Last spring, Carmelo Mendez was pruning peach trees in Colorado on a temporary visa, missing his children and wife back home, but excited about how his $17.70 hourly wage would improve their lives. This spring, he’s back in the Mexican state of Tlaxcala frantically searching Facebook for a job on one of the thousands of farms across the US that primarily employ guest workers like him.
Mendez is one of the more than 300,000 foreign agricultural workers who comes to the US every year on an H-2A visa, which allows him to temporarily work plowing fields, pruning trees and harvesting crops in states from Washington to Georgia, Florida to New York, Texas to California. But as federal immigration policies change rapidly, farmers and workers alike are uncertain about their future.
“Without [this guest worker program], I believe agriculture in the US would decline a lot because people there don’t want to do the work,” Mendez said.
As the fate of the hundreds of thousands of undocumented farm workers remains in limbo amid Donald Trump’s mass deportation threats, and the administration’s H-2A policies are undecided, the future of these guest workers remains unclear. Their numbers grow each year – and they are increasingly central to an industry historically dominated by undocumented workers. The industry isn’t creating new jobs either.
Farmers agree with farm workers like Mendez. They say they cannot attract other workers to their rural fields.
The debate over guest workers is dividing Republican support. Jonathan Berry, who was nominated to be the solicitor at the Department of Labor, wrote the labor chapter for Project 2025, the rightwing proposal to overhaul the government from the Heritage Foundation thinktank. That section advocates for replacing H-2A workers with local workers and automation. While technology could replace some specific farm tasks, many crops still depend primarily on human labor, and small farmers say they can’t afford to invest in equipment that could take more than a decade to pay off. Other co-authors of the chapter, such as economist Oren Cass, do not think the jobs should be eliminated, but that farmers should improve working conditions to attract citizens to them instead.
On the other hand, Trump’s power depends on a coalition that includes agricultural communities, who voted for him at almost 80% in 2024, according to Investigate Midwest, a journalism non-profit. Agribusiness also donated more than $24m to his re-election. Farm groups insist US citizens are unwilling to do the arduous labor and that eliminating H-2A workers could collapse the food system. They generally advocate for loosening regulations for H-2A workers, like reducing wage and housing requirements. Trump heeded their calls before. In 2019, his Department of Labor unsuccessfully proposed removing some regulations on the H-2A.
Harvest season approaching
As seasonal harvests begin, farmers nationwide are bringing over workers.
At Crist Bros Orchards in Walden, New York, H-2A workers diligently prune back apple tree branches covered with white flowers freshly burst from pink buds so that each future apple will get the same access to the sun. At the packing house, some load last season’s apples out of refrigerators on to conveyor belts while others check for irregularities before packaging.
The orchard has been in the Crist family since 1883, and Jenny Crist now runs it alongside her brother and parents. She said their first wave of workers came this past March and are preparing the orchards for harvest, when more workers come to pluck apples off the trees. By the end of the year, more than 150 H-2A workers will have passed through the compound to help produce the apples sold at supermarkets down the east coast.
“[H-2A is] providing labor that allows us to have a farm 70 miles north of New York City, and provide food in the United States, and employ people year-round,” Crist said. “Without it, we would certainly not be farming apples. My guess is that this would probably be houses.”
The H-2A visa was created by the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, a huge measure that simultaneously cracked down on employers hiring immigrants without work authorization and provided “amnesty” to close to 3 million immigrants without legal status. The law says that farmers must demonstrate an attempt to hire locally first and pay H-2A workers above the minimum wage. Unlike local workers, H-2A workers must also be provided transportation to and from their homes, housing for the season and daily transportation.
Labor leaders argue farmers prefer H-2A workers, despite their costs, because they are easily exploitable. Since the visa is connected to their employment, workers cannot find a job elsewhere, making their ability to be in the country completely dependent on an employer who can revoke it at any moment, and sometimes holds on to their passports, against DOL requirements.
This reluctance to leave an abusive worksite can be compounded by the fact that many H-2A workers arrive with debt they have accrued from paying recruiters to get here. Employers are required to pay all recruitment costs, but recruiters’ practices go largely unregulated since they operate internationally.
