OPINION:
Despite President Trump’s strong focus on immigration enforcement and protecting American workers, a bill to provide amnesty for illegal aliens and to broaden the use of work visas was recently introduced by the House Agriculture Committee chairman.
The Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act of 2026 (H.R. 9535), which has more than 50 co-sponsors including 47 Republicans, dramatically expands the scope of the H-2A program. This would allow employers to more easily replace Americans with foreign workers and would suppress wage growth while reducing incentives to recruit domestic labor, improve working conditions, or invest in productivity-enhancing technology.
Supporters portray the bill as a response to labor shortages. But when workers are scarce, wages rise. Employers improve conditions. Businesses innovate and automate.
The purpose of a market economy though is not to guarantee employers access to labor at a price they prefer; it is to allow supply and demand to determine wages and encourage productivity growth.
H.R. 9535 violates this healthy market dynamic.
The bill broadens eligible work to include not only traditional agricultural jobs, but also packing, processing, transportation, aquaculture, logging, equine-related activities, and even portions of meat and poultry processing.
It also redefines “temporary” work to include contracts lasting up to 349 days, regardless of the employer’s underlying need.
Those changes matter. The bill would expose a much larger group of American workers to competition from a greatly expanded pool of guest workers admitted under a program originally intended for temporary seasonal agriculture. What is presented as modernization is actually a major expansion of a foreign labor system.
The bill also weakens one of the most important protections for American workers: Wage standards.
Current law attempts to prevent foreign labor from depressing wages through the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR). Congress recognized long ago that importing labor can affect local labor markets, which is why employers must demonstrate that hiring foreign workers will not hurt similarly employed Americans.
Indeed, recent research published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics found that increases in the AEWR generate measurable wage gains for American farmworkers. The study estimated that a 10% increase in AEWRs raises non-H-2A farmworker wages by as much as 2.8%, and that freezing AEWRs for a single year would reduce wage growth for domestic workers by as much as $475 million.
In short, wage protections matter because foreign labor supply affects domestic wages.
Despite this, H.R. 9535 would weaken those very wage protections. This is at a time when the share of U.S.-born working-age men who are out of the labor force is near record highs and roughly double its level in 1960.
The bill doesn’t stop there. It allows labor certifications to remain valid for up to three years, permits staggered worker entry and exit, authorizes easier transfers among H-2A employers, and creates streamlined approval procedures for repeat users of the program.
These provisions transform H-2A from a temporary labor tool into a more permanent labor supply program.
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the legislation is its provisions allowing certain agricultural workers who are illegal aliens to obtain legalized H-2A status. It would also simultaneously shield employers from liability for hiring illegal aliens, encouraging employers to use illegal labor without punishment.
There’s also a strong regulatory-capture concern. Throughout the legislation, Congress directs federal agencies to prioritize and expedite H-2A processing, create streamlined online approval systems, accelerate adjudications, facilitate repeat petitions, and even continue processing H-2A applications during government shutdowns.
Meanwhile, protections for American workers receive comparatively little enhancement. This amounts to the government actively aiding the industry in replacing American workers in a more efficient manner. What’s worse, the emphasis on speed will likely result in more rubber-stamp approvals, less-thorough vetting and fewer needed denials.
That imbalance reveals the true orientation of the bill.
H.R. 9535 is not principally about protecting farm workers or ensuring labor market integrity. It’s about providing agricultural and other employers with a larger and cheaper supply of labor, at the expense of American workers, with fewer safeguards against abuse and with more limitations on enforcement.
Agriculture faces real labor challenges. But the solution should not be to weaken market incentives. Higher wages, better working conditions, genuine recruitment of domestic workers, mechanization, and productivity growth are the traditional responses to labor scarcity. Congress should be encouraging precisely those reforms, rather than enabling employers to bypass them.
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John Gibbs is the director of the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.
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