Agricultural employers migrants to undercut the bargaining power of local workers. Credit: Getty


January 16, 2025   7 mins

My grandfather Jesús came to the United States to work on the railroads and harvest crops at the tail end of World War II. He arrived through the bracero programe, the first legal guest-worker system in American history. Designed to address wartime agricultural labour shortages, the initiative would ultimately bring five million Mexican men to work in the United States.

Like other braceros, my grandfather was sprayed with DDT, a toxic pesticide, upon entering the United States — a ritual humiliation born of American paranoia about Mexican “disease”. Wages were low and often stolen, while housing and transportation conditions were inadequate or downright dangerous. The programme also helped depress wages for local workers, and to undermine their organising efforts. Among the braceros themselves, organising was extremely difficult; it was easy to deport any ringleaders back to Mexico.

The experience of men like my grandfather impelled the old Left, Mexican-American civil-rights groups, and the labour movement to oppose guest-worker programmes. That opposition should extend to modern-day equivalents, such as the H1B visa, which allows tech firms to import what amount to white-collar braceros — and which has become the subject of an ongoing civil war on the American Right.

It’s no surprise, then, that Right-wing opponents of the H1 scheme found an unlikely ally in Sen. Bernie Sanders. Back in 2007, Sanders’s scepticism of guest-worker visas led the Vermont socialist to vote against a Bush-era immigration-reform bill that would have expanded such programmes. Neoliberal Democrats would weaponise that record against Sanders in his subsequent runs for the party’s presidential nomination.

Today, as the Democratic Party reckons with its dramatic failure in the November election, Left populists have the chance to take the lead in forging a pro-labour approach to immigration — and, perhaps, a grand bargain with the populist Right that imposes order at the border and ends exploitative visas, while extending citizenship to the immigrant workers who have toiled and lived in the United States for years and sometimes decades.

The history of US agricultural labour underscores the need for a more worker-focused approach than the one progressives in recent years have adopted. Agriculture is the largest economic sector that remains excluded from basic New Deal-era labour protections. While workers in most other sectors have a federally protected right to form unions to defend their mutual interests, agricultural labourers do not.

Crucially, Mexicans were exempted from the 1924 Immigration Act that ended the Ellis Island era of mass immigration — often cited by a number of immigration sceptics as their ideal law — precisely because agricultural employers in western states wanted to continue exploiting Mexican workers. The easy deportability of these migrants was a significant selling factor for agricultural employers, continuing a long tradition of employers preferring labour that is easier to exploit and get rid of.

This is the same pattern — do what the boss says or get deported — promoted by modern guest-worker programmes. That pattern goes back to their bracero origins, which proved so popular among employers that it continued to grow long after the war had ended, and even as demobilised vets — such as a young Cesar Chavez, the founder of the United Farm Workers union, where I work — came home and went looking for work in the fields. It was only after a horrific accident involving an overcrowded employer-owned vehicle that killed more than 40 bracero farm workers in 1963 that the programme came to an end.

“Right-wing populists lack the muscle to take on Silicon Valley’s preferences.”

Notably, within a year of its termination, the first successful effort to unionise US agricultural workers began with the UFW’s historic 1965 grape strike in Delano, California. The confidence that striking workers could no longer be easily replaced by braceros was indispensable.

This history echoes today in the H2A agricultural guest-worker programme, which is also rife with abuse. Federal investigations have repeatedly uncovered everything from forced labour to employers stealing worker wages to make political contributions. Unlike the H1B visa, which nominally gives recipients a chance at becoming Americans, the non-immigrant H2A visa explicitly excludes agricultural guest workers from future citizenship.

Even worse, workers’ visas are entirely dependent on their employers, effectively allowing bosses to deport a worker at will, or to simply not renew the visa for the next harvesting season — the most convenient way to ensure any potential troublemaker asking about wages or workplace safety will never again set foot in America. Needless to say, the H2A scheme has exploded in size over the past decade, severely undercutting the wages and jobs of the US-citizen workers who still make up a significant share of our agricultural labour force.

Could populist conservatives end such abuse on their own? The short answer is no.

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led blueprint for the incoming Trump II administration, explicitly called for a “cap and phase-down” of H2A guest-worker visas with the aim of “increasing employment for Americans in the agricultural sector”. Yet Big Agriculture, a much more powerful Republican constituency, wants to see H2A expanded and made cheaper by lowering wages.

As it is, the H2A visa programme is already uncapped, meaning there is no legal limit to how many workers it can bring in. The only limits are the costs it imposes on employers required to provide housing, food, and transportations, with growers frequently cutting corners to keep costs down and ignoring the requirement to first offer jobs to local workers.

Still, employers are bent on expanding the H2A programme to year-round industries, and worst of all, they want to reduce the federally mandated wages they must pay these workers. In a bitter irony, the prospect of mass deportations is now being used by some industry lobbyists as just the latest excuse to expand the H2A programme, saying, in effect: If you get rid of one cheap foreign workforce, we’ll need another one to replace it.

