Posted on 08/10/2002 2:06:47 PM PDT by USA21
"Scandal": For many Eastern European students, an expected summer of jobs and travel in America has become a scramble to find shelter and support.
MILWAUKEE - Victoria Kordus was in surgical scrubs, about to assist with an operation, when the anesthesiologist mentioned to her that dozens of Polish students had been left stranded on the streets here after the summer jobs they had been promised suddenly vanished.
(Excerpt) Read more at sunspot.net ...
The scene was replicated in other households around this Midwestern city.
In the suburb of Wauwatosa, Diane Fowler, whose daughter had just left for military basic training, took in five Polish students. Others found temporary refuge with other families and in college dormitories vacated for the summer.
The young Poles who arrived here are among dozens of students recruited from Eastern Europe to work in America this summer - from Maryland to Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming to California - under the J-1 visa program, a work/travel program overseen by the U.S. State Department and designed to encourage cultural exchange.
They paid up to $2,000 in airfare and fees, only to find that the promises of well-paying summer employment and a place to stay didn't materialize.
"This is becoming a national scandal," said Les Kuczynski, executive director of the Polish American Congress in Chicago, who rattled off a list of a half-dozen locations where students have been stranded.
"You can't have this going on unregulated," he added. "The greed factor had a lot to do with it. People just saw dollar signs. It snowballed out of control."
In Harford County, a group of Poles and Slovaks were assigned to work at McDonald's restaurants upon arrival. But they received no money for their first days on the job because their $8-an-hour wages were offset by high apartment rental charges deducted directly from their paychecks.
On Thursday, U.S. Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat, asked the State Department to investigate the treatment of the McDonald's workers, who were recruited by a contractor, Donna Maertens of Stafford, Va. The company, which was renting a two-bedroom apartment to five students for $2,000 a month - nearly triple the usual rate - says it is working to address the complaints.
In other cases, such as here in Wisconsin, arriving students found no work at all and had no place to stay.
Among the recruiters involved is David C. Marzano, who has a history of skirting immigration laws to import workers and is due to begin a 15-month jail term Aug. 27.
Marzano, who said he brought several hundred students to the United States this summer, pleaded guilty in federal court in Atlanta on July 26 to a charge of conspiring to unlawfully encourage and induce aliens to reside in the United States. Prosecutors charged that he placed his recruits in jobs at hotels and resort areas across the country.
His company, Global Staffing, and a related company were found guilty of similar charges and fined a total of $81,000.
Among the students he recruited was Karol Frankiewicz, 23, a computer science student from Poland. After landing in New York, he received an e-mail from two of his friends, telling him that the jobs already had been filled.
"He [Marzano] told them he hired too many people," Frankiewicz said.
Marzano, in a telephone interview, denied that any job recruits had been turned away and said that in fact he didn't have enough recruits to fill all the available jobs. He said the immigration violations for which he was convicted did not involve students or the J-1 program, under which students are permitted to work here for three months and travel for another month.
"We made a mistake," Marzano said of the criminal case.
After hearing that Global Staffing had no jobs, Frankiewicz said, he joined up with his friends in Chicago. Eventually, after four weeks of searching and with some assistance from relatives, he and his friends found construction jobs that pay about $8 an hour.
Marzano's firm was able to recruit the students under visas issued through a nonprofit firm, the Council for Educational Travel-USA. Officials of the firm, based in Seattle, said they had no idea of Marzano's legal problems.
"It's news to me," said Kevin Watson, director of special programs for the organization. He said the council didn't deal directly with Global but worked through an intermediary in Poland, International Student Employment Services.
Asserting that "100 percent" of the 1,500 students placed by the council this year "had jobs lined up in advance," Watson also said he was unaware that Frankiewicz and others didn't get the promised jobs. He said he didn't know how many of the 1,500 visas issued by his organization were for jobs with Global Staffing.
"There's a problem, no question about it," said Stanley Colvin, head of the State Department unit that oversees the work/travel program. He said the problems have surfaced with students being recruited from Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, the Ukraine, Russia, Slovakia and the Baltic states.
There is "enough blame to spread around to everyone," Colvin said, saying the principal wrongdoers have been "unscrupulous" overseas recruiters "who are misrepresenting the program."
Colvin said the problem has been exacerbated by companies in the United States that offered jobs to hundreds of workers but then hired only some of them.
The State Department, he said, has told the various agencies authorized to issue the work/travel visas to conduct a review of the overseas employment firms with which they have been dealing. The object, he said, is "to find out, one way or the other, who's doing what to whom and who these unscrupulous agents are."
Since so many of the affected students are from Poland, the job placement problems foreign students are facing this year have become a major issue in the Polish American community. Last week Edward J. Moskal, president of the Polish American Congress, issued an "action alert" to members across the country warning of a "scam" victimizing hundreds of visiting Polish students.
"At this point we are requesting emergency help for these people who, through no fault of their own, have found themselves in a tragic situation," Moskal said.
In Chicago, dozens more Polish students have sought refuge with relatives and friends when promised jobs proved nonexistent.
Ava Sawaszkiewicz, now living with friends in Chicago, said she and four other students were recruited by a company called Almatur and promised up to 60 hours of work a week at Chiquita Processed Foods in Gillette, Wis., a bean-canning factory.
