So he couldn't believe his good fortune when a recruiter came to his village offering three years of farm work in North Carolina at a rate of more than $8 an hour.

He mortgaged his farm to get the recruiter's $11,000 fee, said goodbye to his wife and infant son and headed to Johnston County -- where he says he became a prisoner in a storage building beside a rural highway.

Asanok is one of 22 Thai men suing the former owners of a Wayne County labor contracting company, saying the owners stole their money, failed to pay them for their work and held them captive with threats of violence.

The vast majority of North Carolina's farmworkers still come from Mexico, state officials say. But a few new farm labor contractors have moved into the state in the past few years, offering laborers who have never worked in the United States and using temporary visas for farmworkers to bring them in legally.

"These companies promise the moon to farmers, saying, 'Sign here, and we'll bring you all the workers you need,' and 'Don't worry, we'll charge them,'" said Libby Whitley, who runs másLabor, a farm labor contracting business in Virginia. "They're proliferating."

Bubba Grant of the Employment Security Commission in Raleigh, who handles migrant farmworker applications for temporary work visas, said he has seen only a handful of applications from countries outside Mexico, but he said he couldn't provide exact figures.

Lawyers with Legal Aid of North Carolina, a federally funded agency that advocates for the poor, say they know of at least 115 workers whom contractors brought to North Carolina from the Far East between 2004 and 2006.

"There's a desire for a work force that's not going to speak up," said Kate Woomer-Deters, a lawyer with Legal Aid. "Any time you can get people who are more vulnerable than Hispanic workers, unfortunately, that's an attractive work force."

Legal Aid filed suit last month on behalf of the Thai workers. The group also sued on behalf of three Indonesian workers who say they were charged $6,000 apiece to come to the United States as farmworkers, then held captive in an industrial workshop in Charlotte.

The suits demand repayment of the fees plus an undisclosed amount in damages and lost pay.

Debt for the future

Asanok, 28, comes from one of Thailand's poorest regions, a place where men routinely travel to other countries for the promise of better-paying work. In his early 20s, he worked three years in a clothing factory in Taiwan. But in the spring of 2005, a recruiter from a company called Million Express Manpower offered something he never imagined possible: three years of work in the United States.

His earnings would be enough to start a business and pay for the education of his children, born and unborn, he said in a telephone interview this week.

The fees were steep, and he said he had to mortgage his land, take a bank loan, take another loan from a neighborhood loan shark and borrow from his mother.

He figured he would pay it all back in the first year of work.

Cheaper labor

For the owners of Million Express Manpower, the Mount Olive labor contractor that recruited the men, Thai workers were a novel product that they offered to farmers around the state, according to the lawsuit.

They knew that some farmers were disgruntled with the Mexican laborers who picked their crops, the lawsuit says. The majority of the state's legal farmworkers, who come to the United States on temporary visas each growing season, had formed a union. They started demanding rights beyond their federally mandated wages, which this year will be more than $9 an hour.

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