Our movements must win an immigration policy centered on human dignity and rights and end the terrorizing and scapegoating of vulnerable people. Our government's exclusionary immigration policy and violent enforcement regime disempower not just immigrants but all working people, and this regime is a primary obstacle to making the agricultural industry more fair and just for everyone.

Farmworkers experience some of the worst working conditions in the United States, and farmworkers are excluded from basic labor rights at the federal level, including protections for union organizing.¹ Farm work has some of the highest rates of injury and death of any occupation, and farmworkers’ average life expectancy is 49.² Climate change and extreme weather have only heightened these risks. Nationwide farmworker wages average 40 percent lower than those of comparable workers in other industries, and crop workers additionally experience long periods of seasonal unemployment or forced migration for work.³ The Trump administration, unsurprisingly, is working to drive farmworker wages down even further.⁴ While farmworkers have recently won important gains in a few places—including heat protections (California and Washington), overtime (Washington and New York), and the right to unionize (New York)—the reality is that enforcement of farmworkers’ rights is practically nonexistent.⁵

Historically, farmworkers’ poor working conditions and lack of protections are the result of industrial growers’ efforts to secure the most exploitable workers, first through chattel slavery and racial/ethnic codes, and, eventually, through borders and immigration policy.⁶ It is no accident, then, that of the 2.4 million farmworkers in the United States today, a solid majority are immigrants: almost half are immigrants without work authorization, and about 400,000 more are immigrants with temporary guestworker visas.⁷ For undocumented workers and guestworkers alike, immigration law is effectively labor law, setting the terms on which work happens and giving employers greater power over workers. And as we explain below, the current immigration policy and enforcement regime plays a central role not just in the erosion of worker rights, but also in authoritarian assaults on democratic institutions and civil rights. 

In order to make this case, we start with a summary of immigration policy since AJP’s founding: by foreclosing pathways to legal status, empowering bosses over workers, maintaining agriculture’s dependency on immigrant workers, and simultaneously reinforcing anti-immigrant rhetoric, decades of bipartisan immigration consensus have laid the ground for the Trump administration’s current assaults on communities. Because this is a complex topic, we supplement our narrative with sidebars on key concepts, policies, and institutions: on who is migrating and why; on the criminalization and detention of immigrants; and on the role that immigration agencies play in driving authoritarianism. We then connect immigration policy to the increasing precarity of workers across the economy and the significant obstacles to growing workers’ power. Finally, we close by highlighting the opportunities for solidarity that current conditions are creating, along with an outline of steps towards winning a more humane immigration policy.

Need for human-rights-centered immigration policy#

Since AJP’s beginning, agriculture has witnessed two major shifts in immigration policy, both of which have severely undercut workers’ rights and their ability to organize for better working conditions.

The first is the rapid growth of the H-2A guestworker program as farm employers have increasingly turned to hiring guestworkers to ease labor shortages (real or imaginary) and, when convenient, undermine organizing by locally-based workers.⁸ The program grew exponentially from fewer than 50,000 guestworkers in 2005 to almost 400,000 in 2025 (see chart).⁹ Much like the Bracero program (its similarly scandal-ridden precursor), the H-2A visa program imports workers from the Global South—primarily Mexico, Jamaica, and Central America—and sends them back to their home country at the end of the season, where they must stay for at least 2 months of the year.

In this way, H-2A functions as “deportation by default.” Workers are tied to the employer that imports them and cannot change jobs except by quitting the program. Employers can deport workers at whim and even ban them from the program, with little to no recourse for workers. Though officially disallowed by program rules, workers often have to pay bribes and go into debt to recruiters in order to secure a placement. Recruitment chains are highly corrupt and intertwined with organized crime and drug cartels, especially in Mexico. The program is rife with abuse, and advocates have called it “close to slavery.”¹⁰ Like the Bracero program before it, the H-2A program has been designed for maximum employer control over workers’ labor, movement, and even reproduction—ensuring that spouses and families stay out of the US. The Biden administration made gestures at reform, promptly reversed by Trump.¹¹ Regardless, most farmworkers and human rights advocates have called not for tweaks but for abolishing the program altogether—not least because proposed reforms have no realistic pathway for enforcement.¹² Why offer guestworkers a few more rights and protections—that likely aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on—when we could give them green cards and ensure they enjoy all the same rights and protections as other workers?¹³

The second major trend in immigration policy has been an increasingly aggressive, militarized border regime with exponentially expanded criminalization, detention, and deportation of immigrants (see Criminalization and Detention). Detention and deportation were rare before the Clinton administration (see figure below), but as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) drove the displacement of Mexican farmers, the Clinton administration simultaneously hardened the border and imposed new punishments on unauthorized immigrants. Successive Democratic and Republican administrations consistently doubled down on this hardline approach, especially as border enforcement was fused with the post-9/11 War on Terror.

