In 1964, the agricultural lobby warned that ending the Bracero guestworker program would destroy American farming. President Lyndon Johnson and Congress ended it anyway. Within five years, mechanical tomato harvesters revolutionized California agriculture. Labor costs fell. Wages for American farmworkers rose. By the 1970s yields had tripled. The doomsayers were wrong then — and they’re wrong now.
Today, the same lobby is running the same playbook with the H-2A guestworker program. They insist crops will rot without endless foreign labor. They demand amnesty for millions of illegal alien farmworkers. They want carve-outs from E-Verify and exemptions from immigration enforcement. And too many Republicans, influenced by donor pressure and decades of cheap-labor orthodoxy, are tempted to comply.
