There Are No Ag ‘Jobs Americans Won’t Do’ If They Earn Enough

Whenever Republicans talk about immigration enforcement, amnesty supporters chant the same tired line: What about picking crops? What about meat processing? Those are necessary jobs that Americans simply refuse to do.

That argument was used to justify dozens of House Republicans’ latest mass amnesty effort. Their proposal would give illegal alien agriculture workers a pathway to legal status through the H-2A program, even though they have broken multiple laws by being in the United States illegally and getting a job without a work permit. Their employer has also violated the law by hiring these illegals.

The bill — which covers everything from harvesting crops, to raising livestock, to processing agricultural products — is a workaround to avoid Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from standing in the way of low-cost labor for agriculture operations.

“With the border now secure, it is time to address these shortcomings and provide fair and legal pathways for all of agriculture to obtain workers when they are unable to find U.S. citizens willing to perform these noble but arduous tasks,” a letter from bill author Rep. Glenn Thompson, R-Pa., chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, states.

This trope has been pushed for a long time. President George W. Bush parroted it in 2006, stating, “There are people in our country doing work that Americans will not do, and those people ought to be given a chance to have a tamper-proof card that enables them to work in our country legally.”

Democrats do it too, always taking the opportunity to signal some kind of American fragility for not wanting to do “backbreaking” work. They also want to import as many illegals into the country as possible, by any means necessary.

The reality is that these companies, and the lobbies that support them like the Farm Bureau, are only interested in a consistent flow of foreign illegal labor because this allows them to pay subsistence wages. They know, in other words, that Americans expect more from employers because they want to be able to have a family and raise children in their own country, and subsistence wages kill that possibility.

“At the same time as compensation deteriorated dramatically, the share of meatpackers who are immigrants has increased enormously… [A]ny suggestion that native-born Americans are not interested in this type of work cannot be taken seriously given the huge decline in average hourly wages for these jobs,” a journalist and Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) researcher wrote in a 2009 report. “[T]here is no question that the jobs paid a great deal more a generation ago when the vast majority of workers were native-born. There is also no question that as the foreign born share of this workforce has increased, wages have fallen significantly. The desirability of any job is heavily dependent on compensation.”

For illegal aliens, low wages are sufficient. They often live on the farms where they work, and a large portion of their earnings go back to their home countries as remittances (which are barely taxed), and go a lot further because of the lower cost of living. They also are willing to put many more people in a rental property than Americans will, in worse living conditions.

Some “American” farms are actually owned by foreign companies, or are forced to contract with them because of the pseudo-monopoly that exists in much of the agriculture industry.

The Trump administration has highlighted that the “big four” beef production companies currently control 85 percent of the market, noting that two of them are foreign. They act as a “cartel” and “mounting evidence shows this monopoly power has slashed payments to ranchers, reduced herd sizes, driven up consumer prices, and threatened America’s food supply chain.”

The world’s largest pork producer and packager, Smithfield Foods, is “headquartered” in Smithfield, Virginia, but is owned by the China-based WH Group. That is on top of the fact that foreigners own or have interest in 45 million acres of U.S. agricultural land as of 2023, including foreign adversaries such as China, which at the time owned nearly 300,000 acres.

In practice, this means foreign companies can buy American farm land, livestock production, and processing operations and import even more foreigners into the United States virtually unchecked. While some Republicans, like Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith, who also serves as the state’s secretary of agriculture, say that the kind of amnesty sought in this bill “is NOT something farmers are asking for,” Rep Don Bacon, R-Neb., a cosponsor of the bill, claims “this is what most of our farmers are requesting.”

He also said critics of the bill might be “with the Dems,” and implied that anyone who disagrees with mass amnesty does not “support our farmers.” If Bacon’s claims are true, it still does not give ag corporations the right to impose mass illegal migration on America simply because they do not want to pay reasonable wages to Americans.

The financial situation is assuredly more complicated for individual farmers, and there are almost certainly farmers in America who refuse to hire illegals on principle, to their financial detriment, as well as farmers who take every advantage to hire the cheapest labor possible no matter what. But there is a big gulf between being financially unable to pay American farm workers what they deserve and being financially unwilling to do so.

