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By Ross Courtney, Good Fruit Grower

Longtime orchard and vineyard managers helped build industry with hard work and amnesty.

Lupe Muñoz came to the United States at age 17 with a third-grade education.

He wasn’t destitute or desperate. It’s just the path men from his rural Jalisco, Mexico, neighborhood traveled. 

“When I grew up, everybody came to El Norte,” said Muñoz, who spent years dodging immigration agents as he worked at Northwest farms and began building a career in orchard management. “We were used to a mentality, as soon as we get of age, we’re gonna go. I mean, just the way it was.”

Muñoz, now 63, is among a cohort of Washington orchard and vineyard managers from Latin America who crossed the border illegally decades ago and went on to help build the tree fruit industry and their own professional careers with little education, a lot of hustle and a huge break from the U.S. government — amnesty.

Good Fruit Grower spent the past year getting to know three such managers nearing retirement. Here’s what they have in common: They love farming. They stress the importance of continual learning. They care deeply about their fellow employees.

“If you treat people right, they do good work for you,” said Miguel Rodriguez, a longtime manager for Sagemoor Vineyards in Mattawa. “You don’t want people to come work for you and hate the work they do. So, take care of people like a family. It’s important. That’s very important.”

The agricultural and labor policy that created the opportunity for Rodriguez and others on U.S. farms lasted only briefly in the 1980s. Since then, efforts to reform immigration policies have failed to gain political support, leaving farms chronically understaffed.

“My ex-patron called me a few months ago. ‘Where are these good people now?’” said Faustino Barrios, a longtime manager for a North Central Washington company. “This is what I told him: ‘I think the good people are old men right now.’”

Risk and opportunity

When Muñoz was young, he and his family considered deportation an uncomfortable but tolerable risk.

“It was not devastating,” said Muñoz, an area manager for River Valley Fruit in Washington’s Yakima Valley.

Following an older brother, he headed to Northwest farms in 1980. He remembers fleeing into hop yards when someone yelled “La Migra!” When agents began stopping cars to check green cards as workers left orchards, he started wearing a suit when he drove by, so they waved him through.

Muñoz got caught once in 1982 when coming out of a restaurant in Hood River, Oregon. After a week in Tijuana, Mexico, he came back to the U.S., paying a $350 coyote fee. 

At first, his only goal was to save enough money to buy himself a tractor back in Jalisco, where his family owned a subsistence corn, bean and cattle farm. But U.S. opportunities wowed him into staying. The American middle class seemed filthy rich. 

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which shaped the tree fruit industry workforce for a generation. The measure gave legal residency to those who had lived continually in the U.S. since 1982, or earlier, and done at least 90 days of agricultural work in the previous year. The act also made it a crime to knowingly hire an undocumented immigrant, and it created I-9 paperwork and the H-2A visa program. 

The amnesty application window technically ran from May 1987 to May 1988 and granted 18 months of temporary residency before transitioning to a Permanent Resident Card, or green card. Over the years, the federal government initiated multiple extensions and exceptions to that core policy.

Muñoz was one of nearly 3 million to take the deal.

Dave Gleason, a veteran horticulturist for Kershaw Cos., spent part of his career in the 1980s and 1990s with hiring as one of his responsibilities. The federal government forbade hiring undocumented immigrants, but investigating applicants risked violating their civil rights. 

“You didn’t really question their ID or paperwork,” said Gleason, who speaks fluent Spanish. “You could be charged with discrimination if you challenged them.”

In 1986, Gleason and his company helped some undocumented workers gather records and sent them on a bus to Olympia, Washington, to take advantage of Reagan’s amnesty, the last major overhaul of immigration law in the United States. One of those workers ended up becoming a longtime family friend.

The workers who received amnesty and legal status became “pillars to the success of the tree fruit industry,” said Ofelio Borges, program manager for the Washington State Department of Agriculture’s technical services and education program. “Most of them began as migrant farmworkers, working across diverse orchard operations and gradually mastering every aspect of farming.”

Those years of hands-on experience provided an education in how to run a successful farm, he said, and it’s not surprising that many longtime managers now own their own farms as well. Their success, despite language and cultural barriers, is a testament to how resilience creates opportunity.

“It is no exaggeration to say that the tree fruit industry would not be where it is today without their contributions,” he said. “At the same time, great credit belongs to farm owners who recognized their potential and extended trust and opportunity.”

Immigration today

Muñoz, Barrios and Rodriguez share opinions with many fellow Americans: They favor a legal path for hard workers who otherwise follow the law, and they do not oppose efforts to root out criminals.

“What the president is doing now, it is hard, but he is trying to clean it up,” Barrios said.

The last policy proposal offering a pathway to legal status for farmworkers and reforms to the H-2A guest-worker program, the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, failed to get enough political support when it was proposed in 2019 and over several campaigns since.

Today, the landscape is very different. President Donald Trump took office early last year promising to curb illegal immigration, with special emphasis on those with criminal histories. 

Deportations are up nationwide, but 74 percent of the people held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers, as of Feb. 7 this year, have no criminal conviction, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC. Founded in 1989 at Syracuse University, TRAC is a data research organization that publishes immigration statistics gleaned from Freedom of Information Act requests. Its data also showed, in the first three months of fiscal year 2026, less than 2 percent of new cases filed in immigration court seeking deportation involved allegations of criminal activity beyond illegal entry.

Arrests are up in Washington, too. Daily detainee population counts at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma almost doubled between early February 2025 and the same time this year. 

