Local farmworkers face lowered protections, wages
The barracks are situated at the end of a winding gravel road.
Lily Levin photo
For the past 11 years, Ricardo has spent nine months each year at Barber Orchards in Waynesville — and the other three with his wife and adult children in northern Mexico.
“I wish [I could stay] only for six months, but now we are coming for some time — for nine months — because the orchards are being renewed. The big trees are being cut to put in smaller ones,” Ricardo said, adding that the duration of stay at his location is either nine or four-and-a-half months.
Ricardo is one of nine men working and living at the orchard. All nine are part of the H-2A program, a growing United States visa initiative in which domestic growers employ mainly Mexican farmworkers. In fiscal year 2024, H-2A workers numbered nearly 385,000 — over 27,000 of whom resided in North Carolina, the fifth most populated state for the program.
The farm labor shortage has been a pressing issue for years due to issues such as upward mobility, unpredictable climates, an aging farming population and the grueling nature of the work. Furthermore, 70% to 90% of most major food sectors is concentrated among global mega-companies, turning these select few into the architects of marginal commodity value and high costs for farmers — while mandating food options and expenditures for consumers.
For farmers, the H-2A visa provides foreign labor amid the progressively shrinking domestic workforce. However, despite its benefits, many growers are concerned with what they call the bureaucratic red tape and burdensome regulation inherent to the program.
For workers, the H-2A visa is a means of providing a living for themselves and their families — with quite a few tradeoffs. Visa holders are dependent on their employer for every aspect of their livelihood, which can create fertile ground for labor violations, wage theft, trafficking and abuse.
Related Items
Grants available for agricultural projects
2025 A Look Back: Perfectly clear priorities award
Toltec wisdom resonates in today’s world
Root & Rise opens inclusive workspace
Though H-2A employers must adhere to certain federal and state standards — a set hourly wage, sufficient housing, provision of meals and/or cooking, absence of recruitment fees, non-discrimination, payment guarantees — an Economic Policy Institute report in 2022 found that less than 1% had been inspected by the government. And when the Department of Labor did investigate, according to the EPI, it noted wage and hour violations from 70% of employers.
Part of the reason farmworker conditions are largely unnoticed is because, as determined by 2015 Wake Forest University study, just under 40% of North Carolina migrant camps are “hidden” — inaccessible through a main road and embedded within structures or a rural landscape.
The migrant camp at Barber Orchards fits into the “hidden” category. The gray barracks is situated at the end of a winding gravel road along the side of a steep hill, shielded by magnificent, towering trees. It’s nestled within the mountainous landscape.
It’s also one of 23 migrant camp locations — seven in Macon, six in Jackson, 10 in Haywood — within SMN’s coverage area. And for the majority of the year, it’s Ricardo’s home.
At around 8 o’clock, the place smells of the fried eggs and beans simmering on the stove: dinner, the final daily task. Two hours later, all will have retired to their beds, alarms set for 6 a.m.
Ricardo told The Smoky Mountain News that in addition to breakfast, early mornings involve preparing his lunch. Sustaining the daily 11-hour shift — 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. — requires something to eat.
Farmworkers at the orchard get a 10-minute break at 10 a.m., an hour at noon for lunch, and a second short break at 4 p.m. for a snack. Upon returning to their housing, some form a line to use the shower, while others clean and wash up.
Policy and recission
The acute vulnerability of H-2A workers was addressed last year by a Biden administration rule entitled “Improving Protections for Workers in Temporary Agricultural Employment in the United States.” It granted the Department of Labor last-minute access to farms and migrant housing, allowed farmworker unions in certain instances, codified employer anti-retaliation policies and mandated worker protections such as seatbelts.
Generally, farm bureaus and farmers’ groups opposed the legislation, filing numerous lawsuits asserting federal overreach. The 2024 farmworker rule, they argued, added more paperwork to an already document-heavy program. In the end, the policy was successfully blocked in 17 Republican-led states. In North Carolina, however, it prevailed until June 2025, when the Trump administration’s DOL proposed a nationwide recission, removing all 2024 worker protections.
