SUMMERLAND, British Columbia — Desperate to provide for his family, Hilario Mendoza leapt at the chance to leave Mexico to pick cherries on a farm in British Columbia.

But bad weather left him so idle that he often worked just three hours a day — far less than the 40 hours a week he said he had been promised under Canada’s program for temporary farmworkers. While he waited to go to the fields, he found himself crammed with 34 other laborers into a small house where rain leaked onto their beds.

Months of complaints went nowhere — and then he was abruptly sent back to Mexico.

Read more at The New York Times