‘Slavery never left agriculture’: Migrant farmers face dire conditions

‘Slavery never left agriculture’: Migrant farmers face dire conditions Categories: A&C Top Stories ‘Slavery never left agriculture’: Migrant farmers face dire conditions Alex Wallin and Alayna Day October 14, 2026 Noah Williford Farmers working on a fog-laden Christmas tree farm in North Carolina Nov. 20, 2024. The Appalachian has granted anonymity to the workers and workplace to maintain the safety of the photo’s subjects. Every day, farmworkers across North Carolina get up and head out to work long, demanding hours in extreme conditions, not knowing if their paycheck will be enough to support them and their families under federal regulations. President Donald Trump’s administration announced last year that it was enforcing regulatory changes nationwide involving drastic wage cuts for farmworkers. The impact varies by state, with North Carolina implementing decreases of around $5, making most farmworkers’ wages fall to around $11 an hour. Derrick Vela, the director of farmworker health for High Country Community Health, said these new regulations bring uncertainty to the future of the U.S. agricultural economy. “We’ve heard from many farm workers that they’re getting to the point where they don’t know if they’re going to be able to return,” Vela said. “They work here with a work visa, so they don’t know if they will return next year.” El Futuro Es Nuestro is an organization working to educate and improve the livelihoods of migrant farmworkers on H-2A visas, which are work visas allowing growers to bring in labor they can’t find domestically. Leticia Zavala, a coordinator for El Futuro Es Nuestro, said about 28,000 migrant farmworkers have come to North Carolina on these visas to fill the roles American-born laborers have left open. Zavala said under this H-2A program, migrant farmworkers’ lives are left at the hands of their employers — or the ones who hold their visas — allowing exploitation and manipulation to thrive, especially since growers have the power to revoke their workers’ visas at their discretion. One can go from documented to undocumented in a heartbeat. “A lot of growers see workers as recyclable,” Zavala said. “They don’t like a worker, they bring another one in, which is one of the reasons why we don’t like the way the H-2A program is in that sense, because really it’s the grower who controls the visa and controls how the workers are pressured and forced into doing the work that needs to be done.” The idea that migrant farmworkers are “recyclable” can also be seen in the working and living conditions they experience, both being barely livable at times.  H-2A visas obligate growers to provide housing for their workers. They take an additional charge from the farmworkers’ wages that goes toward their “rent” in a home that is well below living standards, Zavala said. Additionally, many of the comforts non-migrant workers experience are not extended to workers under an H-2A visa. “The farmworkers do not have the right to breaks in North Carolina. They don’t have the right to collectively bargain, so they can’t come together and talk to the grower about their working and living conditions,” Zavala said. “They’re exempt from a lot of the minimum wage standards, so some workers can technically make less than $7.25 an hour in agriculture, and in housing, their housing standards are less than jails.” Zavala said the expectations placed on these workers to labor in extreme conditions and live in poor ones are attached to a mentality that can be traced back to the principles of slavery.  “Slavery never left agriculture,” Zavala said. “We still see it. We’ve continued to see it since it was abolished.” Access to farmworker health care is more important than ever because of the extreme conditions and long hours these farmworkers face daily, said Anna Mullany, an assistant professor in App State’s Department of Public Health. “I have the farm worker program people with High Country Community Health in every semester in my rural health class because it’s really important for students to see the labor that is being done, whether it’s the Christmas trees or the tobacco farms or the poultry or the landscaping, that there are incredible sacrifices that these migrant workers do,” Mullany said. HCCH provides workers with walk-in clinics requiring no appointment, Vela said. The night clinic is open every Thursday from 3-8 p.m. in the HCCH pediatrics office, and a farmworker-specific walk-in clinic is available one Sunday a month. Vela also said HCCH has a medical mobile unit for farmworkers, where it brings a medical doctor to agricultural fields in need. “There’s a lot of limited resources already for all of us in rural areas, but it’s exacerbated, I think, with farmworkers,” Mullany said. Zavala said even though agricultural work has an immense impact on people’s daily lives, the respect and support the workers require in a time like this has not been met. Looking forward to the future, she said the struggle for farmworkers’ rights is a difficult one to pursue, but a necessary effort the community should be aware of. “We hope that one day farmworkers will have the right to breaks, and that will be covered under the minimum wage laws and will be covered under the right to organize and form union laws and that farm work will be a place where people who enjoy it can actually find dignity in it,” Zavala said. View Story Comments 0 Like This Story Share on Facebook Share on X Email this Story Print this Story Leave a Comment Tags: health Immigration Migrant Farmworkers Donate to The Appalachian $400 $2,500 Contributed Our Goal We hope you appreciated this article! Before you move on, please consider supporting The Appalachian's award-winning journalism. The bulk of our operational expenses — including printing, website hosting, training, and entering our work into competitions — is dependent upon advertising revenue and donations. We cannot exist without the support, whether financial or otherwise, of our fellow departments on campus, our local and regional businesses, and donations of time and money from alumni, parents, subscribers and friends. 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