In the early months of the year, thousands of men make their way north from Mexico and Central America to tend America’s most delicate crops.

They travel on chartered buses through the night to farms where they spend most of the year picking crops like blueberries and celery, produce still harvested best by human hands.

These are America’s H-2A workers, named for the visa the federal government grants them. The program is uncapped, and available to seasonal agricultural employers who can’t find domestic workers. Since 2013, as farmworkers have aged and immigration has slowed, H-2A holders have quadrupled to become a sixth of the agricultural labor force.

The program is poised to grow even faster. As the Trump administration pursues undocumented immigrants, it’s becoming harder to find workers, foreign or native-born. And the White House has restricted many avenues for legal immigration, such as refugee status, H-1B visas for skilled workers and any immigrant visas for people from 75 countries.

But farmers pushed back, and the Agriculture Department responded. Last fall, it lowered the wages that guest workers must be paid, substantially decreasing the cost of the program. In the first half of the 2026 fiscal year, the Labor Department approved 17 percent more visas than in the same period the year before.

In theory, the program is mutually beneficial. Growers get crucial help during the growing season, and foreign workers make far more than they would at home without having to risk sneaking across the border.

Amando Chavez’s sons had been working for AgriLabor, a farm contractor in Oregon, and recommended him for an H-2A position in 2023. He has come every year since. He farms some of his own land in Mexico’s Michoacan State, but doesn’t always get the price he would like for his vegetables.

“I come here, I get more money,” Mr. Chavez said, in hesitant English, while waiting for orientation before joining the cherry harvest. He never considered coming illegally. Although he won’t earn as much this year with the lower wage rates, he said it was still worth the trip.

The program’s rapid expansion, however, comes with significant risks. H-2A visas have historically been ridden with fraud, labor trafficking and abuse. According to the Government Accountability Office, of the 2,857 investigations that the Labor Department pursued from 2018 to 2023, 84 percent found violations.

The agriculture industry is trying to police itself and reward good behavior, but the efforts depend on the good will of growers and labor contractors, which take up an increasing share of the visas.

“Having workers tied to an employer for their legal status, their wages, working conditions, their ability to return, creates such a power differential that really exacerbates vulnerability to forced labor,” said Rachel Micah-Jones, executive director of the Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, which advocates on behalf of migrant workers.

High Standards, High Costs

Taylor Atkinson’s father got into labor contracting in 1990, supplying the reforestation industry in western Oregon with local workers. As willing hands became harder to find in the 2010s, the pair started a company called AgriLabor to bring in guest workers to cultivate watermelons and corn. Now, Mr. Atkinson hires about 2,000 workers on H-2A visas each year, serving labor-intensive crops within an hour’s drive of Hermiston, Ore.

Mr. Atkinson, who learned Spanish on a mission trip to Argentina, said he always wanted to operate the business ethically. His first big test was recruiting. In the H-2A program, recruiters often illegally charge workers thousands of dollars in fees for jobs with U.S. growers. In his first season, he advertised a recruiting event in Mexico on Facebook. A busload of workers showed up expecting jobs, having paid about $500 each to a fraudster who stole and modified Mr. Atkinson’s ad to lure them in.

“People are trying to scam workers all the time,” Mr. Atkinson said. After that, he did the job himself with trusted lieutenants, holding smaller events and advertising through word of mouth.

He went through a similar evolution with housing, which employers must provide along with transportation. First, he rented rooms for the growing season. But after one lease fell through at the last minute, he started buying apartment buildings and outfitting them with bunk beds, shared kitchens and air-conditioning.

Now AgriLabor is a complex operation. Mr. Atkinson has 10 industrial ice machines for supplying cold water and a warehouse full of pruning shears, fruit baskets, first aid kits and shovels. He has a housing maintenance department, 100 portable toilets, 100 vans, 20 school buses and an auto body shop. Since diesel mechanics are hard to find, he brings one in on an H-2A visa.

That level of service is expensive for growers, and they can be tempted by lower-cost competitors. A former employee of Mr. Atkinson’s who started his own labor contracting business was charged by the Justice Department this year with underpaying workers and exposing them to pesticides and extreme heat.

Oregon and Washington have enacted labor standards on top of the federal rules, which protect workers and add costs. When the federal Labor Department allowed employers to charge workers for housing, the rule was moot in Washington and California, where the deduction would drop workers below the state minimum wage. There are also heat protection rules and overtime requirements, which most states lack.

For Paige Hake, it has become almost too much.

She’s an organic cherry and apple farmer on a sweeping river plain in eastern Washington. Her father started hiring H-2A workers 20 years ago, as fewer locals started showing up for the harvest.

In the days before her 72 H-2A workers arrived, Ms. Hake dropped off boxes of new silverware and plates at the housing she rents from the Worker and Farmer Labor Association, a cooperative. The complex has well-tended landscaping, a picnic area with grills, an expansive kitchen and dining areas on each floor.

Labor is 80 percent of Ms. Hake’s expenses, and prices for fruit are not keeping up. “You bite the bullet because you’d rather have employees than not,” she said. She puts up with regular inspections and audits, and dreads more certifications: “It just seems like there is a lot of oversight.”

Weak Sticks, Missing Carrots

The conditions in the deeply Democratic Pacific Northwest are not universal. In states with looser regulations, there’s little pressure to improve.

