Last week, the Trump administration pushed through a rule change that went largely unnoticed by the mainstream press. Under the new rules, H-2A workers — the only uncapped guest worker programme in the US — would be paid much less. By the government’s own estimate, the change will result in $2.46 billion in wage cuts annually.

The short story is that the administration is pushing a “downward adjustment” of the wage for guest workers on farms. In many cases, this adjustment is lower than the prevailing state minimum wage. The new rules also allow employers to further “adjust” wages to account for “non-monetary” compensation — meaning they enable employers to automatically deduct rental and other payments from guest workers.

To be sure, the new rules are a boon to farm employers who are required to pay guest workers the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR), a mandated wage rate designed precisely to protect domestic workers from downward wage pressure. But now, freed from having to pay higher wages and housing costs, the rule change amounts to an immediate transfer of income from poor farm workers to the very rich, very large agribusinesses which dominate US farms.

This isn’t progressive hysteria, either. As the government’s own factsheet puts it, the new rule “translates into a wage transfer from the average H-2A worker to U.S. employers of $5,513 per year”.

While the administration is not advertising its plans to expand the guest worker programme, the new rules make cheap foreign farm labour much more attractive for employers. Naturally, it could mean a major expansion of H-2A guest workers. So, just as the administration is making headlines with sensational deportations, it is opening the back door for yet more poverty-wage labour on America’s farms. As Teresa Romero, President of the United Farm Workers, said in a statement, the wage cut “opens the gates to potentially unlimited American job losses”.

The story is a familiar one. Trump’s policies seem to consistently result in the rich winning an ever-larger share of the national income pie, while workers — in an irrationally ring-fenced economy — face low wages yet higher costs, more job insecurity, and increasingly degraded public services. It’s worth remembering, for instance, that the US construction and manufacturing sectors have also faced frigid contractions over the last half-year or so. Far from supercharging domestic industry or infrastructure, Trump’s economic policies have hampered labour-intensive sectors.

Meanwhile, the coastal rich — from Wall Street to Silicon Valley — have been showered with goodies and rewarded with a genuinely mind-boggling stock market surge that dwarfs the dot-com bubble and appears to be propping up the whole economy.

To many workers, Trump’s policies seemed like a needed response to globalisation. There’s no doubt that America has become over-integrated in the global economy and, as a result, hostage to trade deals and immigration policies which hurt domestic workers. Worse, this hyper-globalised economy has robbed American citizens of basic sovereignty, as the needs of the global market almost always come before those of working people at home.

Unfortunately, Magonomics has come to look less like a needed pro-worker correction, and more like a cash grab.