Everyone in Washington wants to ‘reform’ agriculture’s main visa program

Shortly after Gustavo started working as a sheepherder in Cokeville, Wyoming, he says his boss took his passport. Over the years that followed, he and his brother, Iván, herded up to 2,000 sheep through the state’s remote mountains. All the while, they told me in 2023, the rancher stole their wages, deprived them of food and water, and shot more than one of their dogs in front of them. “We were afraid he’d kill us,” said Iván. After the brothers managed to escape they were granted special visas reserved for victims of human trafficking.

Originally from Peru, Gustavo and Iván (whose names have been changed due to fear of retaliation) came to the U.S. through the H-2A program, which provides temporary work visas for seasonal, foreign-born agricultural workers. In Washington, H-2A is having a moment. The visa is one of the only immigration programs that Trump officials have embraced — Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has said expanding it is “of the utmost priority” — with lawmakers from both parties on board. And last year the administration made a number of significant changes to the program, none of which would have protected Gustavo and Iván. Some of them will make the kind of abuse the brothers faced more likely.

Workers in the program face a daunting array of concerns, from wage theft to assault, rape, and even death. The steps the Trump administration and Congress have taken to expand and overhaul H-2A are not designed to solve these problems, but rather to give the agricultural industry policies it has long lobbied for.

It’s not hard to understand H-2A’s appeal. For Trump officials, it’s a solution to a longstanding problem they made a lot worse: Farmers have been coping with a labor shortage for decades, and an estimated 40 percent of the farmworkers they’ve hired are undocumented. By the administration’s own admission, its increased immigration raids in farm country would likely worsen this labor shortage to the point of increasing food prices. For policymakers across the political spectrum, expanding the H-2A visa can look like a panacea for much of what ails our agricultural labor force — a way to supply farmers with a sufficient number of workers who they can afford to hire, and who reside in the country legally.And much easier to accomplish than comprehensive immigration reform. For farmers, H-2A is the only viable path to a legal workforce. As a result, the visa has grown steadily popular: Over the past decade, the number of certified H-2A jobs has increased by 200 percent. As of 2024, about 17 percent of America’s roughly 2 millionfarmworkers were here on an H-2A. 

But H-2A is not a silver bullet. It is a poorly regulated, structurally flawed program in dire need of reform, and Gustavo and Iván are far from the only H-2A workers who have been trafficked. Workers in the program face a daunting array of concerns, from wage theft to assault, rape, and even death. The steps the Trump administration and Congress have taken to expand and overhaul H-2A are not designed to solve these problems, but rather to give the agricultural industry policies it has long lobbied for, like extending H-2A visas to year-round jobs. A bipartisan coalition is pushing to fulfill this longstanding goal of the dairy and meatpacking industries, despite its potential to depress farmworker wages. 

If all these changes are enacted, they are almost certain to exacerbate workers’ wage and safety issues without fully solving agriculture’s labor problem — and leave the underlying causes of this labor shortage unaddressed.

While the agriculture sector has suffered labor deficits since the 1940s, the shortage has worsened in the past two decades. Farmers say they are leaving blueberries, wine grapes, and strawberries to rot in their fields because they don’t have enough workers to harvest them; a recent study found that the average farmer employs 21 percent fewer farmworkers than they say they need. Field and crop workers are aging; the number of new farmworkers immigrating to the country has declined; and nobody else is taking on the work. American-born workers tend to avoid these jobs, which are dangerous and low-paid; at least 20 percent of farmworker families live below the federal poverty line. Native-born workers “will only work for one day or half a day, and then they quit,” says Cesar Escalante, a professor of agriculture and applied economics at the University of Georgia. “They cannot tolerate the working conditions.” 