Nearly a third of all H-2A workers in 2025 went to Florida, Georgia and North Carolina — states with minimal labor standards and weaker enforcement. In 2021, Georgia’s onion fields were the site of one of the largest labor trafficking cases in the Labor Department’s history, and North Carolina’s H-2A industry is dominated by a cooperative whose founder went to prison for fraud in 2015.

Caitlin Ryland, managing attorney with the farmworker unit of Legal Aid of North Carolina, said conditions had not improved much since then. H-2A workers are reluctant to complain if they are not being paid properly or their housing isn’t up to code.

“If you’ve got that unending supply where you could have a new crop of workers every single year, I don’t know what the incentives would be to provide shade when it’s not legally required, or provide flush toilets in migrant housing,” Ms. Ryland said.

That’s a problem that the Equitable Food Initiative has been trying to solve since 2008, when Costco; Oxfam, an antipoverty nonprofit; and the United Farm Workers began developing a certification for farms with good labor practices. In 2018, a broader group of retailers, including Walmart, pledged to protect human rights in the produce supply chain.

Some of the retailers pay a bonus to workers at certified farms, amounting to $35 million since the program started. E.F.I. says its certified farms are competitive because their employees are treated better and more motivated. But there is little commercial incentive to participate; only 32 U.S. farms have gotten certified.

Matt Rogers started a farm labor contractor called AgSocio after years working as a buyer for Whole Foods. The company is the only contractor to achieve E.F.I. certification. But this year, he folded the company back into its major investor, a large grower. He said buyers were reluctant to pay a premium for his pricier services.

“The market often does not meaningfully reward high-road labor practices,” Mr. Rogers said.

Joe Martinez, a former member of the United Farm Workers staff, started CIERTO, a nonprofit recruiting organization, with support from foundations, including Walmart’s. Certification hasn’t helped his sales, either.

“If the retailers don’t come forward and acknowledge it and start to provide a better price incentive, then I don’t see how this scales and becomes a standard business practice,” Mr. Martinez said.

Mr. Atkinson has dropped the stamp-of-approval strategy. AgriLabor was one of the first U.S. farm labor contractors to achieve an international certification called Clearview, and he said that it helped him improve some processes, but that it wasn’t worth paying to keep it current. He decided to not pursue E.F.I.’s full program, which would have cost about $50,000.

“It requires a lot of extra work time that needs to be compensated,” Mr. Atkinson said. “You can get a pulse on problems, but no customers, no distributors, no stores, require it.”

A group of West Coast growers and labor contractors are now going in a different direction, planning to propose an audit system that they hope will release them from some Labor Department rules and inspections.

Softer Power

Reyna Lopez, the executive director of Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste, a farmworker advocacy organization in Oregon, has long opposed the H-2A program out of a belief that it worsens conditions for workers already here. But she has recognized that its growth is beyond her control. Now she is the chair of E.F.I.’s board, hoping to improve conditions for all workers.

“We’re trying to build a standard here,” Ms. Lopez said.

To attract more produce companies, E.F.I. is allowing them to demonstrate a degree of responsibility by attending trainings and doing self-assessments. Over time, E.F.I. plans to tighten the criteria for staying engaged, and add a channel for worker feedback. Walmart says 98 percent of its produce comes from participating growers.

It’s a softer approach than Ms. Lopez is used to, but in the absence of stronger federal action, she thinks it’s worth a try — especially beyond Oregon, a state where protections for farmworkers are strong.

“In a place like North Carolina, the reality of passing something like that is slim to none,” she said. “You do need market solutions, things that are building relationships, building different kinds of incentives.”

In Britain, employers organized to clean up the labor contracting industry after 23 migrant laborers drowned while harvesting cockles in 2004. A parallel nonprofit, Stronger Together, began organizing similar efforts internationally.

Last year, Stronger Together started a group in the United States focused on farm labor contractors. Nikki Enersen, its director, saw how the H-2A program could improve farmworkers’ lives while she worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“We don’t have the pressure in the U.S. right now to say that the government is going to come after you,” Ms. Enersen said. “So the idea is that, our founding members, they’re already doing it right. They want to be able to raise up the sector as a whole.”

That project, like E.F.I.’s work, is funded by the Walmart Foundation. People who have been through these efforts in the past say that philanthropic support isn’t enough.

Hannah Freeman built the produce and floral market for Fair Trade USA, the certification organization for international labor and sustainability standards. She said it improved conditions for farmworkers in other countries when U.S. buyers realized that the Fair Trade label mattered to consumers.

Now she runs Ganaz, a company that provides software for H-2A recruiters.

Ms. Freeman said she hadn’t seen voluntary efforts translate to better conditions for workers in the H-2A program. “The Walmart Foundation, they fund these really great initiatives, but their buyers aren’t making their suppliers adopt these things.”

The problem is also baked into the structure of the H-2A statute, which binds workers to one employer. Michael Clemens, an economist who studies immigration, believes that allowing visa holders to change jobs is the best way to prevent abuse. South Korea, for example, lets workers quit and be rehired.

“Giving workers the opportunity to seek out better employers is so much more effective than any regulatory apparatus,” Mr. Clemens said. “Workers have the strongest incentive to make sure their rights are enforced.”