The DOL stated in its June press release: “The decision provides much-needed clarity for American farmers navigating the H-2A program, while also aligning with President Trump’s ongoing commitment to strictly enforcing U.S. immigration laws.”
According to Farmworker Justice Legal Director Lori Johnson, the rule’s nullification creates “less transparency in foreign worker recruitment, which may cause workers to be more vulnerable to fraud in foreign labor contracting as well as human trafficking.”
The proposal’s 85 federal register comments are a mixed bag. Unsurprisingly, migrant and farmworker advocacy groups were opposed to the recission, while supporting comments came from growers and farmers associations.
Other participants include National Nurses United. The union submitted a long document outlining its dedicated opposition. So did 18 state Attorneys General.
Then, USCIS had one word: “Yes.”
The DOL did not respond to a request for comment on the ruling’s implications.
The wage debate
Santiago, another of the orchard’s H2A visa holders, has opted to stay for just over four months. He has four children in northern Mexico between six and 15 years old. Santiago described why farmworkers return year after year, regardless of what they’re forced to leave behind.
“Give it your all here, because this is where we earn a little extra so that our family in Mexico can have a better life,” he said.
Housing is hidden by towering trees and a forested landscape. Lily Levin photo
Barber Orchards owner Benny Arrington must pay out set wages communicated by the North Carolina Growers Association, the organization through which he hires his workers.
“[The Growers Association] normally notify us about the first of December what the wages are going to be for the following season. I am hoping that there’s not an increase this year. There’s been an increase every year for the last 10 years,” said.
The Barber Orchards owner isn’t alone in his opinion of farmworker wages. In addition to concerns about bureaucratic red tape, grower complaints almost always highlight the costliness of the program. Fortunately for Arrington and other growers, wages won’t be rising anytime soon. But they won’t be stagnant, either.
Until early October, migrant farmworkers were mandated an hourly wage varying by state known as an Adverse Effect Wage Rate. The AEWR in North Carolina was most recently $16.16. Now, the Department of Labor lists the AEWR as $12.78 in its interim final ruling, with $1.69 subtracted as housing compensation. In reality, the statewide AEWR is $11.09.
“H-2A workers have previously received free housing as part of the contract, which makes sense since they still have their housing costs back home, where their family lives,” Johnson wrote to SMN in a statement.
In its IFR, the DOL also acknowledged that Trump administration immigration raids had resulted in the deportation of countless undocumented workers, previously accounting for over 40% of the farming labor force. Because of both the desire for cheap hands and the ongoing labor shortage, many farmers employed undocumented workers — and got away with paying them far less.
The rule posited that because growers have lost a significant portion of their underpaid workforce, they’ll be forced to hire more H-2A visa holders, all of whom would be owed the Adverse Effect Wage Rate.
“The near total cessation of the inflow of illegal aliens combined with the lack of an available legal workforce, results in significant disruptions to production costs and threatening the stability of domestic food production and prices for U.S consumers,” the IFR said.
The Department of Labor’s solution significantly decreases the AEWR of H-2A workers with the goal of making farming — and food prices — more affordable. But its reasoning is contradicted by calculations from a 2019 UC Davis report: raising farmworker wages by 40% would result in merely an extra $25 annual average household grocery cost.
Furthermore, the Census of Agriculture in 2022 determined that worker pay accounted for 12% of all farming expenditures. Meanwhile, farmers receive an average of 15 cents for every retail dollar.
Farmworker advocates say not only is the IFR a non-solution — it also creates other problems.
According to Johnson, “the H-2A Program will be used to bring in workers to do construction, mechanical work, trucking and other non-field work without these workers getting a higher wage than field labor so long as they are doing that work no more than 49% of the time.”
Amal Bouhabib, senior staff attorney at FarmSTAND, described the organization’s view of the IFR in a nutshell, “Anti-immigrant terror creates an artificial agricultural labor shortage, which the administration seeks to use as a pretext not for directing more ag work to U.S. workers, but for making H-2A labor as cheap, plentiful and exploitable as possible.”
Due to the federal lapse in appropriations, Southern state DOL representatives could not respond to a request for comment.
