DeSantis Attacks H-2A Farm Labor Bill That Florida Growers Say They Need

Governor Ron DeSantis has publicly criticized a bipartisan federal agricultural labor bill that Florida's farm sector has spent years lobbying for, opening a rare split between the governor and one of the state's most established industry constituencies. Writing on social media on July 20, DeSantis said that amnesty is not what people voted for in 2024, a reference to the Securing Agriculture's Workforce Act of 2026.

The bill, introduced on June 30 as H.R. 9535 by House Agriculture Committee Chair Glenn Thompson of Pennsylvania, does not create a pathway to citizenship. It is a set of reforms to the H-2A temporary agricultural visa program, which allows employers to hire foreign workers for agricultural jobs when they cannot find domestic labor. The legislation would be the first statutory reform to H-2A in roughly four decades if enacted.

The dispute matters for Florida in a way it does not for most states. Florida's specialty crop sector, which includes citrus, tomatoes, strawberries, peppers, ornamental horticulture and nursery production, is among the most labor-intensive agricultural economies in the country, and it is one of the heaviest users of the H-2A program nationally.

What the bill would actually do

The Securing Agriculture's Workforce Act would make several structural changes to how H-2A operates. The most significant is the removal of the requirement that H-2A visas be tied to seasonal work. That requirement has historically excluded year-round agricultural sectors, most notably dairy, from using the program at all.

The bill would allow temporary workers to remain on the job for up to 350 days, which effectively extends the program to operations that need labor throughout the year. It would also limit what supporters describe as excessive or irrelevant federal fees associated with participation, and it would codify a wage methodology with safeguards intended to prevent unpredictable swings in the Adverse Effect Wage Rate.

The Adverse Effect Wage Rate is the minimum wage employers must pay H-2A workers, set by the Department of Labor and calculated to prevent the program from depressing wages for domestic farmworkers. Growers have complained for years that the rate can jump substantially from one year to the next with little warning, which makes it difficult to plan a season's budget. The bill would also designate H-2A workers as essential so that federal funding lapses do not halt processing.

Why Florida growers care

Florida agriculture generates billions of dollars in annual economic activity, and much of it depends on hand harvesting. Machines can handle grain and some row crops efficiently, but strawberries, tomatoes, peppers, citrus for the fresh market and nursery stock all require human labor at scale during compressed harvest windows.

Growers across the state have said for years that they cannot find enough domestic workers willing to do that work at any wage the market can bear, and H-2A has become the primary legal mechanism for filling the gap. The program's administrative burden and cost, however, are frequently cited as reasons some operations avoid it. Reforms that reduce fees and add predictability to wage calculations address exactly those complaints.

The American Farm Bureau Federation has said the bill is supported by more than 400 agriculture groups nationally. That breadth of support is unusual for immigration-adjacent legislation and reflects how narrowly the bill is drawn around program mechanics rather than around legal status.

The political tension

The governor's characterization of the bill as amnesty is at odds with what the legislation contains. The bill does not confer permanent legal status, does not create a citizenship pathway and does not legalize workers currently present without authorization. It modifies the terms of a temporary visa program that already exists and that already brings workers into the country legally.

The tension DeSantis is responding to is nonetheless real within Republican politics. Expanding a guest worker program increases the number of foreign workers entering the United States legally, and a portion of the coalition that supports strict immigration enforcement objects to that expansion regardless of whether the workers are here lawfully. The disagreement is about the desirability of the labor flow itself rather than about legal status.

Florida agriculture organizations occupy the other side of that argument. Their position has consistently been that a functional legal guest worker program is the alternative to an unauthorized workforce, not a supplement to it, and that restricting legal channels without addressing labor demand pushes the sector toward the very outcomes enforcement advocates say they want to prevent.

What it means for Floridians

The most direct consumer effect of agricultural labor policy is on food prices and on the domestic availability of fresh produce. Labor is among the largest cost inputs for specialty crops, and when growers cannot secure workers, the result is typically either higher prices, reduced acreage or a shift toward imported produce from countries with lower labor costs.

Florida's tomato and strawberry sectors have both faced sustained competitive pressure from Mexican imports, and labor cost differentials are a significant part of that equation. Policy changes that raise or lower the effective cost of a legal domestic workforce directly affect whether Florida acreage stays in production.

