History often repeats itself. On June 12, 2025, echoes of the late 20th Century surfaced when President Trump shared his realization about the negative economic effects of strict immigration policies. He stated on Truth Social, “Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have said that our tough immigration policy is driving away skilled, long-time workers, making those jobs hard to fill.” This is not revolutionary. Previous administrations, regardless of political party, have also taken strong stances on immigration enforcement during their time in office. Then the Vidalia Onion Farmers of Georgia voiced their concerns.
The last time Congress passed any meaningful legislation on immigration enforcement was under President Clinton in the 1990s, specifically, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act of 1996 (“IIRIRA”). We had a Democrat in the White House, but thanks to the “Republican Revolution” in 1994, President Clinton worked with a Republican Congress for six years from 1994 to the end of his second term in 1999. IIRIRA focused primarily on immigration enforcement, including border security, enforcement measures, and tougher restrictions and increased penalties for employers who hired undocumented workers. Coupled with laws passed 10 years earlier under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), the former Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS), which then included both the administrative and enforcement sides of immigration, increased employer compliance audits and worksite raids nationally.
Enter the Vidalia Onion Farmers of Georgia in July 1998. Georgia primarily voted Republican in the 1994 election, with over 47% of votes for Bob Dole, the Republican candidate opposing the incumbent Democrat. However, when the worksite raids began to affect available labor for the May 1998, harvest of the famous sweet Vidalia Onions, the farmers organized and sent two Republican congressmen, Senator Paul Coverdell and Rep. Jack Kingston, scurrying to Washington to prevent any further INS interference. The result was a significant decrease in employer compliance audits nationally. In March 1999, INS announced a strategy to move away from worksite raids and focus more on removing criminal aliens and arresting alien smugglers. Sound familiar?
A familiar rallying cry around improving or increasing immigration enforcement, especially employer worksite compliance, is that “illegal immigrants” are taking US workers’ jobs. In reality, this isn’t true. The truth is that undocumented workers are filling gaps in our ever-evolving labor market, particularly for “unskilled” labor positions in the agricultural, hospitality, janitorial, food and beverage, and construction industries. As an immigration attorney, I often receive calls from employers who tell me the same thing: We advertise, but the workers don’t come. Employers report that maybe one US hire per advertising cycle will accept the position but rarely stay on the job. If an employer is looking for a lawful immigration solution, the employer has most likely exhausted all other avenues. The current legal immigration solutions are expensive, arduous, and come with heavily regulated liabilities, which may amount to nothing in the end. The current options are severely limited in variety, validity periods, and numbers.
What we need are fewer untrue soundbites about “illegal immigrants” taking over and “mass deportation” as the solution, and more common-sense economic solutions to reform our immigration system to address our ever-changing labor force demands. We came close in 2013, when the Senate passed a comprehensive bipartisan bill to overhaul our broken immigration system. Unfortunately, the House of Representatives failed to pass the bill. The Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act emphasized an “economic” approach to immigration regulation, both at the border and internally, over the prior focus on security at the turn of the 21st Century and family unification of the late 20th Century. The 2013 bill included increased funding for border security and a highly regulated and rigorous pathway to citizenship for DREAMers and agricultural workers, among other beneficiaries. The bill also included modernizing the nonimmigrant worker options to “supplement all sectors of the workforce.” The bill increased the availability of nonimmigrant visas and introduced a “Guest Worker” visa option for agricultural and nonagricultural workers. Employers could petition for the “W Status” to employ foreign unskilled or low-skilled workers on a year-round basis, instead of being limited to seasonal, peak load, or one-time need, and offered a less restricted transition to permanent residence. The “year-round” option was welcome news to dairy farmers in the agricultural sector and landscaping/snow-removal and construction companies in the non-agricultural sector. Further, the W Visa availability was flexible based on annual workforce demand, among other nonimmigrant and immigrant measures introduced in the bill, and not a set quota like our current system. Like most good bills, the “carrot” to employers was balanced with the obligatory “stick,” which included mandatory enrollment in E-Verify. In addition, the bill offered more protection for US Workers. The flexible employment-based immigration options would require employers to offer competitive wages and maintain fair working conditions for both US and foreign workers and give the government the ability to better monitor and patrol the ebb and flow of human resources across borders.
Providing more flexibility and variety in employment-based immigration options would lead to economic growth, reduce inflation factors, increase tax revenues, and improve the standard of living. This is basic economic theory. Increasing and diversifying the available workforce in all sectors increases productivity. More productivity and a larger labor market also help to moderate wage growth, which leads to moderation in the costs of goods and services. More lawful workers increase the collection of tax revenue through employer deductions and reported income, as well as improve living standards, infrastructure, and available health care. Voila! Reforming our immigration system would not only help the Vidalia Onion farmers but also reduce the cost of eggs, reduce the national debt, and save us from collapsing bridges and homelessness. Vive la révolution!
What our “great Farmers and people in the hotel and leisure business” need is a “free[r] market” and “less government” restricted immigration system focused more on economics, integrated with security and humanitarian measures. We are a nation of immigrants in a modern global economic market. Our economy is not rigid, and like it or not, relies heavily on the availability of foreign labor for our country to thrive. Until we learn from our past and reform our immigration system, “we are doomed to repeat[edly]” failing not only our “great Farmers and people in the hotel and leisure business” but employers in all sectors, as well as consumers.
