H-2A Grew 185% in a Decade. Enforcement Didn't Keep Up.

The thesis is simple, and it is damning: the federal government has spent a decade expanding the H-2A temporary agricultural worker program faster than it has ever built the enforcement infrastructure to police it. The result is a program where exploitation is not an aberration — it is a documented pattern baked into the structure.

New Labor Department data reported by Farm Policy News shows H-2A job certifications rose 17 percent in the first half of fiscal year 2026 compared to the same period in 2025. That number follows a decade in which the program expanded 185 percent. Visa holders now represent roughly one-sixth of the entire US agricultural labor force. Fiscal year 2025 was the first year the program ever certified more than 400,000 positions.

At the same time, a Government Accountability Office review of 2,857 Department of Labor investigations conducted between 2018 and 2023 found that 84 percent uncovered violations — fraud, labor trafficking, and abuse. Not edge cases. Not outliers. Eighty-four percent.

That is the enforcement gap. And it only widens as the program grows.

How a visa becomes a leash

Understanding the gap requires understanding the program’s structural flaw. H-2A workers arrive in the United States on visas tied to a single employer. If they leave that employer — or are sent home — their legal status evaporates. That arrangement gives employers near-total power over people whose survival, housing, and legal presence in the country depend on staying in their employer’s good graces.

As one farmworker advocate quoted in the GAO report put it: “Having workers tied to an employer…creates such a power differential that exacerbates vulnerability to forced labor.”

That power differential is not incidental. It is the program’s architecture. Federal certification requires employers to attest they cannot find domestic labor, to provide housing, and to pay at least the Adverse Effect Wage Rate — a floor set to prevent guest workers from undercutting domestic wages. But attestation and reality routinely diverge. The DOL investigations the GAO reviewed documented wage theft, housing that failed basic safety standards, recruiters who charged illegal fees, and in the worst cases, trafficking.

The Agriculture Department moved in fall 2025 to lower required guest worker wages substantially — a policy that reduced program costs for employers and reduced protections for workers in the same stroke.

The numbers the industry would prefer you not add up

The H-2A program’s expansion tracks almost perfectly with the decline of domestic agricultural wages as a share of farm revenue. Farms that once competed for domestic workers by raising pay found a federally administered alternative: recruit abroad, certify the need, and import a workforce that cannot easily leave.

This is not a conspiracy. It is an incentive structure. When the labor market price for harvesting lettuce or milking dairy cows rises high enough to attract US workers, farms will pay it. When an alternative exists that keeps prices lower and workers less able to organize or quit, farms will use that alternative. H-2A is that alternative, at scale.

The 185 percent growth figure tells the story. In 2013, roughly 85,000 H-2A positions were certified. By FY2025, the number exceeded 400,000. The workers certified through this channel are doing work that is central — not seasonal, not incidental — to the US food system. As this site has reported, those workers often labor under conditions — extreme heat, limited water access, substandard housing — that domestic workers would and do refuse to accept.

Meanwhile, DOL enforcement staffing has not grown at anything close to the pace of H-2A expansion. The Wage and Hour Division, which is responsible for investigating H-2A violations, was conducting roughly 570 agricultural investigations per year across the 2018–2023 period the GAO reviewed. Against a program certifying hundreds of thousands of positions annually, that coverage is statistical noise.

Expansion proposals ignore the enforcement floor

The program is not just growing — it is being redesigned to grow faster. House Agriculture Committee Chairman Glenn Thompson has drafted legislation that would redefine “temporary” work as any contract under 350 days, a change that would make dairy operations and other year-round farms broadly eligible for H-2A. Dairy farms gained official clarification on their H-2A eligibility in June 2026, accelerating a trend that advocates say will deepen worker vulnerability in a sector where employees work daily, year-round, with no seasonal endpoint.

None of the expansion proposals currently before Congress include proportional investment in DOL enforcement capacity. The GAO report was not produced as an indictment — it was produced as a performance review. The agency’s recommendation was, essentially, that DOL get better at tracking violations and coordinating across agencies. The structural flaw — the employer-tied visa, the power differential, the housing dependency — was not addressed, because Congress has not asked it to be.

Who pays for the gap

The workers who pay for the enforcement gap are the people the H-2A program is nominally designed to protect. Domestic agricultural workers, meanwhile, see their wages held down as a workforce willing to accept lower pay for fear of deportation competes for the same jobs. The exploitation documented in H-2A compounds with conditions that are dangerous by any standard — heat, pesticide exposure, repetitive strain — and that are underregulated precisely because agriculture has historically been carved out of worker protection statutes.

The food supply chain depends on this labor. One-sixth of the agricultural workforce is now guest workers certified through a program where the majority of federal investigations find violations. That fact does not appear on a food label. It does not show up in a commodity price. It is absorbed by the workers themselves.

A 17 percent surge in certifications in half a year is not a policy success story. It is a measure of how far the program has expanded beyond the enforcement capacity meant to keep it honest — and how willing federal policy has been to let that gap widen in the name of keeping food cheap and farms solvent.

The GAO’s 84 percent violation rate should be the headline. The certification surge is just the context that explains why the rate is not getting better.

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Source: Farm Policy News, University of Illinois Extension (June 16, 2026).