  We propose that natural TeV-scale new physics (NP) with ${\cal O}(1)$
couplings to the standard model (SM) quarks may lead to a universal enhancement
of the Yukawa couplings of all the light quarks, perhaps to a size comparable
to that of the SM b-quark Yukawa coupling, i.e., $y_q \sim {\cal O}(y_b^{SM})$
for $q=u,d,c,s$. This scenario is described within an effective field theory
(EFT) extension of the SM, for which a potential contribution of certain
dimension six effective operators to the light quarks Yukawa couplings is $y_q
\sim {\cal O} \left( f \frac{v^2}{\Lambda^2} \right)$, where $v$ is the Higgs
vacuum expectation value (VEV), $v=246$ GeV, $\Lambda$ is the typical scale of
the underlying heavy NP and $f$ is the corresponding Wilson coefficient which
depends on its properties and details. In particular, we study the case of $y_q
\sim 0.025 \sim y_b^{SM}$, which is the typical size of the enhanced
light-quark Yukawa couplings if the NP scale is around $\Lambda \sim 1.5$ TeV
and the NP couplings are natural, i.e., $f \sim {\cal O}(1)$. We also explore
this enhanced light quarks Yukawa paradigm in extensions of the SM which
contain TeV-scale vector-like quarks and we match them to the specific higher
dimensional effective operators in the EFT description. We discuss the
constraints on this scenario and the flavor structure of the underlying NP
dynamics and suggest some resulting "smoking gun" signals that should be
searched for at the LHC, such as multi-Higgs production $pp \to hh,hhh$ and
single Higgs production in association with a high $p_T$ jet ($j$) or photon
$pp \to hj,h \gamma$ and with a single top-quark $pp \to h t$.
