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Some of the GOP base have had their feathers ruffled following rumors that there may be a push for amnesty for illegal alien farm workers. High-profile conservatives like Charlie Kirk have been outspoken, demanding that President Trump stick to his promise of mass deportations.
In a recent post on X, Kirk spoke out against the idea of amnesty, saying, "There is no other issue the conservative base feels more passionately about than immigration. In just a few decades, everyday Americans have watched their country transform into a nation of strangers."
Thankfully, the Trump administration seems to have listened. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollings recently said at a press conference that the mass deportations would continue and there would be no amnesty.
The administration seems to be pushing toward something along the lines of a heavily automated workforce, with what jobs remain going to Americans. While that might be a great idea in the long term, there are questions about how quickly we can get there.
Unfortunately, experts like Russell Boening with the Texas Farm Bureau say that reality is a long way off. According to him, "I'm not saying we're never gonna get there, but we're not gonna get there fast. As far as an all-American citizen-born workforce? No, I think that's going to be very difficult."
Boening says the reality is, at least for the foreseeable future, immigrants will have to play a role in our farm labor, but he did emphasize that that doesn't mean those immigrants have to be illegal. He said, "We agree as an organization that our border needs to be secure, that our immigration policy needs to have legal immigration. Farmers and ranchers want a legal workforce."
He pointed to cutting back red tape with regard to things like temporary work visas as the solution here, asserting that if we make getting a temporary work visa easier than immigrating illegally, we'll be able to "walk and chew gum at the same time."
According to Boening, these programs already exist; they just need to be improved upon. He said, "The H2A program, which is a program to procure legal workers for agriculture, needs to be enhanced and revitalized. There's a lot of red tape that's sometimes hard to work through."