Foreign workers often fill jobs Americans don’t want to do. So we can’t make them Americans because then they wouldn’t want to do those jobs either.

Does that logic work?

On a serious note, 47 House Republicans have signed onto the bipartisan Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act of 2026, which would expand H-2A farmworker visas for illegal immigrant agricultural workers. It waives any violations of immigration law for both the worker and the employer, so long as the work was being done prior to May 31, 2026. Unsurprisingly, the American Farm Bureau Federation strongly supports the bill.

House Agriculture Chair G.T. Thompson explained in a Dear Colleague letter, “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.”

There it is — jobs Americans won’t do.

On that subject, there are a record 105 million Americans sitting on the couch rather than working. To be fair, many of them are retirees or students, but seven million are men aged 25-54. No, they’re not exactly lining up to do farm work.

“We’ve got a big problem … with the flight from work of prime-age men,” says the American Enterprise Institute’s Nicholas Eberstadt. “And what’s been carrying the overall prime-age labor force participation has been the strong involvement of women, not men.”

We have potential workers not doing work. Maybe there’s a better solution to the farm labor question than amnesty for illegals. The Department of Labor estimates that “roughly 327,000 farmworkers on U.S. crop-producing farms may be unauthorized to work in the United States.” That number, by the way, does not include workers on “dairy, poultry, hog, or other livestock-related farms.”

More broadly, roughly 70% of agricultural workers are foreign-born, and nearly 40% are here illegally.

On that note, a House Agriculture Committee document explains that the Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act will “ensure that aliens who have self-deported or those who are here and currently working in agriculture but whose only crime is unlawfully obtaining employment will be eligible to apply for H-2A status.”

The bill emphasizes the word “temporary,” saying, “The term ‘temporary’ means … work performed pursuant to a contract with a term of less than 350 days, without regard to the approved employer’s underlying need or nature of the job.” In years past, foreign workers would obtain a temporary work visa, come to the U.S. for harvesting season, and return home. The returning home part has become a lot less common. Indeed, the legislation also allows H-2As to be valid for up to three consecutive years.

We all know that the word “temporary” effectively means “permanent” when it comes to federal policy and practice. Heck, it took a recent Supreme Court ruling to determine that Temporary Protected Status for migrants was, indeed, temporary.

So, the bipartisan bill is not quite permanent amnesty, but it might as well be.

Meanwhile, both The New York Times and ProPublica have recent stories alleging abuses of H-2A visa workers ranging from poor working conditions to low pay. The Times, for example, says, “H-2A visas have historically been ridden [sic] with fraud, labor trafficking and abuse.”

Assuming even some of their reporting is accurate — a big assumption, I know — those problems are worth solving. It’s certainly believable that a government program is rife with abuse. For more information, see, well, any other government program.

Yet it’s intriguing to see left-wingers support both open borders and complain that the migrant workers who come here — legally or illegally — have insufficient protection in a racist and exploitative America.

Farm work is critical to feeding not just our nation but others as well, and the use of immigrant workers for those jobs dates back decades. Treating workers well is important. U.S. immigration law is vital. Surely, it’s not insurmountable for Congress to sufficiently address all three spheres.

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