President Donald Trump is eager to pass the radioactive issue of jobs for illegal migrants to his subordinates — and they are also eager to pass it to someone else.
“There’s no amnesty,” Trump said during a July 8 cabinet meeting. “What we’re doing is we’re getting rid of criminals, but we are doing a work program,” he said, before asking Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to justify the move.
Rollins explained:
This morning, we talked about protecting the farmers and the farmland, but obviously, this President’s vision of no amnesty [and] mass deportation continues, but in a strategic way … ensuring that our farmers have the labor that they need. Secretary [Lori] Chavez-DeRemer has been a leader on this. Obviously this comes out of the Labor Department, but [we are] moving toward automation … and moving toward an all-American workforce.
“We’ve got to give the farmers the people they need,” Trump interrupted, adding, “Lori, do you want to say something?”
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer responded:
Thank you, Mr. President, and thank you, Secretary Rollins. [How important this is to] never displace the American worker. But the Department of Labor … is focusing on what the law entails now, being more modernized, more streamlining, to work through the H [H-2A and H-2B visa] programs.
We’re going to have a concierge approach to that. We have developed a new office to answer the need of our farmers and ranchers and producers and not to displace the American worker and fall within the law now, and that does not include the amnesty program, at all, and we’ve seen that working, and will continue to have that roll-out.
The sudden demand for this cheap-labor giveaway “is coming from the usual sources of employers who have built a business model that depends on the constant supply of illegal workers,” Jessica Vaughan, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies, told Breitbart News.
But Republicans need to resist the corporate pressure for amnesty if they want to reap the election-day gains from more jobs and higher wages in 2026, she said. Control of “Pennsylvania is within the grasp of the Republicans if they avoid mistakes,” she said.
Anti-amnesty voters can beat business demands for cheap labor, but they must speak up, Vaughan said, adding:
The pro-American Dream constituency knows that an amnesty can be squelched because they’ve done it many times before. But they also know there is always a threat if they are not vigilant and don’t fight back when they need to.
She continued:
I’m not sure that [cheap-labor employers] represent much of his voting base, but certainly [they exist in] the donor class and people that he encounters on a regular basis, either socially or in the context of other issues.
There’s no doubt that Rollins is receptive and like-minded, and you can see in Trump’s own comments that he sort of accepts what they’re lobbying for, at least in a superficial way, when he says things like, “We want the good people to be able to work here, we know the farmers need workers, the hotels need workers, and you know, some of them are good people. They’ve been here a long time.” So that’s why it wouldn’t surprise me if he thought it was an okay idea, but I’m certain that he’s getting pushback.
Many polls show the public supports deportations — and that wave of support carried Trump to victory in November
In 2026, he will also need those anti-amnesty voters to turn out if he wants to avoid Democratic control of teh House or Senate for the last two years of his presidency.
Social media influencers — often privately aligned with GOP factors — rushed to excuse or slam Trump’s giveaway to farm employers:
Both Rollins and Chavez-DeRemer described the business giveaway as tied to established visa programs.
The administration can open and narrow these programs, but the overall law is set by Congress, and there is little appetite among GOP legislators to vote for a business giveaway when they are hoping to win the 2026 election.
The H-2B program provides employers with at least 150,000 temporary laborers for a wide variety of seasonal jobs, including crab pickers, truckers, hotel maids, and restaurant servers. Many of the lower-wage H-2Bs are employed in hotels, so helping real estate investors get higher rent payments.
The H-2A program is uncapped and allows farmers to import seasonal workers for agricultural jobs at government-set wages. In 2024, almost 400,000 H-2A workers were imported, many of whom were imported by brokers to migrate from farm to farm. Farm lobbies are pushing Trump’s deputies to cut those wages as they try to compete with farms in Mexico, Chile, and other nations. Investors in farmland also want cheap workers because they allow higher leasing prices.
Both programs are now managed by a new team at the Department of Labor. The team is run by Brian Pasternak, who oversees the Foreign Labor Certification process at the department.
Under President Joe Biden, his deputies allowed roughly 10 million people to walk through the southern border. That huge workforce expanded the economy and rewarded employers, but it froze wages, spiked rents — and also pushed Trump back into the White House.
Trump has blocked Biden’s migration, and has been given more than $150 billion by Congress to deport millions of Biden’s migrants.
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