Glenn Thompson, who chairs the House Agriculture Committee, introduced H.R. 9535 on June 30 — the Securing Agriculture's Workforce Act. It would create a path for certain illegal immigrants working in agriculture to remain in the country, while restructuring and expanding the federal guest-worker system.
It has more than forty cosponsors from both parties.
It has also split the Republican coalition open. Ron DeSantis: “No amnesty! Amnesty is NOT what people voted for in 2024!” Former Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino said these Republicans stabbed Trump's deportation promise in the back. FAIR calls it an amnesty that will encourage more illegal immigration. The White House declined to comment.
Thompson's defense is national security: there is no greater threat than disruption to the food supply.
Both sides are making a real argument. Neither is making the one that matters.
What Thompson gets right
American agriculture cannot currently staff itself.
That is not a talking point, it's an operating condition. Crops rot in fields in states with the strictest enforcement. Dairy runs on labor that cannot be replaced on ninety days' notice. If enforcement suddenly worked perfectly tomorrow, the immediate result would be an empty produce section and a price shock, and everyone in that debate privately knows it.
Pretending otherwise is not a border policy. It's a wish.
What the critics get right
We have run this experiment.
The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 legalized over a million agricultural workers by 1992. It was supposed to be paired with employer enforcement that would end the cycle. The enforcement never materialized. The cycle continued for another forty years, and here we are debating the identical trade.
Once is a policy. Twice is a pattern, and the pattern says the legalization is permanent and the enforcement is aspirational.
That objection isn't nativism. It's institutional memory.
The question neither side will touch
Why can't these jobs be filled at a wage Americans will accept?
Every time I've heard that asked, the answer comes back that the work is too hard and Americans won't do it. But hard, unpleasant work gets done in this country every day — on rigs, in slaughterhouses, on roofs in August — when it pays enough.
Agricultural labor is exempted from significant portions of federal wage and hour law. Overtime rules that cover almost every other American worker do not apply the same way. That is not an accident of nature. It is a policy choice, made repeatedly, and it is the reason the wage sits where it does.
So the honest framing is this: we have built a food system that depends on a labor pool with limited leverage, and both parties are now arguing about the immigration status of that pool rather than the leverage.
Legalize them and the wage stays low. Deport them and the crop rots. Neither side has proposed the third thing, which is a food system that pays enough to be staffed by people who can quit.
That would raise grocery prices. Nobody wants to say so in an election year.
Where I land
The critics are right that this is the 1986 bargain again.
Thompson is right that the alternative on offer is a supply shock.
And every one of them is arguing about who picks the crop instead of what it pays.
Add your perspective
Right: legalization without enforcement first is the 1986 mistake repeated, and voters were explicit in 2024. Left: these are people who have worked here for decades, and status is a precondition for any bargaining power at all. Center if you think the agricultural labor exemptions in federal wage law are the actual root and nobody in Congress wants to reopen them.
