On a recent Fox News segment, Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) joined growing calls from the open borders establishment to push the Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act of 2026. The Act would give H-2A status to illegal aliens who claimed to be employed in agriculture, among other benefits. Congressman Sessions vigorously defended the amnesty plan, arguing that Americans cannot do the hard work required, therefore justifying the use of illegal labor.
He began by wrongly asserting that allowing illegal aliens to remain here under legal protection other than citizenship is not amnesty.
This could not be further from the truth.
We see the same appeal made by other amnesty advocates, such as Rep. Maria Salazar (R-FL), in her push for the DIGNIDAD Act. Any policy that allows foreign nationals who have illegally entered America to remain on our soil is, in fact, amnesty.
The second falsehood in this amnesty push is the idea that small family farmers are the ones who need illegal labor. Local farms and ranches are not lobbying for more illegal aliens; big agriculture conglomerates are the ones pushing for it. These farms already have access to the existing H-2A visa program, which is uncapped and contains necessary protections to prevent undercutting of local wages and downward pressure on employment (although these protections have not always worked as intended).
Make no mistake: there is an undeniable crisis facing American agriculture. Rep. Sessions is correct to assert that local farms are going out of business and that food is being monopolized by giant corporations. Putting more illegal aliens to work in the fields is not a solution to this problem.
Congressman Sessions tried to evade Fox News host Tomi Lahren’s objections with weak reasoning. He claimed that no Americans can do farm work because it requires working early in the morning. On the contrary, Americans are completely capable of doing these jobs. The real reason agriculture corporations want illegals and foreign visa workers is that they do not want to pay reasonable living wages to their employees.
Furthermore, this bill would transform the H-2A visa, designed as a seasonal supplemental work program, into a year-round visa that would count towards continuous presence for citizenship purposes, while dropping wage requirements. If this bill were to pass, Americans would essentially be all but locked out of the agricultural labor market permanently.
At Texans for Strong Borders, we recognize that our country is at a crossroads. If we continue to import cheap foreign labor en masse, we will soon lose our country as we know it. The only other choice is to solve the much harder problem of building an economy that can deliver both productivity and prosperity.