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.
We have every legitimate reason to invade Mexico and overthrow that corrupt, racist government.
We just paid my friend's husband to do remodeling work for us. He is in school full-time and having a hard time finding part-time work (but is very good at construction and auto work.) He gave us a great rate (more than I've heard dayworkers charge, but still affordable.) His work is guaranteed, and we knew that he wasn't going to rob, rape, or murder us. My parents hired him after he was done at our house.
Then you know exactly what I am talking about. As does your friend and her husband.
My husband busted up about 500 square feet of "lawn" today, land that hasn't been tilled in 10+ years...........3 people stopped looking for work - not a one of them with a foreign accent. I expect similar tomorrow and Monday when I get out there to "fine tune" it and start planting strawberries. (I'd be out there right now, but it's getting ready to start raining and so I'm dealing with dinner.)
Area firm hiring 300-350 Mexican welders, fitters
By Jerry Jordan
Senior Staff WriterBuna-based Southeast Texas Industrial Inc. (STI) has implemented a plan to bring in more than 300 Mexicans from across the border to take away jobs that could go to welders, pipe fitters and other laborers in Southeast Texas. But, its actions have now spawned a state investigation into whether their advertise-ments for workers was mis-leading.
State Rep. Joe Deshotel, D-Beaumont, said he is con-cerned about what he termed discrepancies in STI’s adver-tisements and is requesting a state investigation by the Texas Workforce Commission be conducted before any for-eign workers are permitted to come into Southeast Texas.
A company representative said STI had tried to hire locally but couldn’t get any-one to apply for its jobs, which he said were starting at more than $10 an hour, with craftsman making anywhere from, “$15 to $20 an hour.”
“We got contacts and used every effort we could to hire locally,” said W.C. Cole, busi-ness development manager for STI, who spoke with The Examiner Tuesday. “We advertised in the Beaumont Enterprise, The Port Arthur News, Houston Chronicle and in Corpus Christi, Dallas, Oklahoma, Florida, Arizona ….
We have an extreme short-age of craftsmen along the Gulf Coast. We talked to headhunters and placement agencies. And, despite what you may have heard, what we are doing is legal.
“We have a bunch of peo-ple sitting in Monterrey (Mexico) waiting so that as soon as they clear immigra-tion and get their green cards, we’ll hire them. We want them here by April 21. I think there are 350 total.”
Despite Cole’s comments that the jobs being offered are “good paying,” the advertise-ments he referred to showed that the company was only offering $7 an hour, according to records obtained from the Texas Workforce Commis-sion. In addition, the records from the TWC state that the company’s first quarter pay-roll was $2.3 million, but Cole told The Examiner that the company’s payroll was more than $3 million a week.
Those same records show that on Jan. 13, 14 and 15, STI advertised that it was seeking “153 temporary fitter helpers” at “$7.12 hr, 35 hr wk, 7am-3pm, M-F.”
Another advertisement offers jobs for “145 tempo-rary laborers” at a pay wage of “$7 hr, 35 hr wk, 7am-3pm M-F.”
Neither ad stated that the workers being requested were for skilled craftsmen, as stat-ed by Cole. And neither ad stated that workers would be paid more than $10 an hour, which was also stated by Cole. In fact, both ads clearly stated that the workers being sought needed no education or experience.
When questioned about the discrepancies, Cole said he did not know what the ads said, and that he was “not aware of any $7 an hour jobs — maybe for a janitor or something.”
The application filed by STI seeking foreign workers for its shops in Buna, Bridge City and Nederland states, “This employer has found it impossible to locate any U.S. workers that want the tempo-rary jobs. Because of this impossibility of finding U.S. workers on a temporary basis, this employer requests certifi-cation under the H2B pro-gram.”
The H2B visa program is designed to allow companies to seek foreign workers only after they have exhausted all possible means of hiring American workers for the jobs they are trying to fill.
“If we could find folks, we’d hire them,” Cole said. “We have a payroll of $3 mil-lion a week. We buy locally and we try to hire people locally…. What we are offer-ing people is the going wage around here.”
Anthony Volentine, busi-ness manager of Pipe Fitters’ Local 195, said that no one has contacted him regarding jobs at STI.
See HIRING on page 8 A
Business as usual!
AND, for the What It is Worth Department, someone needs to find out how much real estate actually is owned by Mexicans who have private homes, private jets and private maids living it up in that town. As for advertising in Mexico. YES. here in Mexico we have had two incidents..
Modestos Architect told him to get 40 workers on a bus, that to set aside their place to go get a job in America, they each had to pay $200 to insure a seat on the bus. At about 6pm, 40 anxious souls full of much pride, goin' to make real dollars, gradually as the Sun sat and it got darker, realized that it was a scheme, and no one would be picking them up.
Another case was an American, took passports, collected money and got phoney visas. They were arrested at the Mexico City airport for producing forged U.S. vistor visas. People taking advantage of people.
FWIW, In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which total 1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) are for illegal aliens." - City Journal's Heather Mac Donald
source
"We can't find Americans to do those jobs!"
How many times do you instead hear,
"We can't find Americans to do those jobs for almost nothing...! Which is what big companies would prefer to pay..."
Where I am I see that more attitude more in the small to medium companies, as opposed to the big ones.
If we make all illegals, Americans; who would do the jobs Americans won't do?
The Federal,State & Local Prison system has a labor ready work force that can be put to work all across the Nation. Why does the government refuse to apply this common sense fix?... OH Yeah!, I forgot... The Government No Brains here!
I wonder; is this the economy that OBL organs such as the WSJ are talking about when they say that illegals are good for the economy?
We've had it posted here before - last year? - that there are networks of supporters in CA that sell cars to illegals, run employment agencies for illegals, rent or sell homes to illegals...some parts of our country are already lost if we don't do something about it.
I certainly do.
To H*** with $2 lettuce; I don't like eating crispy water anyway, so never buy it.
OTOH, I'm more than willing to pay an extra $.50/pound for HONEST chicken, if that is what it takes.
As it is, from THIS article, I'll have to be more choosy about beef & pork, too.
Wish they had named for whom Senor Sosa is "organizing meat packing workers" in Nebraska.
I have worked alongside illegal aliens. In my experience, most had exactly the same work-eithic and attention to detail as the average high-school dropout. I suspect the people you're referring to as 'Mexicans' are actually legal citizens and/or residents of the US.
Most people who hire illegal aliens from Mexico do so for 2 reasons:
1) They can hire them cheaper than US citizens, and drive down wages
2) They don't have documentation, and don't speak the language, so they are less likely to seek other employment (lower turnover rate)
They need to up the ante on the prison term for possessing or making fake SSN cards, green cards or drivers licenses. Maybe they need to give the Treasury Dept. (USSS) jurstisdiction over going after government document forgers.
For those of us who live in agricultural areas, this is no surprise. A simple phone call and $1500 is what it costs....
I have been proposing such a "fine" idea myself for quite some time... $10,000 per offense for starters....
And GW knows EXACTLY what he is doing - Remember - Vincente Fox is his good buddy. I'm not sure exactly what his ultimate goal is, but I don't trust him on this issue - period. He has betrayed us on this single issue. I back the WOT, yet how can he claim we are fighting a real war if we don't secure our borders? If it were not for our young soldiers loosing life and limb, it would be hard to take the war seriously with wide-open borders....
I don't like it, but I approve of this more than using illegal labor. (They are using legitamate means and legitimate workers, instead of illegals)
Yeah, no kidding! /sarcasm
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