With One Collective Voice, Business Owners Could Change the National Conversation. They’ve Done It Before
By Julie M. Weise June 26, 2025 (ZocaloPublicSquare.org)
This month’s coast-to-coast protests against immigration raids seem to display a country more divided than ever over the place of immigrants in American life. Yet recent history shows one group that, speaking collectively, often bridged the divide between conservatives and pro-immigrant activists: employers.
Since Trump’s reelection last fall, I’ve been curious: what will they do now—and could they reframe the immigration debate away from criminality and toward a broader understanding of economy, community, and America?
The federal immigration raids that began a few months ago appeared at first to stick to a familiar, predictable script. First, raids on agriculture and other industries dependent on immigrants detained many workers and sent the rest into hiding. Then, employers and their professional associations such as the American Farm Bureau and the American Business Immigration Coalition raised hell with their representatives in Washington, D.C., pleading their cases—that their crops would rot in the fields and their businesses grind to a halt. Next, President Donald Trump did what other administrations of both political parties have always done: carved out a little exception so certain industries could return to their “normal” dependence on undocumented workers.
But the difference this time is that under pressure from the hardline anti-immigrant wing of his party, Trump reversed course. The raids will proceed, allowing him to rack up deportation numbers to meet his campaign promises.
Employers have been trying to script their desired, usual ending in meetings with lawmakers and public statements. California farmer Ronnie Leimgruber expressed unfounded confidence that his industry’s support of Trump will spare it in the end. “The only change that we have to make,” said racehorse caretaking industry association director Eric J. Hamelback after a devastating immigration raid on a racetrack last week, “is to get even more aggressive with both the administration and Congress.”
I beg to differ. The only way for employers to have a chance at winning this battle is to speak loudly on the issue in the public square, as they did from the 1990s until Trump’s complete takeover of the GOP in 2020. In those decades, employers could often be found countering this threat to their livelihood not just in congressional offices, but in the national media and their communities.
In my historical research on Mexican migration to the U.S. South, I saw that many employers and their allies in the early 2000s spoke openly and proudly about immigrant workers, even when they faced public blowback. In the conservative farming community of Tifton, Georgia, the mayor, who was also a technical advisor to local farmers, flew the Mexican flag outside city hall for six days in 2005 to mourn the deaths of six local Mexican men who had been killed in a robbery. He kept the flag up despite some complaints on local talk radio. And when state-level anti-immigrant legislation threatened immigrants in Uvalda, Georgia, in 2011, farmers there attended a public meeting where they decried the law’s effects on immigrant children and compared immigration enforcement to the Nazis. Uvalda Mayor Paul Bridges, a dairy farmer and Republican, ended up challenging the law in court with the American Civil Liberties Union. He argued not just for immigrants’ essential role in harvesting his town’s Vidalia onions, but for their value as human beings in his community. “When the Latino community first started coming in,” he explained in a video, “they would meet someone and fall in love and have families. So they became a part of our societal network.”
These very employers have a unique ability to help tell a more inclusive story not just about who does America’s work, but about whose presence and humanity enrich the country rather than threaten it.
Like Bridges, many employers advocated publicly for undocumented immigrants to receive consideration as indispensable workers, but also full human beings and valued members of the community. In my home state of Oregon, for example, agricultural and hospitality employer groups worked side-by-side with pro-immigrant activists from 2013-’19 to make all residents of the state eligible for driver’s licenses, regardless of immigration status. The same coalition worked together in 2016 to preserve Oregon’s status as a “sanctuary” state that prohibits the use of state and local police officers for immigration enforcement. Both efforts succeeded. Jeff Stone, CEO of the Oregon Association of Nurseries, told me his group supported sanctuary status to create a welcoming environment in Oregon, not one based on “fear and racial profiling.” His members need workers above all, but they did not shy away from defending immigrants as people, too.
The power imbalance between employers and their workers often coexists with mutually caring relationships and interconnectedness through churches, schools, and marriages. Today’s agriculture also often requires skills built over years; many employers cultivate decades-long relationships with their employees. These very employers have a unique ability to help tell a more inclusive story not just about who does America’s work, but about whose presence and humanity enrich the country rather than threaten it. That some employers continue to advocate for comprehensive immigration reform and a path to permanent legal status for their workers shows that the potential overlap of interest between employers and immigrants remains real.
But there are also new challenges. In liberal states, clashes between employer and activist groups over wages and unionization have driven a wedge between groups that once collaborated on certain immigrants’ rights issues. In conservative states, speaking in measured tones about undocumented immigrants has become politically perilous. Since January, red- and blue-state farmers alike may fear that speaking out too loudly could invite retaliatory enforcement. Their pleas to Congress and the White House to back off workplace raids remain vigorous, but are mostly confined to closed-door lobbying that centers on economics.
Economic arguments are essential to the conversation, but employers’ recent reticence to move beyond them has ceded the deeper question about who belongs in America to activists on one side and anti-immigrant ideologues on the other.
It is not too late to change course, as a few brave exceptions show. Idaho farmer and Tik-Tok influencer Shay Myers gets thousands of views on his videos decrying heavy-handed immigration enforcement. He speaks both to the fact that he can’t find other workers in a moment of low unemployment and to the “ethical” implications of ripping apart families and causing them to live in fear. Georgia Republican State Representative Kasey Carpenter, a restaurant owner whose district is powered by the carpet manufacturing industry, explained on national news that immigrants were essential to that industry. He also said, “These are kids, that have gone to high school, that we’ve educated, that everybody else’s kids know, that play sports with them.” Though they may disagree on much else, pro-immigrant activists should recognize the value of these voices.
Employers are not wrong in perceiving that defending immigrants broadly and publicly would provoke more drama than it might have a decade ago. But the risk of inaction is magnified as never before: the continued depletion of their workforce and deportation of their neighbors.
Julie M. Weise is a historian at the University of Oregon and author of Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910. Her next book, currently titled Guest Worker: Lives across Borders in an Age of Prosperity, is forthcoming.