Shockingly, the agricultural lobby, with help from several Republican attorneys general, has even opposed a Biden administration rule requiring seat belts on company vehicles transporting H2A workers. This includes the attorneys general of Idaho and Washington state, where deadly bus crashes involving seatbelt-less company vehicles have left dozens of H2A workers dead.

Unbelievable as it may seem to many conservatives, it was the Biden administration that sought to protect jobs of American workers against displacement by H2A workers. In sharp contrast, it was the first Trump administration that accommodated Big Ag’s priorities on H2A, cutting their wages and thus making it cheaper to displace American workers. Donald Trump even granted H2A workers a special exemption to his Title 42 executive order closing down the border, making sure H2A workers could continue to enter the country during the pandemic.

Put another way: the populist Right, on its own, doesn’t have the influence within the Republican coalition to restrict programmes like H1B and H2A in the face of powerful corporate constituencies like Big Tech and Big Ag. The populist Right’s arguments against mass migration may have helped the GOP make historic gains among working-class voters, including with many Latinos who compete in the same economic sectors with new arrivals. But that doesn’t change the fact that Right-wing populists lack the muscle to take on Silicon Valley’s preferences on H1B or Big Ag’s preferences on H2A. The nonstop pilgrimages of tech barons such as Elon Musk, Tim Cook, and Mark Zuckerberg to Mar-a-Lago will see to that.

Thus, any serious effort to reform the legal immigration system will need to attract progressives like Sanders who understand the negative impact of guest-worker programmes on American workers of all races. Trade unions would be critical in forging such a bipartisan coalition. However, labour has one major demand from any immigration reform effort: an amnesty for existing undocumented workers.

This demand is born out of the most basic duty of any union: loyalty to members. Every union has a legal duty to represent every member of a bargaining unit, regardless of immigration status. The threat of deportation isn’t theoretical to labour. Organisers know from bitter experience that workers who are afraid of getting deported are harder to organise. Many have seen first-hand how the immigration status of outspoken worker leaders is used to silence or even deport them.

Expanding union density in the 21st century, then, requires taking into account the interests of undocumented workers. While employers may be happy to exploit these workers indefinitely without ever extending citizenship rights, the labour movement is locked in as a powerful constituency in favour of a pathway to citizenship. This disposition unavoidably complicates the populist Right’s efforts to consolidate into a coherent pro-worker project.

Despite this, there remains the outline of a deal here for those paying attention: legislation that restricts exploitative guest-worker programmes such as H1B, H2B, and H2A, while extending a pathway to citizenship to the undocumented workers who are already here. Such a compromise could be combined with E-Verify provisions to effectively ensure a closed labour market going forward and assuage concerns on the Right about spurring further migration.

This would be an immigration platform designed to appeal to Main Street, not Wall Street, and one which the emerging populist centre of American politics can rally behind. Call it the American Workers First Act, with four major provisions: restrictions on guest-worker programmes; amnesty for undocumented workers without criminal records; mandatory E-verify going forward; and substantial investments in US workforce development.

This is admittedly a long shot in the current political climate. Any deal would need to include a sizable enough amnesty for Democrats to turn on powerful constituencies that would oppose any restriction to guest-worker programmes, such as Silicon Valley. In turn, any deal that includes the dreaded A-word, would have to overcome significant scepticism on the Right, and likely necessitate other significant concessions to restrictionist priorities.

But despite the obvious challenges, it’s easy to see what both the populist Right and the labour Left have to gain from such a bargain. For the Right, America would keep the predominantly Latino (and mostly socially conservative) longtime residents already living here, while compelling them to learn English and pay taxes. In exchange, restrictionists would get to slash the number of migrants coming legally for the first time since 1924.

For the labour Left, such a deal is first and foremost a pathway to citizenship for very deserving and hard-working people. Extending full citizenship and labour rights to the undocumented workers who make up a large share of the workforce in sectors such as agriculture, hospitality, caregiving, and construction also creates new organising opportunities. Many Democrats would no doubt still strongly oppose a compromise that went against the interests of major corporations. But the political pressure to seize the long-awaited opportunity for a pathway to citizenship would be unavoidable.

Could any Democratic senator really tell her constituents that she voted to keep the Mexican grandmothers undocumented in order for Elon Musk to continue bringing in tech workers on demand from India?

This is the conversation we should be having. The days of relying on business interests to deliver Republican votes for immigration reform are clearly gone, and have been since at least 2013. For a labour Left looking to protect and empower our undocumented members, it is the populist Right we should be negotiating with.

An immigration policy truly concerned with the interests of American workers would recognise a highly exploitable permanent immigrant underclass as a threat to American jobs and wages — one best eliminated by extending the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, not by the cruel and unworkable fantasy of removal. American workers would be the biggest winners of a compromise which would leave them able to compete on a fair and level playing field.


Antonio De Loera-Brust is the communications director for the United Farm Workers. Previously, he served as a special assistant to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

@AntonioDeLoeraB