Trump Needs To End Big Agriculture’s Cheap Foreign Labor Racket

In 1964, the agricultural lobby warned that ending the Bracero guestworker program would destroy American farming. President Lyndon Johnson and Congress ended it anyway. Within five years, mechanical tomato harvesters revolutionized California agriculture. Labor costs fell. Wages for American farmworkers rose. By the 1970s yields had tripled. The doomsayers were wrong then — and they’re wrong now.

Today, the same lobby is running the same playbook with the H-2A guestworker program. They insist crops will rot without endless foreign labor. They demand amnesty for millions of illegal alien farmworkers. They want carve-outs from E-Verify and exemptions from immigration enforcement. And too many Republicans, influenced by donor pressure and decades of cheap-labor orthodoxy, are tempted to comply.

Here’s what they won’t tell you: The H-2A program has exploded from roughly 50,000 workers in 2005 to nearly 400,000 today — an eightfold increase — while nearly half of all crop farmworkers remain illegal aliens. H-2A hasn’t replaced the illegal workforce. It’s been layered on top of it. The program isn’t solving the problem. It is the problem. Immigration policy should not function as an agricultural input.

Worse, a new Labor Department rule reduces required H-2A wage rates by as much as $5 to $7 an hour in some states — a $24 billion giveaway to Big Agriculture over the next decade. That makes imported labor cheaper than American workers and cheaper than automation. It’s a government-engineered subsidy for avoiding modernization, paid for by American workers who cannot compete with politically depressed wages.

Meanwhile, the Farm Workforce Modernization Act — reintroduced in 2025 as H.R. 3227 — would open H-2A to year-round industries and freeze wages for a year before capping increases for a decade. It is estimated that it would also grant amnesty and eventual green cards to more than 2 million illegal aliens, including the current illegal farmwork population and those who qualify based on past agricultural work, along with spouses and dependents. Sponsors call it “modernization.”

It’s the opposite: a permanent lock-in of the cheap-labor model dressed up in reform language. The same bait-and-switch Americans saw in 1986. Amnesty now. Enforcement later. Enforcement never.

This is what happens when Washington subsidizes an outdated labor model instead of forcing change. Employers import workers on favorable terms, fight E-Verify and interior enforcement at every turn, and lobby relentlessly for amnesty for the illegal workforce already in the fields. It’s a racket — one that has endured for decades because immigration law has been selectively enforced whenever powerful industries demanded exceptions.

If Republicans are serious about border security and mass deportation, agriculture cannot operate on special terms. No carve outs. No amnesty. No exceptions.

The technology to replace hand-harvest labor already exists. Robots are harvesting strawberries in California. Automated apple systems can pick thousands of apples per hour in Washington orchards. Robotic dairy systems allow a single worker to manage more than 100 cows. In 2019 Idaho’s Heglar Creek Dairy reported milking about 720 cows with a dozen DeLaval robots and only two-thirds of the workforce. Nobody needed to stay on the floor at night. In the wake of agricultural automation the jobs that remain are technical, American, and they pay more.

Capital investment, not foreign labor dependency, is what drives long-term competitiveness. The billions currently spent on H-2A recruitment, housing mandates, transportation reimbursements, and compliance costs could instead finance mechanization and higher-wage technical jobs that keep farms lawful and productive.

But Big Agriculture resists that transition. Machines do not need housing. They do not require transportation reimbursement. They do not become political leverage in the next amnesty campaign. And they do not anchor a permanent foreign labor constituency that can be mobilized every time enforcement tightens.

Europe offers a useful, albeit imperfect, illustration. Dutch farmers have been crushed by regulatory overreach unrelated to labor markets, and no one should look to Brussels as a model for central planning. But the broader trend is instructive. Europe has already moved in this direction. Between 2005 and 2020, the number of EU farms declined sharply while output per worker increased dramatically. The EU’s subsidy structure and labor markets differ from America’s, but the directional lesson is the same: fewer farms, more mechanization, higher productivity. That’s what modernization looks like.

For decades, the United States has used immigration policy to postpone that adjustment. We have chosen to import labor rather than invest in innovation. That’s not an inevitability. It’s a policy choice.

Congress should place H-2A on a path to termination — not expansion. Cap the program immediately. Phase it down over five to eight years. Write a hard statutory sunset into law. Mandate universal E-Verify for agricultural employers. Reverse regulatory wage distortions that artificially privilege foreign labor. And launch a serious mechanization initiative so American agriculture competes on productivity and technological leadership, not access to the cheapest workforce.

Will there be short-term disruption? Yes. Some farms will consolidate. Some crops will shift. That happened after Bracero ended as well — and American agriculture emerged more productive and more innovative. The sky-is-falling predictions have echoed for 60 years. They have been wrong every time.

Any transition must ensure smaller family farms are not placed at a competitive disadvantage relative to the largest agribusiness conglomerates that helped create this dependency. But the answer is targeted modernization support — not perpetual labor importation. A forthcoming National Immigration Center for Enforcement analysis details the full case for termination and the modernization path forward.

The choice is clear. America can have secure borders, lawful labor markets, and an agricultural sector driven by innovation. Or it can continue subsidizing permanent foreign labor dependency under the guise of reform. It cannot sustain both.

When Bracero ended, critics forecast collapse. What followed was mechanization and growth. Big Agriculture is wrong again. It’s time to call the bluff.

R.J. Hauman is president of the National Immigration Center for Enforcement (NICE) and principal of Stryker Strategies.