This article is part of Food Tank’s primer series, “Food Tank Explains.” Each installment unpacks the ideas, innovations, and challenges shaping today’s food and agriculture systems, offering clear insights into complex topics. To explore more articles in the series, click here.
The H-2A program allows United States agricultural employers to hire foreign workers temporarily or seasonally when there are insufficient qualified and available U.S. workers.
Since its inception, the H-2A program has grown exponentially. The U.S. Department of State (DOS) issued 44 H-2A visas in the program’s first year in 1987. It has become the nation’s largest temporary visa program, with more than 315,000 visas issued in 2024.
The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) certified 48,000 H-2A positions in 2005 and more than 398,000 in 2025. H-2A workers now are one sixth of the U.S. agricultural labor force, and data suggest H-2A growth is continuing. In the first half of 2026, DOL certified 17 percent more positions than it did during the same period in 2025.
According to the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), increasing H-2A demand is a direct reflection of the U.S. labor force. H-2A jobs arise from a proven lack of domestic interest in seasonal work, the organization says.
In 2025, U.S. workers applied for less than 0.04 percent of requested positions. “The lack of available labor is among the largest limiting factors of American agriculture,” says Zippy Duvall, AFBF President. “Most Americans don’t want to work on farms.”
To qualify for the H-2A program, agricultural employers must have a temporary or seasonal need for full-time labor. Employers apply for certification from DOL while recruiting U.S. workers for the positions. The employer must demonstrate that enough able, willing, qualified, and available U.S. workers cannot be found and that employing H-2A workers will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of similarly employed U.S. workers.
The employer then petitions U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Once approved, prospective workers may apply to DOS for H-2A visas. Employers must provide workers with housing, three meals per day, and convenient cooking facilities, and provide or pay for required transportation and travel expenses.
The program’s growth has occurred alongside widespread reports of fraud, labor violations, and worker exploitation. From 2018 through 2023, DOL investigated 2,857 H-2A employers. 84 percent uncovered at least one violation.
Though charging a fee for recruitment is illegal recruiters have charged workers thousands of dollars to secure H-2A jobs. Other schemes have collected money for jobs that do not exist. Documented on-farm violations range from wage theft and inadequate housing to retaliation and dangerous working conditions. Polaris’s Trafficking Hotline identified 2,841 H-2A visa holders who were victims of labor trafficking.
H-2A workers often live in remote camps with limited digital connectivity, Stacy Rhodes of the Agricultural Workers Advocacy Coalition (AWAC), tells Food Tank. This seclusion, coupled with language barriers, and limited access to legal assistance makes reporting abuses difficult.
Workers risk losing employment, immigration status, or future job opportunities if they assert their rights, Maggie Gray, Adelphi University Professor and Author of Labor and the Locavore: The Making of a Comprehensive Food Ethic, tells Food Tank. As a result, H-2A workers are unlikely to advocate for themselves.
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) reports that DOL’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD), tasked with federal enforcement, is “underfunded and understaffed,” with 800 WHD investigators monitoring 165 million workers. DOS describes oversight of temporary worker programs as “weak,” while EPI calls it “woefully inadequate.”
Stakeholders broadly agree that the H-2A program needs reform but differ over what those reforms should address. The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union opposes any increase in the program, while some farmers, worried for their labor supply amid a labor shortage, have sought to expand H-2A. House Agriculture Chair G.T. Thompson, alongside organizations including the American Dairy Coalition, Dairy Business Milk Marketing Cooperative, and the CATO institute, have proposed legislation extending the program to jobs that aren’t seasonal or temporary, like dairy, cattle, and pork producers.
United Farm Workers (UFW) has taken DOL to court, asserting that a rule reducing wages for U.S. farm workers and H-2A workers is unlawful. Meanwhile, other organizations and farmers complain that the cost of H-2A wages, transportation, and housing are too expensive. Increasing fees have hit farmer’s margins in nearly every step of the H-2A filing process, the AFBF describes.
The Equitable Food Initiative (EFI) and UFW focus on changing labor practices within the existing system. EFI certifies farms that meet standards for worker treatment and safety, while UFW has supported policies that would allow H-2A workers greater freedom to change employers without losing legal status.
Others organizations advocate community action. “we need to see more and more communities organizing,” says Gerardo Reyes Chavez of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Rather than settle, he continued, workers and organizers should “set examples with things that actually work through the market.”
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