Rather than enticing farmworkers to stay with adequate pay or better working conditions, the agriculture industry’s go-to move has long been to make it harder for them to quit — in some cases, a lot harder. Historically, America’s farmworkers have been enslaved, imprisoned, forced into debt, displaced and food insecure, under threat of deportation, or otherwise oppressed. At the federal level, agricultural employers are still largely exempt from many labor laws, including child labor laws, the right to form a union, and the right to overtime pay. This dates back to the 1930s, when southern Democrats refused to support President Roosevelt’s labor rights overhaul unless it excluded agricultural and domestic workers, who in the Jim Crow South were mostly Black. 

A product of the Reagan administration, the H-2A program was implemented in its current form to address agricultural labor shortages by providing farmers with a legal, foreign-born workforce. On the surface, the visa might seem like a better deal than the one many farmworkers have. In contrast to undocumented workers, H-2A workers are given temporary legal status, and employers are required to provide them with housing and, in most cases, an hourly minimum wage. And some workers have decent experiences in the program. “In my personal experience, my employer pays me what he owes me, down to the minute,” says Samuel, an H-2A worker in North Carolina who asked to use a pseudonym out of fear of retaliation. Samuel, who’s also an organizer with El Futuro es Nuestro, a labor advocacy group, has his own bedroom and access to a clean kitchen and bathroom. “Thank God I’ve gotten to where I am.”

But the visa also gives employers an extraordinary amount of control over their employees. H-2A workers are only eligible to work for the farmer who sponsors their visa, and switching jobs, while possible, can be prohibitively difficult. If they quit, they’re sent back to their home countries, and for many H-2A workers that’s not a viable option either. 

Because H-2A is famously difficult for employers to navigate, many farmers outsource hiring to third-party recruiters and contractors — and many of those recruiters illegally charge workers fees for connecting them with job contracts. And though it is illegal under the law governing H-2A, some farmers force their workers to pay for their own travel from their home countries. As a result, more than half of H-2A workers enter the country with significant debt and could face financial ruin, and possibly violent retribution, if they return home before paying it off. This is why labor advocates often compare H-2A to indentured servitude: In practice, H-2A can become a form of debt bondage, where workers are trapped in jobs until their debts are paid.

Rather than address these issues, the Trump administration has made H-2A cheaper and easier for farmers to use.

Plenty of employers abuse the power that H-2A gives them over their employees. A survey conducted by the labor advocacy group Centro de los Derechos del Migrante found that 100 percent of H-2A workers interviewed had experienced at least one serious legal violation during their employment; a report from the Government Accountability Office found that 84 percent of federal investigations of H-2A workplaces have found at least one violation. In aninterview with Prism media, Mike Rios, a regional agricultural enforcement coordinator for the Department of Labor, which oversees the H-2A program, described wage theft as “baked into” it. In his capacity as an organizer, Samuel has seen his fellow H-2A workers deprived of water and forced to work sick. “Some workers have died from these conditions,” he told me.

Some employers use methods far beyond the “indentured servitude” that many H-2A workers experience. The Polaris Project, an anti-trafficking nonprofit, has connected H-2A to human trafficking, and while the extent of the visa’s trafficking problem is hard to quantify, the anecdotal evidence is glaring. In 2021, the Department of Justice charged two dozen employees of a farm labor contracting company with imprisoning H-2A workers behind electric fences, withholding their wages, and threatening them with guns to keep them in line. Defendants bought and traded the H-2A workers among themselves; several workers were raped repeatedly, and at least two died. H-2A workers were similarly held against their will and sexually assaulted in a 2024 case settled in North Carolina, and a trafficking case is currently working its way through the courts in Michigan. 

When employers mistreat H-2A workers, they usually get away with it; the program’s regulations are well-intentioned but rarely enforced. On the federal level, H-2A is overseen by DOL, which is so chronically understaffed that it inspects fewer than 1 percent of farms a year. State labor agencies can also be debilitatingly understaffed, and some of the states with the highest numbers of H-2A workers, like Florida, don’t have their own labor departments at all. In my own reporting, I’ve found that employers who are found guilty of labor violations are rarely banned from the H-2A program. In one case, from 2017, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration determined that an H-2A worker had died of heat-related illness and that his employer had deprived him of water. In 2019, the agency fined his employer $9,750. He was allowed to bring three more H-2A workers into the country later that year.