The last twenty years featured important peaks of immigrant justice organizing, especially when immigrant youth won DACA during the Obama administration.¹⁴ Yet recent immigrants, if they have authorization at all, are mostly stuck in temporary protections (including DACA and TPS) and constantly under threat of deportation depending on the political winds.¹⁵ Real progress on immigrant justice has felt out of reach, not least because liberals and progressives have not prioritized winning a more just immigration policy:

While nativist policies are a fixation for Republican voters, pro-migrant politics receives far less attention from the left…. A major national poll in late 2023 found that even Latinos, for whom immigration is often an important concern, tended to rank it behind inflation, jobs, and health care. Despite eruptions of protest against the most egregious anti-immigrant politics, the imagined “sleeping giant” of Latino voters who would one day demand immigration reform and punish its enemies never materialized. Unlike many white MAGA supporters, most Latinos have never been single-issue immigration voters.¹⁶

For years, hard-line, anti-immigrant forces have thus kept immigrant communities on the defensive, fighting in court against deportations, detention abuses, and the end of temporary protections.

Given the protracted difficulty of this situation, it’s no surprise that there have been major disagreements among farmworker organizations around strategy on immigration reform. The Farm Workforce Modernization Act (FWMA) in particular has been a focus of disagreement.¹⁷ This proposed federal law is a compromise struck by congressional lawmakers, industrial growers, and the United Farm Workers, who claim to negotiate on behalf of all farmworkers.¹⁸ The law would shunt undocumented farmworkers into their own temporary legal status; but even that status is reliant on showing proof of residency and work in agriculture, contingent on continued work in agriculture, renewable only at the whim of the Secretary of Agriculture, and unavailable to recent arrivals or to immigrants convicted of felonies or “moral turpitude.” The law would trade a long and winding pathway to citizenship for greatly increased surveillance and enforcement (making E-Verify universal and mandatory on farms) and continued expansion of the H-2A guestworker program.

Undocumented workers account for almost half of US farm laborers, and most farmworker organizations consider the FWMA’s tradeoffs too high a price to pay for such limited gains. Current farmworkers who aren’t offered temporary status—if, for example, they couldn’t prove their work history—would become unemployable. Expanding H-2A could replace workers with guestworkers who can be deported at will. Multiple observers have pointed out the UFW’s conflict of interest at the heart of this legislative push, since it would benefit their own H-2A recruitment enterprise, CIERTO.¹⁹ The FWMA bill has been defeated twice—once under Trump in 2019, once under Biden in 2022—but its sponsors are still trying.

The FWMA fits into the decades-old pattern of “comprehensive immigration reform” proposals, whereby “Democrats and self-styled Republican moderates proposed increased border security as a part of larger packages that would also legalize undocumented immigrants and supply American business with guest workers.”²⁰ Like every president since George W. Bush, Joe Biden followed exactly this strategy. With tough-guy rhetoric and callous policies, he tried to beat the hard-liners at their own game—caving to xenophobic, fear-mongering narratives, scapegoating refugees and asylum-seekers. 

We now suffer the results of this stale, cynical strategy. Not only has it failed to produce improved outcomes for immigrants and workers; the gruesome bipartisan spectacle of being “tough on the border” has only further emboldened anti-immigrant hard-liners. Over more than thirty years, it has sunk untold resources into building up a massive, militarized complex of border policing and detention, which now—in the hands of a Trump administration once again—brings its xenophobic brutality to bear on immigrants and the communities they live in (see sidebar, Immigration Enforcement and Authoritarianism). Meanwhile many of the judicial guardrails that restrained the first Trump administration are gone, and ICE tramples over the due process rights that were once immigrants’ primary defense.

Never has there been a more urgent time to rethink strategy on immigration reform, for farmworkers or anyone else. Never has there been a more urgent time to muster a broader coalition to win justice for immigrants. Thankfully, despite media spectacles scapegoating immigrants, public goodwill towards immigrants has been increasing to historic highs for years.²¹ As during Trump’s first term, most people are horrified to witness the hard-liners’ enforcement fantasies acted out. As the public witnesses the brutal reality of immigration enforcement, our movements must build on our collective anger to demand justice. 

