As Carr drives his tan Chevy SUV past tidy rows of ripening peaches, he describes how the workers have helped him grow his business and how he, in turn, has helped them earn enough money to buy houses in Mexico and put their kids through college. "They are like family," says Carr, stopping his truck along the side of the road and walking into a field of trees.

He waves down a tractor and asks the driver — in rudimentary Spanish — where the supervisor is. The driver pulls a smartphone out of his pocket and calls José MartÃ­n Carbal RamÃ­rez, who appears a few moments later wearing a baseball cap and a Bluetooth earpiece. RamÃ­rez has been working at Titan Farms for about 16 years, Carr says, and now oversees a harvesting crew of 60 workers, eight tractors, and two buses.

The 44-year-old native of Hidalgo, Mexico, says he supports his wife and two sons back home on his hourly wage of $10.75. He's bought a house, a car, and now pays his son's college tuition. It's a relief to be able to work legally in the United States and return home each year, he says. But it's also a sacrifice. "I left my son when he was 3, and now he's 17, 18, and I haven't watched him grow. That's the same for all these workers here," says RamÃ­rez.

The work is hard too, which is why RamÃ­rez thinks Americans don't last long on the job. Farmworkers start picking peaches at dawn and may work up to 16 hours in a day at the height of the harvesting season. "Agriculture is some of the heaviest work there is," he says. "If right now it starts to rain really hard, we have to keep working. The harvesting needs to be done. So an American can't put up with this work pace."

His employees run back and forth from the trees to the tractor, dumping bags of peaches into boxes and packing them into plastic bins. Each worker fills about 200 bags, and each tractor makes about eight trips to unload the fruit at the packing shed.

Inside the shed, Esperanza Orozco sits on a platform watching line workers sort the green bell peppers that also grow on the farm. The 44-year-old woman from Nayarit, Mexico, started picking peaches here two decades ago and now runs the farm's guest-worker program.

Orozco credits Titan Farms for helping her achieve the American dream. She was a single mother working at a furniture store in the resort town of Puerto Vallarta when she decided to look for work in the U.S. Income from the furniture store job barely covered the cost of food for her and her 3-year-old daughter. She said she remembers owning only one pair of jeans and a pair of shoes that matched everything.

"When you don't have children, that's OK. But when you have children, you know you don't want that for [them]," she says, holding back tears. Her daughter is now an architect and just started her own architecture firm, she adds with pride.

Orozco lives on the farm with the other workers, who often line up to call relatives via Skype on one of the computers Carr provides in the break room. Sometimes they drive into town to go to the grocery store or run errands. Orozco said it frustrates her that people assume they are all "illegals," especially because Carr works so hard to do everything by the book. "He cares for the workers; he follows the law," says Orozco. "He deserves help for whatever he is fighting for."

Carr meets with Orozco and the other workers every few months to update them on the prospects of immigration reform. Right now, he's not feeling very optimistic. "I'm never going to give up hope, but I think our opportunities for getting immigration reform done under this Congress are very bleak," he says.

This article is part of our Next America: Communities project, which is supported by a grant from Emerson Collective.

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Alexia Fernández Campbell is a former staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers immigration and business. She was previously a reporter at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the Spanish-language newspaper of The Palm Beach Post. Connect Twitter

Reena Flores is a Video Producer at National Journal.