Wilson couldn’t understand why it was legal. The H2A visa program, as she understood it, was meant to provide the agriculture industry with seasonal farmworkers.

Until recently, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL)—which, alongside the State Department, oversees the visa program—seemed to agree. In 2008, the DOL rejected a request by Alewelt Concrete Inc. to employ workers on H2A agricultural visas to help build livestock confinement facilities in Iowa. The DOL explained in a refusal letter, “The requested workers will not be raising, feeding or caring for the livestock in the facilities.” Alewelt appealed, however, and reached a deal with the DOL to dismiss the case.

In the decade since, Alewelt and other farm construction companies have brought in hundreds of workers on H2A visas. In These Times spoke with H2A visa workers doing farm construction in Illinois, consulted legal experts and migrant-worker advocates, and studied DOL records, and determined that the practice has become widespread—particularly in building the hog confinement facilities that are mushrooming in the Midwest.

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Pork is a booming industry, driven largely by growing exports to China. Between 2015 and 2016, the profits pork packers earned per head of hog almost doubled, according to the North American Meat Institute.

As profits continue to rise, Iowa, Minnesota and Illinois lead the country in number of hogs slaughtered, and the hog industry’s infrastructure continues to expand. The number of “concentrated animal feeding operations,” known as CAFOs, has quadrupled in Iowa to more than 10,000 since 2001, according to a report by the Iowa Policy Project. The dramatic increase has raised serious environmental and health concerns for neighbors who deal with overflowing manure lagoons, overwhelming odors and air pollution from the facilities. And many workers who staff the CAFOs are themselves immigrants who endure low pay and dangerous working conditions.

The CAFO boom also requires construction workers, but it’s hard to come by exact figures on how many are on H2A visas. Full of typos and misspellings, DOL databases tracking H2A workers require much guesswork. Over the years, “construction” appears and disappears as a database category.

Even officials with the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which released a report about the H2A program in 2015 (and updated it in 2017), find the records difficult to decode. “We were trying [to] answer what [H2A workers] were doing once they were in the country—but we couldn’t match [the federal records] up with what they were actually doing,” says Cindy Barnes, director of GAO’s Education, Workforce and Income Security division. Barnes believes the muddled records are due to a lack of coordination between the DOL and the State Department.

Asked by In These Times about the number of H2A farmworkers doing construction work, DOL officials pointed to a specific category code that has been in use for H2A only since 2015. But even after 2015, many companies with names that include “building” or “concrete” filed as if their workers were picking crops or milking cows.

Based on the DOL’s category for farm construction jobs, only 36 construction applications for H2A visas were approved in 2015, 2016 and 2017. But when In These Times searched the database for the word “construction” as a subcategory of “primary crop,” more than 300 applications were approved over that three-year period. Most of the applications were for multiple workers.

The amount of H2A visas issued for Iowa and Illinois has been climbing markedly, from 2,071 in 2012 to 3,475 in 2016. Much of the increase can be attributed to one company: Alewelt Concrete. Alewelt made the DOL’s 2016 list of the top 10 H2A employers in the country, with 1,343 certified H2A workers. Alewelt is the only construction company on the list.