A new House bill will grant amnesty to illegal aliens — if they’ve picked enough fruit.
H.R. 9535, the “Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act,” was introduced at the end of last month by Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-Pa.), chairman of the House Committee on Agriculture. It has roughly 50 bipartisan co-sponsors and does two things under one name.
‘The sad fact is that American citizens just don’t want to do this type of work.’
On paper, the bill rewrites existing qualifications for the H-2A program, the legal channel for foreign farm workers. These changes include opening the program to year-round operations and streamlining the application process within the bureaucracy.
The proposal also drops the “seasonal” requirement, replacing it with an apparently indefinite number of contracts under 350 days. Thompson calls the 350-day cap a worker perk, a built-in “two-week vacation.”
But buried in the same bill is a waiver that seems to effectively grant amnesty to immigrants illegally present in the U.S. as of May 31, 2026, who can show they worked farm labor 5.75 hours a day, 180 days a year, for two years.
In a mid-July AgriTalk interview, Thompson said, “This is not a pathway to citizenship. This is really a solution to address a tremendous problem in terms of illegal workers that are here in our country.” His fix: They “stay in agriculture” and “after three years,” go home and reapply for H-2A status.
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Matt McClain/Bloomberg/Getty Images
“The sad fact is that American citizens just don’t want to do this type of work. It pays well, but it’s hard work,” Thompson said.
His evidence: In 2025, producers advertised roughly 400,000 positions and drew 182 domestic applicants, drawing from an American Farm Bureau Federation analysis of H-2A data from the Department of Labor.
Proof of eligibility is an employer-written letter, on request. No pay stubs, tax records, or independent verification are specified in the bill. The record also can’t be used to prosecute the employer for the underlying unauthorized hiring, and the employer is shielded from liability for producing it unless it’s later proven fraudulent, with no audit process specified.
The same self-attestation model powered the 1986 “Special Agricultural Worker” amnesty, which required just 90 days of farm work. An estimated 400,000 workers were eligible; it drew nearly 1.3 million applications, with 750,000 of the 1.1 million eventually legalized workers likely never having done the qualifying work.
New York Times reporter Roberto Suro called it “one of the most extensive immigration frauds ever perpetrated against the United States Government” in a 1989 investigation.
Once someone qualifies under the proposed H-2A reforms, employers would be required to provide Department of Labor-inspected housing with wage deductions capped by a HUD-linked formula. The only built-in oversight would review housing, but not fraud.
The bill now sits in the House Judiciary Committee, where Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) will decide its fate.
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