Posted on 04/15/2006 11:15:11 AM PDT by Flavius
By Julie Watson and Olga R. Rodriguez, Associated Press Writers U.S. Companies in Need of Cheap Labor Use Undocumented Workers to Recruit Friends From Mexico
SASABE, Mexico (AP) -- When Pedro Lopez Vazquez crossed illegally into the United States last week, he was not heading north to look for a job. He already had one.
His future employer even paid $1,000 for a smuggler to help Vazquez make his way from the central Mexican city of Puebla to Aspen, Colo.
ADVERTISEMENT "We're going to Colorado to work in carpentry because we have a friend who was going to give us a job," Vazquez said.
Vazquez, 41, was interviewed along the Arizona border after being deported twice by the U.S. Border Patrol. He said he would keep trying until he got to Aspen.
His story is not unusual. A growing number of U.S. employers and migrants are tapping into an underground employment network that matches one with the other, often before the migrants leave home.
"It continues to become clear who controls immigration: It's not governments, but rather the market," said Jorge Santibanez, director of the Tijuana-based think-tank Colegio de la Frontera Norte.
As debate over immigration heats up in the United States, more and more U.S. companies in need of cheap labor are turning to undocumented employees to recruit friends and relatives back home, and to smugglers to find job seekers.
Darcy Tromanhauser, of the nonprofit law project Nebraska Appleseed, said companies in need of workers rely on the networks to "pass along the information more effectively than billboards."
"It started out more explicitly, where (meatpacking) companies used to have buses to transport people to come up, and they would advertise directly in Mexico," she said. "Now I think that happens more informally."
At the same time, it has become less risky for companies to recruit illegal migrants. Since the Sept. 11 terror attacks, U.S. prosecution of employers who hire such workers has dwindled to a trickle as the government puts its resources toward national security.
The few cases that are prosecuted, however, highlight how lucrative a business recruiting undocumented workers has become. In one case, a single smuggler allegedly earned $900,000 over 15 months placing 6,000 migrants in jobs at Chinese restaurants across the upper Midwest.
Shan Wei Yu, a 51-year-old Chinese-American, was sentenced in December to nine years in federal prison on charges involving the transportation of 40 of those migrants. Investigations involving the others continue.
Rick Hilzendager, special agent for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Grand Forks, N.D., said Yu connected 6,000 migrants from Latin America with jobs in Chinese restaurants in Illinois, Michigan, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin.
Based in Yu's home in McKinney, Texas, the Great Texas Employment Agency placed ads in Chinese-language newspapers in the Chicago area offering cheap labor from Latin America, investigators said.
Yu sent a recruiter with Spanish interpreters to find migrants in Dallas willing to be fry cooks and dishwashers, Hilzendager said. A team made up mostly of illegal Chinese immigrants rented cars and drove them up.
Yu allegedly charged a $150 finder's fee for each migrant while the drivers earned $300 per worker. Restaurant owners deducted the $450 from workers' first-month paychecks of $1,000.
"It was just so easy," Hilzendager said.
Nick Chase, assistant U.S. attorney in North Dakota, said Yu even offered to replace workers free of charge if one left within two weeks of starting.
"It was a 2-for-1 special -- like a pizza," Chase said. "Everything about it was ugly."
The employees, housed in cramped apartments provided by employers, worked 14-hour days and had little outside contact. The case broke open in August 2004 after two Mexican migrants working at the Buffet House in Grand Forks fled poor conditions and were picked up along a highway by Border Patrol agents.
Many of the drivers involved in the scheme were deported to China. Two North Dakota restaurant owners were sentenced to four months each for harboring illegal immigrants.
But many migrants, and many employers, say the recruiters provide a valuable service. Sergio Sosa, who organizes Nebraska meatpackers, said many are seen as heroes in the Mexican towns where the workers come from.
Sosa, speaking by telephone from Omaha, said that in the 1990s companies bused migrants from the U.S.-Mexico border, paying them room and board plus salaries of $100 a week. But after a government crackdown, they began to rely more on their workers to recruit friends and family back in Mexico.
"One of the meatpacking supervisors is from Michoacan, and most of the people working for him come from his town," Sosa said. "There's no official recruiting -- it's more internal through family."
Migrants setting out along the border confirmed his account. Guadalupe Mendez, 26, said her sister found her work as a seamstress in Los Angeles. Lorenzo Garcia Ruiz, 38, said friends arranged a gardening job for him in Kentucky.
To make a real dent in this network, the U.S. government would need to go after employers or make them pay the costs of legalizing workers, migration activists say.
But an August 2005 report of the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, indicates the opposite is happening. After the Sept. 11 attacks, work-site inspections by U.S. immigration officials plummeted as they focused on national security cases.
From 1999 to 2004, the number of businesses that faced fines dropped from 417 to three, the GAO said. Data after 2004 could not be compared because the government changed the way it records data.
Investigators say fake documents makes it difficult to prove an employer has knowingly hired an undocumented worker. The business community argues that employers aren't equipped to spot fraud and warns that more investigations could lead to workplace discrimination.
Chase said businesses must be kept in check.
"There are employers out there who are always going to be tempted by the bottom line," he said.
Associated Press writer Julie Watson reported this story from Mexico City and AP writer Olga R. Rodriguez reported from Sasabe, Mexico.
This was going on back in the 90s. Vail, Aspen, Beaver Creek, Steamboat, Edwards, Avon, et al were crawling with illegal aliens. Now they are all over the front range too "doing the jobs that Americans won't do" in the trades for a hell of a lot less money.
And the corruption just spreads, until we will be little better than Mexico. I wonder how long it will be before I can bribe my way out of a parking ticket?
What are the trades from hell? I'll bet most were considered proper employment a generation ago.