The situation of agriculture workers in the US is really bad already, but what they’re going to do is legalize this oppression.
The DC-based Economic Policy Institute, a liberal thinktank, has said this amounts to a program that exploits and silences migrant workers, replacing year-round workers in the process. In some cases, US prosecutors have accused farmers and recruiters of using the H-2A program to engage in forced labor trafficking.
“The situation of agriculture workers in the US is really bad already, but what they’re going to do is legalize this oppression,” said Carlos Marentes, executive director of the El Paso-based Centro de Los Trabajadores Agrícolas Fronterizos. “In the H-2A program, the way they’re proposing to get rid of the regulations and any guarantees that workers get is going to look like legalized slavery. The industry understands that they need a labor force, but they [want] a labor force that is going to be afraid, that is going to be grateful because the employer is providing you a job.”
Undocumented workers left behind?
If mass deportations go forward as promised, growers and ranchers will be even more desperate for these workers. Undocumented workers compose about 40% of the agricultural workforce, according to the US Department of Agriculture.
These longtime farm workers say that the system is designed to replace them with this more vulnerable group, limiting their work opportunities and decreasing their union’s power by giving farmers an alternative labor pool.
“It’s very clear to us that the deportation of undocumented workers is to clear the field for bringing in H-2A workers instead of having these farm worker families that are part of our community now for over 20 years and providing them [legal] status to continue being productive community members,” said Rosalinda Guillen, a farm union leader in Washington state who grew up in the fields and founded Community to Community, a local non-profit. “Everybody in this country is an immigrant and has had the opportunity to build community and root themselves and all of a sudden the families that came here from Mexico don’t?”
In 2023, a bipartisan coalition in the House of Representatives introduced the Dignity Act, which aimed to address this by extending legal status to long-term farm workers while at the same time expanding the H-2A visa. The proposal eventually failed, though, after Republicans reversed course on it.
Workers still needed
In Minnesota’s Red River valley, Scott Field runs Field Brothers Farm with his brother John, growing grains, beans and sugar beets on the same land his family has worked for five generations. His local community has shrunk as younger generations moved to cities, leaving the Field brothers dependent on H-2A workers.
“There is just flat out nobody out here available to work,” Scott Field said.
With housing and transportation factored in, Field says they spend more than $30 an hour on H-2A workers. It would be easier if they could just employ them as US citizens, he said as he detailed why.
“These are people who are working, making money, spending money in our communities, and paying taxes. Talk about a revitalization of Rural America if they made it easier for them to come here and stay with their families,” Field said.
Changes to the H-2A visa would also probably be felt in Mexico, where over 91% of the H-2A workers come from. Some have small subsistence farms, or are part of the 2 million people who became landless with the 1994 onset of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and depend on their seasonal incomes to provide their families with basic necessities.
Flavio Vázquez has worked at Crist Bros Orchards for the last five years, earning more than double in an hour packing apples than what he could in a day in his home in the Mexican state of Morelos. According to 2020 estimates, more than half of Morelos’s population lives in poverty despite unemployment being below 2%. The fact that the visa allows him to escape poverty doesn’t mean that it is ideal for him, though.
Vázquez must spend eight months a year living between a warehouse and a dorm 2,500 miles away from his loved ones, relieved to be earning a higher income, but at a cost. While he enjoys his job in New York’s Hudson valley, he wishes he could bring his family and build a permanent life.
“In Morelos, the situation is difficult, so I come here to stabilize the community there economically and to have resources for my family,” Vázquez said, looking resigned as apple-scanning machinery roared in the background.
“In Mexico, you leave your children, your wife, your parents, who support you emotionally. I would feel a lot more comfortable with my family here.”
This story was co-published with Puente News Collaborative in partnership with Palabra and the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University at the City of New York (Cuny). Puente News Collaborative is a bilingual non-profit newsroom, convener and funder dedicated to high-quality, fact-based news and information from the US-Mexico border.
