August 18, 2010
While members of the partisan U.S. Congress fight amongst themselves and devote hours to campaigning each day, thousands of foreign workers in the U.S. and its territories are suffering as victims of human trafficking at the hands of unscrupulous recruiters and labor contractors. The U.S. Congress and the U.S. DoJ have done far too little to address the exploitation of foreign workers and victims of human trafficking on U.S. soil.
There has been an urgent need for comprehensive immigration reform for decades
, but never has the need been so critical as it is today. In just the last few years there has been an explosion of abuse and exploitation of foreign workers, combined with an ever growing hostile and racist attitude towards the people who makeup our country's much-needed foreign workforce. A campaign of hate against migrant workers and immigrants has been championed by members of the Tea Party, hate radio talk show show hosts, and "conservative" political propagandists, including members of the U.S. Congress, as well as local and state officials. The anti-immigrant and unconstitutional CNMI and Arizona laws, and the handful of proposed copy cat laws that are springing up in states like Florida testify to the anti-immigrant sentiment that is poisoning the United States and its territories.
Still, there may be a glimmer of hope for some of the abused foreign workers. On August 5, 2010 the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and the law firm of Covington and Burling LLP filed a lawsuit on behalf of 350 Filipino teachers who were brought to Louisiana under HB-1 visas and kept as indentured servants.
The defendants in the Louisiana case are two recruiting companies and some Louisiana school officials who are being accused of human trafficking, racketeering, and fraud. The school officials "helped to keep the teachers in indentured servitude," according to an
SPLC press release.
From the
SPLC website:
“We were herded into a path, a slowly constricting path, where the moment you feel the suspicion that something is not right, you’re already way past the point of no return,” said Ingrid Cruz, one of the Filipino teachers.
In other words, they were conned. And the con continues because currently there are very few standards that govern the way teachers are recruited from abroad. The problem goes beyond criminal exploitation. Many of these teachers were recruited to fill positions at hard-to-staff U.S. schools. Once they arrived they were often thrown into situations where they faced stressful language and cultural barriers. Many teachers were put in these untenable situations with no training or mentoring.
The abuses in Louisiana raise all kinds of troubling issues. If even highly educated people can be exploited this readily under our guest worker laws, imagine what is happening to those who are not as educated and not as willing to fight back? And if school districts are so eager to offload their responsibilities as employers, what does that say about how they handle their responsibilities toward students?
Bringing qualified immigrant teachers to the United States can be very helpful. These teachers often possess language or professional skills that are in short supply. And foreign teachers can expose U.S. students to a rich variety of cultural views. But the current system for bringing these teachers into the country corrupts school administrators and frustrates the education process. And as SPLC Legal Director Mary Bauer put it, it is a rip-off waiting to happen. “It’s clear,” she says, “that the very structure of the program lends itself to pervasive worker abuse.”
The 95-page
complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. The complaint states:
Over the past three school years, more than 350 highly-skilled Filipino teachers have been trafficked into Louisiana through the federal government’s H-1B “specialty occupation” visa program to serve as teachers in public schools. The teachers were systematically defrauded and exploited in the recruitment and hiring process in the Philippines by Defendants, who utilized the promise of a unique opportunity to teach in Louisiana to ensnare teachers in a psychologically coercive and financially ruinous trafficking scheme that subjected the teachers to exorbitant debt and forced labor. Once in the United States, the teachers were further abused and exploited by Defendants, who used a variety of coercive tactics, including abuse of legal process, isolation and segregation, and threats of deportation, to attempt to control the teachers’ actions. When the teachers organized collectively for better conditions, they were victims of severe retaliation.
The complaint tells the story of the unscrupulous recruiter, convicted criminal Lourdes (Lulu) Navarro from the California-based Universal Placement International, Inc. who worked with the PARS International Placement Agency in Quezon City, Philippines to recruit the teachers. The recruiters charged between $5,000 and $5,500 in initial recruitment fees for the teaching positions. They then charged an additional staggering fee of $16,000 for airfare and the chance to work as a teacher in the U.S. The teachers had already paid the initial fee that the recruiters refused to refund and could not afford to back out from paying the second fee according to the complaint. The recruiter defendants referred the teachers to unscrupulous lenders that charged outrageous interest fees in order that they could pay all the fees.
The lawsuit states that once in the states, the recruiter defendants "orchestrated a system of psychological coercion and intimidation to exert continued control over the teachers, including: filing lawsuits against teachers, who complained publicly; isolating teachers from other Filipinos; and threatening deportation or non-renewal of teacher visas."
The lawsuit also alleges that the employer defendants "were knowing beneficiaries of the illegal human trafficking scheme perpetrated by Recruiter Defendants, knew or should have known of the scheme, and aided and abetted the scheme by taking steps to ensure its success." From the lawsuit:
Employer Defendants became aware early on of the unconscionable fees being charged, and took steps to ensure the success of Recruiter Defendants’ scheme, including submitting false letters to federal immigration officials at the request of the Recruiter Defendants, and reporting to Recruiter Defendants those teachers who voiced complaints about the process or who attempted to circumvent the Recruiter Defendants by applying directly to EBRPSB for employment.
This story sounds all too familiar to advocates like myself, and to those who have witnessed the similar suffering and abuse of tens of thousands of foreign workers in the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI). This scenario has been repeated over and over and over for decades in the CNMI affecting a wide range of categories of recruited foreign workers from security guards to waitresses, and yes, including Filipino teachers.
For three decades, under the CNMI's unjust guest worker program, only a small number of scammed or abused CNMI foreign workers have been the lucky recipients of any help from the US DoJ, US DoL, human or civil rights organizations, or even private law firms. Most of the abused workers were returned to their host countries without ever receiving their back wages or justice; some continue to struggle on in the CNMI hoping to collect the money owed to them from their former cheating employers or to seek justice for a variety of abuses.
I hope that this lawsuit is successful and the victims receive justice and compensation. Hopefully too, the illegal recruiters and others involved in this scheme end up behind bars.
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