Yep, but the life of the elites who are promoting this lower standard of living will see little change in their lifestyles.
About thirty years ago one of my sons drove a taxi for a while. Teenagers delight because he could stay up all night and drive as much as he wanted. He and several of his fellow drivers had an arrangement with a business north of Houston. They would pick up a taxi load of "workers" southwest of town and deliver them to the business, pick up load and return them to the southwest location. They had some means of getting back and forth between Mexico and the southwest location. That business, and others, may be still doing the import/export of labor.
They will become prisoners behind their walls as they are rapidly getting rid any country that would give them respite from lawlessness and corruption. Right now the US is one of their last refuges.
After closing the border and hefting big fees to wire money to Mexico, and fining the employers who employ illegals. Now it is worded correctly.
"His future employer even paid $1,000 for a smuggler to help Vazquez make his way from the central Mexican city of Puebla to Aspen, Colo."
Where's the profit for employer if he pays out $1000 for workers? gets arrested for conspiracy in smuggling or illegal decides to take off for parts unknown, has communicable disease, is criminal and murders him?
Could it be employer plans not to list costs on Income Tax but lie about income? Could it be illegals are being used for jobs like "crime", human sex trafficking?? Just Wondering. Also wondering why unions are taking so long to take a Public Stand. SEIU, are these jobs US citizens are not given opportunity to apply for. Maybe the isssue is "jobs legal mexicans won't do"? Just Wondering?
Tell me about it..........
My husband spent 25 years in construction, he's out of it now, but we still do the majority of our own work. We're currently reroofing and siding our house - it's been amazing how many able bodied young AMERICAN men have stopped by when they've seen us outside working, looking for work - because the local contractors are hiring illegals at lower rates than they were previously paying these guys.
I've actually had a couple stop when I've been out hoeing my field looking for work.........yup, jobs Americans won't do, my foot.
The elites in Mexico are doing pretty well, and that's the point, we are becoming more like them.
They will be street corner auctions before long, oh wait there are already daily auctions at Home Depot now.
Like I said on many other posts, the Mexicans aren`t French. They are a plus to the USA, they produce $$$ and they produce by BS&T (Blood sweat and tears)and are right next to us. They are the abused child who wants a new family.
Illegal immigration will never be solved down there without extreme measures and lots of $$$..If Bush went hardcore on their arses expect Hillary to be next POTUS because the Rats will do evrything in their power to make Bush seem like Hitler expelling (or exterminating) the Jews. Look at them already comparing it to the civil rights in the 1960`s, and we are only just debating!
To me, the best offense is absolute and total destructive revenge. That money required to beef up border protection could be spent in a better way...The solution is to annex Mexico, make it a commonwealth, if it was up to me, a state... Why? Because it would absolutely destroy liberals, destroy the Democrat party and to me that is well worth every cent.
The majority of Mexicans are hard core religious conservatives, ask any Mexican if he supports gay marriage and see what he says. We should spend the bucks, root out the corruption down there, take over their oil production and tell Ted Kennedy what he can do with his "civil rights of illegals". I mean my God, can you imagine this happening in the 1700`s? Thomas Jefferson would have had an orgasm, you got an entire country attached to mainland USA absolutely begging to be taken over.
This is what Republicans should be concentrating on. Yes of course illegals break US laws and take jobs, but this would stop if they were absorbed. The only problem is getting people to accept another state. I mean think of it this way; We got Alaska and Hawaii which are in outerspace from the mainland.. Why not Mexico? All we`d have to deal with is Guatemala which has a border 1/3rd if not less than that of Mexico. Just think of this happening while Bush is in office. Democrats would go the way of the Whigs, they would cease to exist. I worked with Mexicans for 3 years when me and a friend started our own landscaping biz out on Long Island.
To Mexicans, someone who doesn`t work, and doesn`t work ball bustin` HARD is a what they would call "Panosha"...A "pussy". They are the EXACT opposite of the French. Socialism, liberalism, is the utimate insult to them and what liberals in this country are starting to do, is doing what they do to blacks: "We are on your side...If you vote for us we will fight the evil Republicans who are against you". By annexing Mexico right now, Democrats would be blown to pieces.
Traitors,they need to be fined, illegal employers hiring illegal workers, great isn't that so American? BS! They can get away with not paying taxes? The employer doesn't pay and the worker doesn't pay yet here we are citizens paying. Think of that on monday as you rush to obey the law and are waiting in line to get your payment to IRS!
"After the Sept. 11 attacks, work-site inspections by U.S. immigration officials plummeted as they focused on national security cases."
It plummeted from almost zero to zero.
It is wrong to say illegals live in the "shodows." They live in the open, knowing they can safely stay, because nothing short of serious crime is in their way.
The employers are their friends, as are government help agencies, schools, etc.
Even if you commit a crime, do jail, chances are release will be inside the US, not deportation.
The resources for "total" immigration enforcement have never been even tried.
See how the problem has metastasized?
Now we don't simply import people, no:
We import Chinese people to import Mexican people, who import other Mexican people.
It's like the story last week about that kidnapped Korean guy in Tijuana, who later got loose.
In that case, we imported a Korean to live in San Diego to manufacture Korean car parts in Mexico employing Mexicans to export to Americans, whose only role would be to simply buy the foreign cheap crap.
It is not like we've been reduced to the status of an unproductive drug-user, no. Now we're a drug-user who employs some slave to tie Master off, and inject Master.
It's freaking SICK.
And OUR government thinks it would be too hard to track down the people that knowing employ illegals.
This is incredible. Has anyone from that state reported them to Immigration so they can be fined?
ping
Exactly, the "new world order" demands that the US become a 3rd world nation
But he is not alone, this is an all out assault on America by all the politically connected of both parties
If you're going to put a word in all caps four times in a post, you should check the spelling first.
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