“They [the employers] can do anything to you,” Nestor, a former H-2A worker, told me, years after his employer had illegally taken his passport and deprived him of food and water. (Nestor’s name has been changed out of fear of retaliation.) “Anything at all.”

Rather than address these issues, the Trump administration has made H-2A cheaper and easier for farmers to use. Last October, the DOL issued a new rule that effectively cut the majority of H-2A workers’ pay and allowed farmers to deduct up to 30 percent of workers’ wages to compensate themselves for housing they’re required to provide. To worker advocates, this housing-related change is particularly galling; in the Centro de los Derechos del Migrante study, about half of H-2A workers surveyed claim the housing they may now have to pay for is overcrowded, unsanitary, or unsafe. In extreme cases, workers have been run over and killed by their own trailers and burned to death in trailer fires. Some workers are forced to sleep four to a bed, says Farmworker Justice legal director Lori Johnson, and “alternate who’s on the floor.”

Congress could increase funding to allow the DOL to properly investigate labor violations, and regulators could ban abusive employers from the program — something that rarely if ever happens.

A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a nonpartisan think tank, estimated that, collectively, these policies will transfer between $4.4 and $5.4 billion a year from farmworkers to their employers. The United Farm Workers and other advocacy groups have sued, arguing that the pay cuts illegally penalize the few farmworkers who are U.S. citizens and work alongside H-2A workers. Samuel thinks these changes could backfire on employers. H-2A pay could sink so low that experienced workers like himself would quit, having already used the program to create some stability for themselves in their home countries.

If H-2A workers object to these conditions, there is now far less they can do about it. Last summer, DOL rescinded a Biden-era rule that extended certain labor rights to H-2A workers and explicitly protected them from trafficking. Farmers can now retaliate against workers who complain about bad conditions, and prohibit “outsiders” — like labor organizers — from visiting workers at home. Employers also are also no longer prohibited from confiscating workers’ passports, a tell-tale sign of labor trafficking. And it’s increasingly unlikely that workers’ abuse claims will be investigated. Thanks in part to the Trump administration’s cuts last year, the resource constraints that have long plagued H-2A oversight have gotten worse. The Department of Labor currently employs between 490 and 611 investigators, the lowest number on record in its history; they’re tasked with overseeing 11 million workplaces.

“Employers are going to know that they can act with total impunity,” says Daniel Costa, a lead researcher at EPI.

Theoretically, lawmakers could overhaul H-2A in a way that does right by workers. Congress could increase funding to allow the DOL to properly investigate labor violations, and regulators could ban abusive employers from the program — something that rarely if ever happens. The recruitment process could be streamlined and tightly regulated to eliminate the illegal fees that entrap many workers, and farmers could be fined or held liable if they partner with recruiters who operate illegally. Perhaps most importantly, policymakers could make it easier for H-2A workers to change jobs and give them a path to legal residency, both of which would minimize the power that employers have over them.

But the agricultural lobby has aggressively opposed many of these ideas, and no one in the Trump administration has publicly backed them. The industry argues that such worker-friendly reforms would make the program even more expensive and bureaucratically onerous than it already is. 

This brings us back to the root cause of the agriculture sector’s labor shortage: Many farmers aren’t paying workers what they’re worth because they either can’t afford to or they prioritize profit over worker rights. And even if all the changes laid out by the administration and Congress are implemented, a decade from now H-2A will still only supply an estimated 42 percent of our agricultural workforce. What is being described as “reform” in Washington right now is going to make the many problems that plague H-2A worse without solving this root problem. As long as we avoid addressing the fundamental reason for the labor shortage, farmers will still be short-staffed, and the workers they do hire will be worse off for the changes.

“In the United States, we live in enslavement or semi-enslavement,” Jorge (whose name has been changed out of fear of retaliation), a former H-2A worker who’d endured abuse, told me several years ago. If current policy trends prevail, more workers will suffer from these conditions, and abusive employers will keep getting away with it.