The Numbers Behind Texas’ Food Supply

Texas’ food and agriculture industries generate more than $102 billion in economic output annually. That figure covers everything from cattle ranches in the Panhandle to restaurant kitchens in Houston — and it depends, in ways that rarely appear in policy debates, on a workforce that includes hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers at every stage of the supply chain.

A report released in May 2025 by the American Immigration Council, titled From Field to Fork: The Economic Impact of Immigrants on Texas’ Food Industry, quantifies what many employers in the state have long understood operationally: immigrant labor is not a peripheral element of Texas food production. It is a structural one.

The report was produced in partnership with Texans for Economic Growth, a statewide coalition of more than 160 member businesses. Its public release was hosted at an event by Amegy Bank in Houston, with participation from the Texas Restaurant Association, the James Beard Foundation, and the Texas Business Leadership Council.

What the Workforce Actually Looks Like

Across Texas’ food sector — spanning agriculture, food processing, wholesale trade, retail trade, and food services — immigrant workers total 400,500 people. That represents 24.9 percent of the entire food industry workforce, just under one quarter.

Those workers hold a wide range of immigration statuses. Approximately one fifth are naturalized U.S. citizens. Another share hold various lawful statuses including work visas and green cards. And 14.5 percent of food sector workers — along with 13.5 percent of agricultural workers specifically — are undocumented. Within that undocumented population, 20,100 individuals are DACA-eligible.

That distribution matters for a specific reason. Because the workforce spans so many different legal categories simultaneously, any shift in federal immigration enforcement or policy — whether a change to DACA protections, a tightening of agricultural visa programs, or an expansion of interior enforcement — lands unevenly and immediately across the same supply chains. A processing plant, a restaurant group, and a wholesale distributor may all be affected by the same policy change in different ways, at different speeds, with no coordinated mechanism to absorb the disruption.

Immigration policy changes do not affect one type of worker in one type of job. They move through interconnected industries that rely on each other to keep food moving from production to consumers.

From Farms to Restaurants: Two Industries, One Workforce Problem

Agriculture and food service are often treated as separate sectors in policy discussions. In practice, they share labor pipelines, face overlapping shortages, and are exposed to the same immigration policy risks. The From Field to Fork report draws an explicit line between the two: disruption on farms creates downstream effects in processing, wholesale, retail, and eventually restaurant supply chains.

Texas Restaurant Association president and CEO Emily Williams Knight noted at the May 21 event that immigrant workers have long been part of restaurant operations — not only in kitchens and dining rooms but across the farms, suppliers, and small businesses that connect to the restaurant industry. The Texas Restaurant Association represents a sector that, like agriculture, operates on thin margins and high labor dependency. For that sector, workforce instability is not an abstract policy concern. It translates directly into operating costs and, ultimately, food prices for consumers.

The James Beard Foundation’s vice president of impact, Anne McBride, described agriculture and restaurants as industries that “cannot exist without the other” and face parallel challenges when it comes to immigrant workers and entrepreneurs. Both sectors have limited ability to automate their core labor functions in the short or medium term. Picking, processing, cooking, and serving require human workers — and the pipeline of domestic workers filling those roles has not kept pace with industry demand.

Justin Yancy, president and CEO of the Texas Business Leadership Council — a statewide network of senior business leaders — stated that maintaining a dependable workforce will remain critical to supporting Texas producers, businesses, and consumers as the state continues to grow. Texas is the second-largest state by population and one of the fastest-growing in the country. Its food system will need to scale accordingly.

What Visa Policy Actually Controls Here

For the portion of the agricultural workforce that holds lawful immigration status, the H-2A temporary agricultural worker visa is the primary legal channel. H-2A allows U.S. employers to bring foreign nationals to the United States to fill temporary or seasonal agricultural jobs when domestic workers are not available. Employers must attest to that shortage, pay at or above the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR) for the relevant state, and provide housing and transportation in many cases.

In Texas, H-2A usage has grown substantially over the past decade, but the program is frequently criticized by employers for its processing times, administrative burden, and the fact that it only covers seasonal or temporary work — not the year-round labor that many agricultural operations actually require. Dairy farms, for example, operate 365 days a year and cannot use H-2A at all under current program rules.

For food processing and food service workers — the restaurant dishwashers, food plant line workers, and warehouse packers who make up a large share of the 400,500 figure — there is no dedicated visa pathway comparable to H-2A. These workers either hold green cards, are naturalized citizens, hold other work authorization, or are undocumented. The H-2B visa covers temporary non-agricultural work but has a statutory cap of 66,000 visas per year for the entire country, across all industries. It is routinely exhausted well before the fiscal year ends.

The gap between legal visa supply and actual workforce demand is where the 14.5 percent undocumented share of Texas food workers comes from. It is not a policy accident exactly — it is the predictable outcome of a legal immigration system whose capacity has not been adjusted to match labor market reality in decades.

Houston as a Case Study

The From Field to Fork report includes a specific spotlight on the Houston Metro Area, which functions as a useful microcosm of the statewide picture. Houston is home to one of the largest and most diverse immigrant populations in the United States. Its food industry — restaurants, grocery retail, wholesale distributors, and food manufacturers — draws heavily on that population.

The event releasing the report was hosted in Houston deliberately. Local leaders in attendance included representatives from business and civic organizations who participated in a discussion about what practical policy responses might look like. The session was hosted at Amegy Bank.

Chelsie Kramer, Texas State Organizer for the American Immigration Council and Texans for Economic Growth, framed the conversation directly: “workforce stability and practical policy conversations are critical to the long-term strength and competitiveness of Texas’ food economy.” That framing — workforce stability as a business and economic issue, not only an immigration debate — shaped how the report was presented to Houston’s business community.

What Comes Next, and What Doesn’t

The report does not propose specific legislative fixes. It presents data and positions the business community as a stakeholder that should be at the table when immigration enforcement and reform decisions are made. For employers trying to plan hiring, that ambiguity is itself a cost — uncertainty about DACA, about H-2A expansion, about enforcement priorities makes multi-year workforce planning structurally difficult.

For individual workers and employers trying to understand their current options, the relevant starting points are U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for visa program details, and legal counsel familiar with agricultural and food industry immigration. Program rules, wage floors, and cap numbers change year to year.

The H-2A adverse effect wage rate for Texas in 2024 was $14.22 per hour — a number that sets the floor for what authorized agricultural guest workers must be paid, and a figure that will shift again when the 2025 rate is published.

This article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Immigration rules, visa caps, wage rates, and enforcement priorities change frequently. Consult an immigration attorney or official government sources before making decisions based on this information.