Nearly 3 million immigrants got amnesty under Reagan. Some of them still work on Washington's farms

Every September, craft brewers from Seattle drive out to the Yakima Valley in Central Washington state for hops — including for Fremont Brewing’s famous Cowiche Canyon fresh hop ale.

For those hops, Fremont Brewing goes to Carpenter Ranches, a sprawling 2,000 acres of apples, cherries, and those precious hops. It’s a skilled operation with farmworkers who have been there for decades, legally, thanks to a 1986 amnesty by former President Ronald Reagan.

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“It takes skill to grow hops,” said Brad Carpenter, in the fifth generation of Carpenters running the farm. “Hops have to grow up a string. And you watch these guys on these sleds — big, tall platforms in the hop fields during the spring — and they’re tying the tops of the string to the wire.”

Among the workers who got the Reagan-era amnesty was Felipe Ávalos, who’s been with the farm for 44 years. That’s as long as his boss, Brad Carpenter.

“There were announcements [of the amnesty] on radio, on television,” Ávalos said in an interview in Spanish. “And, well, I took advantage of the opportunity.”

Ávalos had emigrated to the U.S. from Mexico in 1981, when he was 16, and found work at the Carpenter Ranches that May. He arrived just in time, about eight months before the cutoff.

Brad Carpenter said it made a big difference for his business that in the 1980s the U.S. government offered undocumented immigrants a path to legal status: It helped him retain his workers. He said about 50 people — at the time, the majority of the Carpenter Ranches’ employees — got amnesty.

“It proved to be very valuable to have those particular employees to have status,” Carpenter said.

These days, like all employers, farms gather social security numbers and other paperwork documenting their employees’ work authorization. But, statistically, most growers know it’s possible — or even likely — that some of that paperwork isn’t valid, said Jon DeVaney, president of the Washington State Tree Fruit Association.

That’s because about 40% of farmworkers are in the U.S. without legal status, according to the federal Department of Agriculture. As immigration enforcement ramps up, farms and growers in Washington and across the country are at risk of losing their workforce and the skill that comes with seasoned workers.

The amnesty offered under the Reagan administration had certain requirements. Among them, people had to prove they weren’t guilty of a crime and had lived here at least five years.

The Carpenters got involved when their employees asked them to sign paperwork to verify their employment history.

That help “wasn't politically driven,” Brad Carpenter said. “It was driven based on the value of our company and the betterment of our employees.”

Ávalos said Steve Carpenter, Brad’s brother, helped sign paperwork and went with employees to their interviews in the city of Yakima. The amnesty changed his life.

“I didn’t have to be scared anymore,” Ávalos said. “I could be comfortable working and going out afterwards. I’d gone 10 years without visiting Mexico. So when I got my papers, I decided to visit my parents, and my siblings who’d stayed there.”

Ávalos started with a temporary work permit, eventually got a green card, and now he and his wife, and their five kids, are all citizens.

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Ávalos said he hopes there’s another amnesty. He said what happened in the ’80s was first they deported the “bad guys,” and then they offered an amnesty. To be clear, there’s no active discussion of that in D.C. these days.

This May, Ávalos will have worked for the Carpenters for 44 years. He’s been promoted to foreman and oversees all the orchards: apples, cherries, and peaches.

“Most of my foremans went through that amnesty and that’s what got us to this point right now at the farm,” said Colton Carpenter, Brad’s nephew.

He wouldn’t say on the record if he thought the government should offer another amnesty, but he would say he’s grateful for the 1986 one.

“It’s nice having that certainty. It’s helped us out a ton,” Carpenter said. “And like I said, there’s a lot of good people out here, and that just kind of boosted them a little bit, got them into a situation where they were able to better their lives and not have to worry about any issues with immigration.”

The Carpenters did not want to comment on how they lean politically. And there’s a reason growers are hesitant to talk about another amnesty.

“That word is pretty politically toxic,” said Jon DeVaney, president of the Washington State Tree Fruit Association. “There’s the perception of the fairness issue … should someone that did not wait in the line get granted the benefit?”

What growers want instead is “something that’s not just a blanket giveaway of some new privilege, but it entails some conditions,” DeVaney said. “You know, to continue to work in agriculture, or to pay a processing fine, for example.”

DeVaney pointed to a bill introduced in 2022 by Representative Dan Newhouse, a Republican who represents much of Central Washington, including Yakima and the Tri-Cities. Newhouse’s bill included increased border security and enforcement, but also a path for undocumented immigrants to obtain legal status. It would take 10 years, and applicants would have to meet a lot of conditions.

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The H2A guest worker program allows farms to bring in seasonal workers on temporary visas, and a lot of growers in Washington use it. But DeVaney said the program doesn’t work for a lot of smaller farms, because it’s expensive and highly regulated. And it’s not a solution for the farmworkers who live here — some of whom have worked on Washington’s farms for decades.

“There’s people working in the industry now who may have initially entered the US in a way they should not have, but they’re doing jobs that Americans don’t want to do, and there’s a cost of losing all of that experience, and that current workforce,” DeVaney said.

So far, DeVaney said, there haven’t been big workplace raids under the new Trump administration. And growers have been offering trainings, letting their employees know that anyone who comes on the farm will have to present a warrant and wait in the office to speak to the specific employee they’ve come for.

Back on the Carpenter farm, a handful of workers are gathered around a fire, putting foil packets of their lunches in. They’re taking a break from pruning apple trees.

Brad Carpenter said it’s the low season, so the farm only has about 70 employees at the moment, and there’s a long list of phone numbers of people looking for work in the front office. But during harvest, the farm employs 300 to 400 people.

The Carpenters don’t use the guest worker program. Everyone they hire is a local, he added.

A local, but an immigrant. Spanish is the language of the fields.