This moment offers us an important opportunity: we must turn widespread opposition to the Trump administration’s actions into action to win a people-centered immigration policy.

Opportunities for solidarity across sectors#

As noted above, working conditions in agriculture have barely improved for many years, but workers continue to fight for justice. Many rank-and-file farmworkers are ready for change and organizing in bold new directions. The It’s Our Future caucus of FLOC accuses their union leadership of getting too cozy with growers and suppressing the demands of union members.²² The independent Mexican union SINDJA demonstrated that the Equitable Food Initiative (an ethical certification started by UFW) works with employer-controlled unions in Mexico to stifle workers’ demands.²³ The farmworker union Familias Unidas por la Justicia organized independently when the UFW declined to work with them.²⁴ After securing collective bargaining rights, farmworkers across New York State are winning union representation (including with support from UFW). Farmworkers in Vermont have brought the fight for dignified work to the dairy sector, and small but promising farmworker-owned cooperative farms are taking root around the country.²⁵

These developments suggest that many farmworkers reject the status quo and want to revitalize farmworker organizing. They share this interest with many workers across the economy—whose interest in unions is at an all-time high—and with rank-and-file union members demanding democratic, fighting unions.²⁶ And yet the whole US labor movement is faced with strong headwinds in the form of aggressive union-busting by employers and government alike, worsened by the fact that US labor law has some of the weakest protections of any industrial nation.²⁷ The 2024 report Beyond the NLRB lays out the immense challenges facing the labor movement if we hope to reverse the trend of declining unionization and build worker power.²⁸ Much labor organizing has been channeled through the NLRB in formal union elections, a venue that is closed off to farm and domestic workers, who are excluded from the NLRA; but with the NLRB chronically underfunded, hamstrung by weak labor laws, and under attack by Republicans, the formal processes of union elections and contract negotiation are grossly inadequate to rebuilding union power.²⁹ The report’s authors highlight promising organizing strategies that build the labor movement outside those prescribed processes. Some of these strategies are familiar to farmworkers, such as workers centers or worker-driven social responsibility (made famous by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers); while other strategies—such as Bargaining for the Common Good alliances or sectoral bargaining—are relatively new territory for farm and food workers. The fact that the wider labor movement is weighing these non-NLRB strategies means there are new opportunities for solidarity across the usual sectoral divides. 

Indeed, while farmworkers experience an extreme work regime that’s different from what most workers in the economy experience, more and more workers have come to experience similar kinds of precarious work. Despite recent short-term wage gains for the working class, the long-term trend across the economy is towards lower quality jobs—jobs with lower pay, few or no benefits, greater health risks, unpredictable schedules, little to no control over one’s work, and so on.³⁰ These jobs are especially concentrated in the service sectors of food, healthcare, hospitality, and logistics. The people in these positions are the ‘essential workers’ that employers forced to work in life-threatening conditions during the pandemic, and they are disproportionately people of color and immigrants. These workers already have few prospects for social mobility, but AI and new automation technologies threaten to wipe out even the limited opportunities that do exist—whether by replacing workers, de-skilling jobs, and relegating workers to monitoring bots (if the hype is true) or by creating enough uncertainty that employees are willing to accept much worse working conditions (whether the hype is true or not). And if the policy architects of the Trump administration have their way, workers of the future will lose many of their federal labor rights altogether.³¹ In this way, the vulnerable situation of farmworkers is not an isolated problem but part of a continuum, with most US workers at an increasingly stark power disadvantage with their employers.

These conditions present both the need and opportunity for solidarity across the multi-racial working class.

