Every spring, Marin Saenz leaves behind his family in Mexico for up to five months to come work on Reeves Farm in Baldwinsville. From the middle of May until the end of October, the only contact he has with his 2-year-old son is via cell phone. But Saenz said that’s the way it has to be.

“This is where the work is,” Saenz said through a translator. “The money is much better here.”

Saenz is one of 52 migrant laborers on Reeves Farm who works through the H2A visa program, which gives temporary work visas to foreign laborers to perform seasonal farm work. Brian Reeves said the farm has been participating in the program for about nine years.

“It is the only guaranteed legal way to get seasonal temporary workers,” Reeves said.

In order to participate, farmers have to demonstrate that there is a shortage of domestic workers to perform the job.

“You’ve got to put ads in the paper to try to recruit domestic workers. We usually get anywhere from zero to four responses, and out of those four, three and a half, when they learn the details of the job, they don’t want to do it,” Reeves said. “We have never successfully recruited a domestic worker and had them actually complete a day of work.”

Tony Emmi of Emmi Farms, who also uses H2A workers, has had the same experience.

“We try to get U.S. workers to do basically the planting and the harvesting, but to get a crew together to run a farm for the whole season is next to impossible,” Emmi said. “You can get twos and threes — you know, a guy here, a guy there — but to have a crew every day to do all the work that’s necessary to run a farm, it’s impossible.”

The labor struggle

The problem isn’t just a local one. Farms across the country are struggling to find laborers to work their fields. According to a report published in July by the Partnership for a New American Economy, a nonpartisan immigration reform advocacy group, fewer and fewer agricultural workers are coming to the U.S., in large part because of tighter border security.

Farm labor overall fell by 20 percent between 2002 and 2014, with the number of new field and crop workers entering the country decreasing by about 75 percent, particularly among entry-level workers who typically do the toughest manual labor like hoeing, harvesting and planting.

The report suggests that labor shortages result in a loss of crop production to the tune of $3.1 billion a year, with a corresponding loss in non-farm industries that support agriculture. That means a loss of jobs — 41,000 non-farm jobs according to the report.

For labor-intensive produce farms, like those in Baldwinsville, the problem is especially acute.

In order to keep their produce from rotting in the fields, more and more farmers, like Reeves and Emmi, are turning to the H2A visa program. A total of 204,577 H2A workers entered the country in 2013, the last year for which data is available, up from 183,860 in 2012, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Several other Central New York farms, including Critz Farms in Cazenovia, Behling Orchards in Mexico and Beak and Skiff Apple Farms and Deer Run Farms, both in LaFayette, also use H2A workers.

Reeves began using H2A laborers in about 2007, after thousands more Border Patrol agents were hired to secure the border between the U.S. and Mexico. He brings in about 50 workers each year to work his 450-acre property.

“The numbers of workers that we used to get were not showing up,” Reeves said. He said the workers he’d had in the past came with documents he assumed to be legitimate, but the experience suggested otherwise. “These guys all had documents. They all looked good to me, and then every time I would go to a farm labor meeting, they would tell us that three-quarters of the workers had fraudulent passports, so I can only assume that some of them were fraudulent.”

So he turned to the H2A visa program because despite the costs and the red tape, it was the only way to guarantee a legal and reliable work force.

An expensive workforce

And the costs are high. Tony Emmi estimates that he spends about $18,000 a year just getting 20 or so workers to his 300-acre farm from Mexico every spring. This year, he has 13 through the H2A program, in addition to seven legal alien guest workers who live in Mexico but have returned annually to work on the farm for more than 30 years.

“You put so much money out that you never get back, just to get the guys here,” he said. “I always say it’s probably the worst business decision a person could make.”

In addition to the cost of getting workers here, which must be borne by the farmer who hires them, the farmer also has to pay filing fees to the Department of Homeland Security in the amount of $325, as well as $1,000 plus $100 per worker (up to 10 workers, after which it’s a flat fee) to the U.S. Department of Labor. There’s also the cost of maintaining the housing, year round, as well as the wages, which are currently $11.26 an hour in New York state. The current minimum wage is $8.75.

“New York is third or fourth highest,” Reeves said. “Right off the bat, these guys are going to get at least $11.26 an hour, they are going to get housing and they are going to utilities, and they are going to get transportation here and home. Once a week we transport them to the store to get supplies and things. I easily have $15 an hour invested in these guys.”

But they’re more than just a labor force. According to Reeves’ brother Andy, who manages the workers at the farm, they’re more like family.

“To me it’s like having 52 of my sons around,” he said. “They’re just like family. We work like crazy, but we kid all the while.”

For the workers, who spend five months away from their biological families, having someone who is “como un padre,” or “like a father,” as Andy Reeves said, is comforting.

The migrants, most of whom hail from the small state of Querétaro in North-Central Mexico, 2,500 miles from Baldwinsville, often miss the milestones in their families’ lives — good and bad.

“Pedro [Espinosa]’s son died two years ago. He was 7 years old,” Andy Reeves said. “I had to book him fast to get him back to Mexico. I remember driving him to the Ithaca airport at 3 a.m.”

But because the money is so important to their families’ well-being, the workers, most of whom are in their late teens or early 20s, continue coming back every year to support their families.

“The money is much better here,” Marin Saenz said. “In Mexico, you can work all day for 150 pesos [a little under $9], eight hours. Here, you work four months and send that money back home.”

Under the microscope

If the cost of H2A labor doesn’t turn farmers away, the intense scrutiny will might.

“Because you are deeply involved with state and federal agencies, your name’s on every list,” Brian Reeves said. “Every inspector, every regulator, whether it is … the federal labor department, or OSHA, or the state labor department, they know you’re here and they want to come and look, and they want to make sure everything is on the up-and-up.”

But Reeves said it’s worth it.

“We looked at the extra expense, the extra red tape and the extra hassle. To me, it was like buying an insurance policy,” he said. “Nobody likes to pay for insurance, but you need it, and that ensured we had guaranteed legal workers here so there was never going to be a raid or an INS action in the middle of August.”

Fixing the system

With more and more farmers finding themselves in the same situation, Emmi said something needs to be done to streamline the process.

“I think they could eliminate a lot of the steps,” he said. He also thinks workers who have been to the country five years or more should be allowed to skip the extensive interviews. “If somebody has been in the program a while, I think their application should be shot right through so they can get it right out to Homeland Security. Because if they start getting a lot of people, it’s going to [cause] a lot of problems. It’s going to be tough for them to process everybody at once.”

Reeves said he thinks the whole system needs to be fixed.

“The current guest worker program has a lot of flaws, a lot of extra red tape. It needs fixing. It’s very broken,” he said. “That’s why farms don’t run and embrace it. It should be more user-friendly.”

Reeves also believes the program needs to be extended to include year-round farmers, like the dairy farmers that populate much of Central New York.

While neither Reeves nor Emmi purports to have the answers, they both agree the migrant workers need to be here.

“People like to refer to farm workers as unskilled workers, but believe me, these guys know what they’re doing,” Reeves said. “They know their jobs really well, they know the food safety requirements, they know how to pick stuff and not bruise it or pick stuff that is too green. I would not even want to try and train … domestic people.”

If the most stringent immigration reformers have their way, Reeves said it could be ruinous for farmers.

“If you just immediately shut down the borders, half the farm workers in this country are going to be ineligible,” he said. “That would be devastating for agriculture.”

And it’s not just agriculture that would suffer.

“If we didn’t have these guys … there wouldn’t be any jobs, drivers, fuel workers, equipment operators,” Emmi said. “Without the migrants, all the other jobs go too.”