within the U.S.
In line with the U.S. Division of Agriculture, Chester County on my own produced 199 million kilos of mushrooms – most commonly white button mushrooms – within the 2023-24 season. Whilst Chester County stays the hub of manufacturing, mushroom farms additionally lengthen into adjoining Berks County and portions of northeastern Maryland.
But, team of workers instability stays a urgent factor, because the business has struggled for many years to recruit and retain employees.
Mushroom choosing is bodily hard. Employees in humid, enclosed rising rooms sparsely harvest subtle mushrooms through hand to stop bruising. Pay is structured round a piece-rate gadget, the place income rely on pace and productiveness. Whilst this fashion permits some employees to earn extra, it additionally creates instability, as take-home pay fluctuates in keeping with harvest prerequisites and marketplace call for. Those elements make it tricky to deal with a strong team of workers.
In consequence, mushroom manufacturing in Pennsylvania is very depending on immigrant hard work. Whilst there aren’t any nationwide statistics monitoring the nationalities of employees within the business, our empirical research and ongoing box analysis point out that the majority of nowadays’s employees are from Mexico and Guatemala. Lately, extra have arrived from Venezuela and in different places.
Many of those more recent arrivals have entered the U.S. thru methods similar to TPS and the Processes for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, or CHNV. CHNV permits positive folks from the ones 4 nations who’ve a sponsor within the U.S. and who go a background test to are living and paintings within the U.S. for 2 years. It was once established to grant brief paintings authorization to people fleeing crises of their domestic nations.
TPS and CHNV had been instrumental in addressing hard work shortages in very important U.S. industries similar to agriculture.
On the similar time, the long-standing Mexican mushroom team of workers is present process a generational shift and growing older out of box hard work. Their U.S.-born youngsters from time to time paintings harvesting jobs of their teenagers however are not likely to stick in agriculture long run.
Mushroom employees in humid, enclosed rising rooms should sparsely harvest subtle mushrooms through hand to stop bruising.
John Greim/LightRocket by way of Getty Photographs
Upward thrust of mushroom hard work contractors
To fill employment gaps, many mushroom farms now flip to hard work contractors to recruit, arrange and make use of employees.
Contractors most often deal with payroll, employees’ reimbursement and get right of entry to to hospital treatment if any person is injured.
At the floor, the program gives advantages for growers. It lets them alter their team of workers relying on call for whilst lowering administrative burden and legal responsibility.
However for employees, the program could be a double-edged sword.
Proof from different agricultural industries displays that employees employed thru contractors can have much less task safety, fewer or no advantages, and no more direct touch with farm homeowners – which makes it harder to barter wages or record administrative center issues.
Some Kennett Sq. farmworkers now we have interviewed see contractors as a supply of suppleness.
“I had to miss work for some weeks because my kid was sick, and I lost my spot,” one employee shared. “But then I reached out to a contractor and was able to get another job at a different farm within a day.”
On the other hand, that very same employee went on to mention that this new farm “has wider harvesting beds, and I am getting more tired and have more pain because of it.”
In different phrases, whilst hard work contractors supply continuity in employment, employees can have much less regulate over the place they’re positioned or the prerequisites they paintings below.
For growers, contractors function an efficient stopgap to stay mushroom farms in operation, however they don’t resolve their ongoing drawback of attracting long-term staff.
Pennsylvania produces over 60% of all mushrooms offered within the U.S.
John Greim/LightRocket by way of Getty Photographs
Fewer employees, costlier mushrooms
With fewer employees, mushroom farms might combat to fulfill the call for from grocery shops, eating places and meals processors.
A discounted provide may imply consumers pay extra for mushrooms at grocery shops and eating places. If outlets should supply mushrooms from different states or in a foreign country, costs may upward thrust additional because of transportation bills, price lists and provide chain disruptions.
With out insurance policies that acknowledge the business’s year-round hard work wishes, Pennsylvania mushroom growers will likely be left scrambling for selection team of workers answers.
Lawmakers have tried to handle this factor throughout the Farm Team of workers Modernization Act of 2021, which handed the Area however stalled within the Senate. If enacted, the invoice would create a Qualified Agricultural Employee standing, which would provide felony coverage to skilled farmworkers, and amplify H-2A visa eligibility to agricultural employees in year-round jobs similar to mushroom farming. The invoice additionally features a obligatory phase-in of E-Test for agricultural employers, a federal gadget used to verify employees’ felony authorization to paintings within the U.S.
For now, mushroom farms – and the wider agricultural sector – should get ready for the ripple results of extra inflexible immigration restrictions. With out intervention from policymakers, the stress on employees, growers and customers is prone to accentuate.