Border enforcement as keystone of a predatory economy and agricultural sector#

This brings us to a promising opportunity for solidarity, which this moment is helping to make clear: while most workers are not immigrants, borders and immigration policy nevertheless play a central role in disempowering all workers. Since the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, “Employers have relied on the state to ignore [their] exploitation of undocumented labor while holding the credible threat of deportation over workers.”³²

A federal immigration policy that lets employers weaponize immigration status—whether undocumented or guestworker—hurts all workers, because immigrants face existential risks if they complain about unjust treatment, even if they’re joining in protest with other non-immigrant workers.³³ Under these conditions, “solidarity becomes harder and retaliation easier,” and workers’ “collective leverage is decreased.”³⁴ This has the effect of “lowering wages, weakening unions, and shifting the politics of work away from collective bargaining and wage-and-hour regulation,” extending well beyond individual workplaces, disempowering workers across the economy and especially in majority-immigrant sectors like agriculture.³⁵ Immigration policy thus plays a key role in maintaining the disparities in wages, working conditions, and rights between workers in agriculture and those in other industries.³⁶

In this way, immigration policy, as well as the vast bureaucratic and paramilitary complex of the border that enforces it, has served as a massive government subsidy for the worst employers and the most abusive industries—industrial agriculture chief among them.³⁷ This policy regime allows bad employers to cut costs through crooked means and forces principled employers to compete on those terms. The law has had the additional effect of “cultivating an interest in punitive immigration laws among migrant-dependent employers.”³⁸ This is why the corporate farm employer lobby advocates for guestworker programs that keep workers vulnerable, rather than for amnesties or pathways to citizenship.³⁹ Real reforms would strengthen workers’ position, creating industry-wide pressure to improve wages and working conditions. Those are risks that many farm owners have been trained to fear, since their businesses are capitalized on the expectation of continued access to cheap, exploitable labor and they generally lack the market clout to raise their prices.⁴⁰

For all of these reasons—the threats not just to farmworkers, not just to immigrants, but to all workers; and the need for building grassroots worker power in order to win a fair economy and a livable future—our movements must make it a top priority to fight for and win a radically human-centered immigration policy.

Unfortunately, social movements and the labor movement have not consistently campaigned for a more just immigration policy. Big agricultural employers were once a moderating influence against the hard-liners, and as a class they might (possibly) be won over to at least opposing the Trump administration’s war on immigrants; but business has learned that aggressive enforcement boosts their control over workers without threatening the labor supply.⁴¹ This realization helped pave the way for the xenophobic, authoritarian movement to drive federal policy—even under Democratic administrations—towards the all-out federal assault on immigrants we are witnessing in 2026.⁴²

The failures of “comprehensive immigration reform” make it clear that we need a new coalition—of regular people, for regular people. Given the courage and solidarity that communities are mustering in response to the current administration’s assaults, our movements have an important opportunity to build alignment around a radically more humane policy, one that benefits immigrants and all workers.

Our immediate goals in 2026, all of which are likely to have broad appeal, must be 

1. to end the occupation of cities by immigration enforcement paramilitaries; 

2. to end the campaign of kidnapping, detaining, and deporting immigrants; 

3. to set everyone in detention free; and 

4. to restore due process rights and protections to all immigrants. 

However, these goals are a bare minimum and do not replace the brutal system that got us to this point. Our movements must build alignment around a further set of goals:

• To end the detention and criminalization of immigrants, abolishing the industry of private detention;⁴³

• To end deportations;

• To provide guestworkers all the same rights and freedoms as other workers;

• To prohibit Farm Labor Contractors from using guestworker programs;

• To de-militarize the border and dismantle the paramilitary border enforcement agencies;

• To replace the current enforcement- and punishment-focused regime with a new system focused on human rights, justice, accountability, and the needs of regular people; and

• To win foreign policy and climate policy that place justice, democracy, and sovereignty for people of the Global South over the profits of corporations, abolishing the forces that drive people to migrate against their will.

These goals are ambitious, but they are essential if we aim to secure rights for farmworkers and immigrants that are in line with principles of human rights. Ensuring such rights will also require us to end the exclusion of farm and domestic workers from basic labor protections and bring all US labor laws in line with principles of human rights.⁴⁴

Achieving these further goals will require overcoming fear-mongering and discourses of scarcity as well as divisions among immigrants.⁴⁵ We must help our people see why solidarity must include immigrants and cross borders. Our movements need to project a clear message that our communities’ financial pain is due to corporations and billionaires. The system will not value our lives and our labor any more than it already does just because we throw away vulnerable people; but by building solidarity, we can claim our collective dignity. And we must take concrete steps in our organizations to align farm labor groups, the wider labor movement, community and movement allies, and justice-loving farmers around these steps towards a people-centered economy.

The Trump administration’s sadistic war on immigrants has created an opening for solidarity, and people are taking up the call. The question for our movements is, can we persuade our allies that we need a reconstruction, rather than minor adjustments to a fundamentally violent system?