The Coyote[H-2 Visa Scam]

BuzzFeed ^ | Jan 2016 | Pat Kinsella

[Theoria]

Stan Eury turned an obscure bit of immigration law into a mammoth federal program -- and a lucrative business empire, importing hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers for legal American jobs. Except that some of the jobs weren't real jobs, and an untold number of those workers may never have returned to Mexico at all.

In November 2009, seven men got off a bus in Monterrey, Mexico, and made their way through the crowded and chaotic downtown to the concrete box that housed the United States Consulate.

Inside, the men told a consular officer that they had been invited to work as janitors at the Sugar Mountain ski resort in Banner Elk, North Carolina. They had gone the previous season and were returning; all they needed were their new guest worker visas, which had already been approved, and they would be on their way north.

The Monterrey consulate is one of the world's busiest, processing more than 400,000 visas each year, and it's the single largest issuer of the kind the men were awaiting: H-2 visas, given to unskilled "guest workers" for temporary jobs in everything from tobacco farms to landscaping to shellfish peeling. The consulate cranks out an average of nearly 300 every single day.

But on this day, the State Department employee hesitated, then placed a call to the ski resort. It had been a warmer autumn than usual, and Sugar Mountain wasn't yet open to the public; the consular officer was told that the resort needed snowmakers, not janitors. Stranger still was that the guest worker visa application, filed by a year-old company called Winterscapes, proposed sending nearly 250 Mexican janitors to two small ski resorts in the Blue Ridge Mountains that winter.

Something wasn't right.

[Theoria]

Nice article. Bump.

[Pelham]

” There are strong indications that some of those workers never returned home, as required by law. “

This is my surprised face.

[Pelham]

“The entire program, from its expansive reach to its weak regulation, has been shaped by the businesses that benefit from it. No one personifies that influence more than Stan Eury.”

“He has waged and won battle after battle in the courts and in Congress to push wages down, to reduce regulation, to bat back worker protections, and to discourage and disqualify American job seekers. Most importantly, he has fought and won to maintain the flow of Mexicans and money.”