The American dream

Muñoz, Rodriguez and Barrios — and many other experienced orchard managers with similar stories — stand out from the typical experience of immigrant farmworkers. 

“The ag labor market is a pyramid, with a broad bottom and narrow top,” said Philip Martin, professor emeritus of agricultural and resource economics at University of California, Davis. “Most of the Mexican-born workers who arrived before 2008–09 did not rise in ag — instead, they got out of ag or are aging out of hard ag work. You are dealing with a very small group who climbed the ladder. They deserve lots of praise for overcoming many obstacles to achieve the American dream.”

Most farmworkers who received legal status in the late 1980s or early 1990s left the industry, according to Martin’s book, “Bracero 2.0: Mexican Workers in North American Agriculture.” Their jobs were backfilled by a fresh wave of illegal border crossings. In the 2024 book, Martin said about half of U.S. crop workers are undocumented, a share that has remained relatively flat since 2000.

Rodriguez, who entered the U.S. illegally from Mexico in 1979, got his legal status in 1984 when he married an American citizen. 

Following a brother, Barrios smuggled himself from Guatemala to Wenatchee in 1988 and got a work permit just under the IRCA deadline. He received a valid green card in 1991.

All three of the men, now U.S. citizens, liked farming and the companies they worked for. They have all had 401(k) retirement accounts. They switched employers infrequently during their careers, learning management skills on the job or through classes. 

Barrios was one of the early students in Wenatchee Valley College’s Hispanic Orchard Employee Education Program, and he was a classmate of Francisco Sarmiento, now the director of the program. Muñoz said the O’Brien family of Prosser, the 2014 Good Fruit Growers of the Year, taught him how to manage conflict without raising his voice.

Rodriguez has worked at Sagemoor for his entire 47-year career since moving to the United States. Feeling respected and free from micromanaging, he has turned down other higher-paying opportunities. 

All three of them wonder who might fill their shoes someday. A few of their adult children have followed them into farming. Barrios’ son, Nevin, literally took his job at the orchard, where he raised his family, when Barrios was promoted to be a management trainer.

Other children, however, are nurses, teachers, engineers and waste management technicians. 

Barrios remembers days when 100 applicants would show up at the orchard office looking for work. Some were the same faces 15 years in a row.

“Now, if you find local people, there’s maybe around 20 or maybe less,” he said. “It’s really hard. This is really hard for agriculture right now.” 

Building a promotion pipeline

Tree fruit industry creates opportunities, and still tries immigration, to replace retiring managers.

All three veteran orchard and vineyard managers interviewed by Good Fruit Grower shared a similar concern: Who will take their places when they retire?

Labor is a scarce resource overall, but losing the skills and experience of seasoned managers poses a unique problem. The tree fruit industry has made strides over the years to try to replace these managers from the ranks of existing workers.

To do that, several groups are building a pipeline of opportunity, so that management-level, professional careers are visible to the lower-level employees, making the whole industry more attractive, said Jon DeVaney, president of the Washington State Tree Fruit Association.

“Agriculture does not have to be a dead end,” he said.

WSTFA started the Agricultural Leadership Program in 2022 to help motivated orchard workers develop management skills, such as how to convey expectations and remain even-tempered under stress. Those aren’t innate skills, even for workers who have otherwise proven themselves loyal and productive. 

Wenatchee Valley College’s Hispanic Orchard Employee Education Program equips workers with higher-level horticultural and plant science understanding.

The Washington Apple Education Foundation offers college scholarships to children of tree fruit industry employees, while in California, state-funded workforce development efforts often focus on technology.

“The pathway of the next generation probably doesn’t look the same as theirs did,” DeVaney said of longtime managers now nearing retirement.

The other option is through immigration, where paths are long and expensive, said Eamonn Roach, an immigration attorney in Pasco, Washington. 

Immigration law offers ways for farmers to pursue employment-based green cards for loyal and experienced H-2A workers to become permanent U.S. residents with an EB-3 visa. 

“Those are the people that show promise, who might be the next orchard supervisor, maybe the next generation,” Roach said.

The process takes two to three years by design, but a case backlog makes it even longer in practice. Roach currently works with a Washington potato farm, hop farm and nursery pursuing this option.

Just as with the temporary aspect of H-2A, the employer must convince the U.S. Department of Labor that the management recruits have skills not available in the U.S. workforce. 

That part alone takes up to eight months. After that comes additional periods for recruitment, audits and processing with the U.S. Department of State.

WAFLA, a seasonal and agricultural labor organization that facilitates the majority of Washington’s H-2A applications, processes about 190 temporary H-2A workers for crew boss or other supervisory positions on four farms. Ten months is the longest period H-2A regulations allow the workers to stay in the U.S., said Enrique Gastelum, the group’s CEO.

Workers can learn a lot in 10 months, but some jobs require year-round commitment, Gastelum said. For example, earning a certified pesticide applicator’s license requires continuing education credits available only during winter ag meetings — held when H-2A workers have typically returned home.

WAFLA also is helping some of its clients with EB-3 applications. Some are taking more than five years to complete.

Gastelum has heard of agents and attorneys charging up to $10,000 in administrative and government costs for the Permanent Resident Card process.

Lawmakers in the U.S. Congress have asked for more flexibility. Twice in the past 10 years, the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, which featured year-round work visas, passed the House but not the Senate. This year, other lawmakers drafted bills that would make more year-round opportunities available for H-2A workers.