House Agriculture Committee Chairman Glenn “GT” Thompson joined AgDay to discuss several legislative priorities, including the Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act, or SAWA, which is a sweeping update to the H-2A guest worker program — and the first revision in nearly 40 years.
Thompson says there have been more than 60 co-sponsors of the bill and more than 650 organizations have offered support for the legislation.
“I’ve never seen the agriculture industry come together with such unity,” he says.
Thompson says he’s had positive conversations about the bill with leadership in the White House and the secretary of labor, but progress has stalled with the midterm elections looming.
“There’s not gonna be nothing before the election at this point, but my goal is, post-election, is that we really need to get this into effect,” he says.
Thompson points to the program’s creation as part of the Immigration Reform and Control Act, or IRCA, on Nov. 6, 1986, under then-President Ronald Reagan and the agriculture industry’s desperate need to modernize the program.
“It is [the] non-immigration, non-amnesty, temporary agriculture workforce visa that just needed to be updated,” he says.
SAWA has been created with bipartisan efforts of both parties, as well as the agriculture industry, to bring relief to growers.
“If we don’t have certainty or we lack the workforce in agriculture, we have food insecurity, and if we have food insecurity, we have affordability issues, and then we have national security issues,” Thompson says.
He highlights that about 10 years after Reagan signed IRCA, the Clinton administration added requirements that growers needed to advertise open positions to potential domestic workers before utilizing the H-2A visa program. In 1995 when this provision was introduced, 11,000 positions were advertised. Thirty years later, there were more than 400,000 open positions advertised in 2025; fewer than 200 domestic workers applied.
“That statistic alone is just striking,” Thompson says. “These are good-paying jobs. They’re hard work. I think they’re fulfilling work.”
Without relief, crops will be left to rot and food costs will escalate, he says.
With SAWA essentially on hold until after the November elections, Thompson encourages growers to reach out to members of Congress and the Trump administration “to demand with one voice that it is time for updating the H-2A non-immigrant, non-amnesty agriculture H-2A visa — that we really can’t wait.
“This will give us certainty in terms of workforce and so, and we can’t punt this to the next Congress,” he adds. “This is something that, during the lame-duck session in particular, that we need to move on.”