There is also a rural economic dimension. Agricultural production supports packing houses, trucking, equipment dealers, agricultural lenders and the small-town economies built around them across central and south Florida. When acreage contracts, those downstream businesses contract with it, and the effect concentrates in counties with fewer alternative employers.

Where the bill stands

H.R. 9535 was introduced at the end of June and referred to committee. Bills of this kind typically require committee markup, a floor vote in the House, separate Senate action and reconciliation of any differences before reaching the president's desk. That is a long path, and the legislative calendar in an election year compresses the time available.

Florida's congressional delegation will be central to the outcome. The state's House members represent districts spanning heavily agricultural interior counties and dense coastal metros, and the delegation has historically been divided on immigration questions in ways that do not always track neatly along party lines.

Whether the governor's opposition affects the Florida delegation's posture is an open question. DeSantis remains an influential figure in state Republican politics, but agriculture groups have deep relationships with members representing farming districts, and those relationships have historically been durable.

How the H-2A program operates today

Employers seeking H-2A workers must complete a multi-agency process before any worker arrives. They file a job order with the state workforce agency, obtain a temporary labor certification from the U.S. Department of Labor establishing that domestic workers are not available, petition U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and then the workers apply for visas at a consulate abroad.

The employer obligations that follow are substantial. Growers must provide housing that meets federal standards, pay inbound and outbound transportation, guarantee at least three quarters of the hours promised in the contract, and pay the Adverse Effect Wage Rate or the prevailing local rate, whichever is higher. Those requirements are the reason the program is expensive relative to informal labor arrangements.

Program usage has grown dramatically over the past decade nationally, with certified positions rising into the hundreds of thousands annually. Florida is consistently among the top states by certification volume, and the state's growers have generally reported that the program works but that its cost and administrative complexity limit how much of their labor need it can practically cover.

The wage rate mechanics at the center of the fight

The Adverse Effect Wage Rate is calculated from the Department of Agriculture's Farm Labor Survey, which measures average hourly earnings for field and livestock workers by region. Because the rate is derived from a survey of actual wages, it can move substantially from year to year based on shifts in the underlying data rather than on any policy decision.

Growers have argued that this volatility is the single most disruptive feature of the program. A rate increase announced late in a planning cycle can raise labor costs for an entire season after crop and acreage decisions have already been made and after buyers have negotiated prices. Farms operating on thin margins have limited ability to absorb that.

Farmworker advocates counter that the wage rate exists precisely to prevent the program from suppressing wages for domestic agricultural workers, who are among the lowest-paid workers in the country. Any methodology change that slows wage growth, in that view, shifts costs from employers onto the workforce the safeguard was designed to protect. That disagreement is the substantive core of the debate over the bill.

Florida agriculture by the numbers

Florida agriculture spans a diverse set of commodities, with the state a national leader in fresh market tomatoes, bell peppers, sweet corn, snap beans, watermelon, sugarcane and ornamental horticulture, alongside its historic citrus industry. Ornamental horticulture and nursery production alone represent one of the state's largest agricultural sectors by value.

Citrus has faced the steepest decline. Production has fallen dramatically over the past two decades because of citrus greening disease, hurricane damage and development pressure on grove land. Growers who have remained have invested heavily in disease management, and labor availability is one of several constraints on whether replanting is economically viable.

The land use dimension compounds the labor question. Florida agricultural land faces continuous conversion pressure from residential and commercial development, and when a farming operation becomes unprofitable, the land generally does not return to agriculture. Decisions made in a few difficult seasons can permanently remove acreage from production.

That irreversibility is why industry groups treat labor policy as an existential rather than a marginal issue. A grower facing another season of uncertainty about workforce availability and cost has a standing alternative in selling to a developer, and each such decision reduces the state's agricultural base permanently.

What's next

Committee action on the bill is the next procedural step to watch. Agriculture committee bills with more than 400 supporting organizations generally clear committee, but floor time is scarce and leadership decisions about scheduling often determine whether a bill advances.

Florida growers are entering the planning window for the coming season, and decisions about acreage and labor contracting are made months in advance. Uncertainty about the program's rules is itself a cost, and industry groups have argued that resolving the wage rate methodology question would provide value even independent of the program's expansion.

Floridians tracking the issue should watch the House Agriculture Committee's schedule and the positions taken by Florida members of Congress. The Florida Farm Bureau and the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association are the state-level organizations most likely to publish detailed positions as the bill moves.