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Immigration reform has failed in Congress for decades by becoming a political football between advocates for legalizing undocumented workers on the one hand and advocates for maintaining the current indentured servant system on the other.

There is such a crying need for agricultural workers that nearly half are undocumented, according to Polaris . Government should focus on improving worker conditions to increase the labor force.

Many fly-by-night labor contractors in the H-2A agricultural guest worker system illegally charge large fees to guest workers who then often find themselves in the U.S. toiling in poor working conditions, poor housing, and low wages, as the Coalition of Immokalee Workers reported in October 2021.

The U.S. Labor Department should act unilaterally to eliminate third-party labor contractors and make domestic employers take responsibility for H-2A visas to reduce abuse. The H-2A program has become the drug of choice for agriculture in ballooning sevenfold since 2005 and more than threefold since 2013 to the current 371,619 guest workers in 2022, as Rural Migration News reported in December 2021.

These changes should improve the remaining workers wages and living conditions while promoting unionization. State attorneys general should be encouraged to tackle human trafficking of agricultural workers and not just sex workers. States which respond well to labor reforms could be rewarded with more H-2A visas. One of these reforms can be the farm worker-led Fair Food program , which is an agreement between participating growers, buyers, and workers for safer working conditions and improved wages.

While there might be a shortfall of agricultural workers in the short term, there are tens of thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of people working in illegal economies who could be redirected to replace imported agricultural workers.

It is estimated that 80% of marijuana sales come from illegal growing operations. From 80% to 85% of these illegal grows infest the 20 national forests of California. Much of the rest is in the national forests of Oregon, Washington, and Colorado. It is thought that 95% of illegal marijuana grows are run by Mexican and Chinese cartels, as National Public Radio reported in November 2019. States that legalize recreational cannabis should require sales from only in-state growers, as the Minnesota Legislature is proposing .

Law enforcement is so overmatched that only activating the National Guard would provide enough support to close down and clean up illegal grow sites that are often polluted with toxic pesticides. Drones can locate them. Cartel leaders can be deported or jailed. And victims of human trafficking (defined as involving fraud, force, or coercion) working there can be given the choice to receive visas as victims to work in legitimate enterprises or accept deportation if undocumented.

I argued in a commentary in the News Tribune in March that $600 billion could be saved by transferring 400,000 active-duty service members to Reserve status and still leave 900,000 active duty.

These initiatives would make legal marijuana more profitable and safer from pesticide residues, provide more taxable income, provide a larger workforce for agriculture, reduce the influence of foreign cartels, and provide better pay and working conditions for agricultural workers. This should also engender more incentive for businesses to call for comprehensive H-2A and immigration reform.

By closing down illegal national forest marijuana grows and incentivising work in our normal agricultural economy, balanced with whatever guest-worker imports are needed, we should be able to reach a worker-job opening equilibrium, reducing incentives for migrants illegally crossing the border just looking for job openings.

John Munter of Warba, Minnesota, ran as a Democrat in 2022 to represent Minnesota's 8th Congressional District. He wrote this for the News Tribune.

John Munter

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Local View: Here's a solution for illegal immigration - Duluth News Tribune