The incentive structure needs to change in favor of American workers, including outlawing the H-2A program entirely and the payment and banking system that passively allows employers to compensate illegal labor.

But there are other things farms and processing plants can do to hire American, and some of them are already doing it. In the context of impending ICE raids, one Nebraska meatpacker, Sustainable Beef, found a “novel pitch” to hire American workers that included things like raising wages ($22 per hour) to match those of other jobs in the local area; having a single, daytime shift to allow workers to spend time with their families; an upgraded working environment; and a 401(k).

In other words, Sustainable Beef’s “novel pitch” offered some basic expectations most American workers have and was consequently able to attract American workers to their plant.

An ICE raid targeted poultry plants in Mississippi, and Americans lined up at a job fair to fill the positions. By contrast with Sustainable Beef, Koch Foods only offered jobs ranging from $9.20 per hour to $12 per hour, and it is unclear what kinds of benefits were provided, if any. According to the Washington Post, the company had a hard time retaining some new hires, but like any job, noncompetitive wages are going to result in stagnant recruiting.

The Washington Post feverishly mentions “gruesome scenes” and “blood splattering” in the faces of workers — a common argument used to advance the idea that “Americans do not want to do this work.”

However, William Whittaker, a specialist in labor economics for the Congressional Research Service (CRS), wrote in a 2005 report that “some have argued that work involving ‘blood, unpleasant odors and repetitive tasks, is not attractive’ to U.S. workers. But other factors including low wages, high line speeds, little job security, rural-sited facilities, and diminished union protection may also make domestic recruitment difficult. ‘A decline in wage levels,’ together with other workplace considerations, [Michael] Broadway says, ‘… has served to make meatpacking an unattractive employment option for many Americans.’”

Shockingly, some American facilities owned by JBS, the Brazilian conglomerate and largest meat company in the world, have been working with refugee resettlement agencies to recruit foreigners who have work authorization. Workers at one of their Colorado facilities that produces about 5 percent of U.S. capacity went on strike, but because of collective bargaining, these jobs there start pay at $23.25 per hour and the average wage is $26 per hour.

In 2006, ICE raided that facility when it was under different ownership, but by 2020, the refugee resettlement program meant 80 percent to 90 percent of that facility’s workforce was foreign. If Americans will work meatpacking jobs in Nebraska for $22 per hour, it is hard to believe they would not do the same in Colorado for more money. Collective bargaining efforts could be part of the solution, but they must be for the benefit of Americans and American families, and not divert members’ dues to political activism for Democrats.

As CIS noted, meatpacking in the United States used to be a well-paid job, but industry “cost-cutting measures” starting in the 1960s changed that status.

“In 1960, meatpacking workers, heavily urbanized and unionized, earned 15 percent more than the average manufacturing wage in the United States,” Jerry Kammer wrote in a report for CIS. “During the next decade, however, corporate leaders…. relocated processing plants to rural areas—closer to livestock supplies and farther from organized labor’s urban strongholds. They replaced skilled butchers with less-skilled workers who made the same repetitive cuts thousands of times a day on the ‘disassembly line.’ They slashed wages, so that by 2002 workers were earning 25 percent less than the average manufacturing wage.”

Cutting labor costs and moving to rural areas inevitably resulted in a scarcity in available labor. It therefore set up the conditions for importation of foreign labor.

“If recruitment for such jobs is directed toward persons of limited work experience, few marketable skills, and slight English language proficiency, then a demographic shift may not be unexpected,” Whittaker said. “In pursuit of such a strategy, critics suggest, firms ‘deliberately recruit … immigrants’ who ‘almost universally lack any knowledge of U.S. working conditions, labor practices, or of their legal rights.’”

With 7.1 million Americans officially unemployed as of June and an additional 6 million who “want a job,” it is not necessary to grant amnesty to illegals. It is necessary for employers to offer competitive jobs to American workers.

Breccan F. Thies is the White House correspondent for The Federalist. He is a co-recipient of the 2025 Dao Prize for Excellence in Investigative Journalism. As an investigative journalist, he previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.