When they arrived, however, she said they were told they were too late and the full-time jobs had been filled. Dissatisfied with an offer of three days of work per week, they left, a Chiquita official said.
"We were surprised and angry. What we were told in Warsaw, it wasn't true," said Sawaszkiewicz, who is a student of veterinary medicine.
Anna M. Rychlinska, national director of the Polish American Congress, told of other Polish students who gravitated to Chicago after anticipated jobs at Yellowstone didn't materialize.
Jim McCaleb, general manager for Xanterra Parks & Recreation, the private Montana firm that runs the lodging facilities at the park, said the problem was that the foreign students showed up "too late" and many of the jobs had already been filled.
He said the company "did the right thing" and put the excess students in housing and fed them until other jobs opened up.
In Panama City Beach, Fla., several hundred foreign students, most of them from Poland, showed up for promised jobs only to be told the jobs were gone and they'd have to pay another $200 to be referred for a new job.
Most of them refused to pay, said Richard Dabrowski, a local resident, who became involved after running into two of the students seeking help in a local Social Security office, where they were obtaining cards. As elsewhere, local community groups stepped in and provided housing and found jobs for many of the students.
"The first kids to get over here got jobs, but then it got crowded," said Dabrowski, who brought several students into his home. "It's the same thing all over."
He said the students had been recruited by several different overseas agencies. They were promised jobs with a local employment agency called TLC Labor Services Inc. TLC officials could not be reached for comment.
Fowler said she is concerned that what these students are learning about life in the United States may not be exactly what the creators of the J-1 visa program envisioned.
Pointing to her house guests, she said, "These are the future leaders of their country. They should be getting a positive image of America."
Fowler, who now has five students living in her home, was making a quick trip to a local drugstore one night last month when she came upon two distraught students wandering the parking lot with all their belongings.
"One of them tapped me on the shoulder and said, 'We need a cheap hotel,'" Fowler recalled. "I thought to myself, Why would these young girls want a cheap hotel?"
The two had been promised a job at a local job placement firm called QPS, but when they and other foreign students arrived, they were told all the available jobs already had been filled.
Dan McNulty, QPS vice president, said that twice as many students showed as expected. He said that forms listing QPS as the employer were falsified, probably by overseas recruiters.
"Kids came here thinking they had a guaranteed job. They showed up here with their luggage. They had nowhere else to go. It was a real mess," he said. "Actually, it's kind of scary. It looks like in three days anyone can get a visa."
Fowler took the two girls home and eventually took in three more.
"Theoretically, it's a nice program," said Don Pinkeos, president of the Wisconsin chapter of the Polish American Congress. "There needs to be some accountability. It's so lax that people just come over and get lost. What if someone came over with evil intentions?"
Colvin, the State Department official, said that the agency was considering a stricter work commitment requirement but that imposing it may be more difficult than it appears. He said if the rules were made too tight it could lock the students into "indentured servitude."
He also said that students were not "all angels" and sometimes take advantage of the program.
Kordus, who still has five students living in her home, has no misgivings about her guests. They found work in a local printing plant and she proudly displayed copies of some of the national magazines they help produce.
It's hard work, she said, and when they come home they are sweaty and tired. Her water heater, she said, has been working overtime.
They pay for the food, but they stay here for free, she said.
Asked if the students were angry when they found the promised jobs didn't exist, Kordus shook her head.
"No. They still have this 'I love America' attitude. 'America is beautiful.' But when I picked them up," she continued, "you could see the stress on their faces."
She said that the first day the students arrived at her house she made two big pots of spaghetti before she left for work. When she got back, both pots were empty.
"They must have been awfully hungry," she said.
WASHINGTON (August 9, 2002 10:41 p.m. EDT) - Part-time Canadian and Mexican college students studying in the United States will be allowed to continue taking courses until the end of the year, immigration officials said Friday. The announcement delays a policy change that would have cut off part-time foreign enrollment next week.
"It gives them an extra term," while Congress considers whether to grant foreign commuter students a permanent reprieve, Immigration and Naturalization Service spokesman Bill Strassberger said.
Citing security concerns following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, INS announced in the spring that it would bar part-time commuter students from Canada and Mexico.
Under federal law, foreigners coming to the United States to study cannot be classified as visitors, but they can't be called students unless they carry a full course load of at least 12 credits.
But for years, border points like Buffalo and San Diego have made exceptions for part-time Canadian and Mexican students.
Under the new policy, U.S. colleges may not accept any new part-time students from outside the country, Strassberger said.
But students enrolled in colleges as of May 22, when INS announced the policy, will be allowed to continue their coursework, he said. "The announcement left some students who were in school at the time unsure of what their future would be," Strassberger said.
Thirty lawmakers wrote INS Commissioner James Ziglar on Tuesday urging him to allow commuters to continue taking courses in the fall semester.
"It is in the interest of the United States to allow Mexican and Canadian students to commute to a United States educational institution and return home at the end of the day," nine senators and 21 House members - Democrats and Republicans - wrote.
In addition, lawmakers from 12 states along the northern and southern border are sponsoring legislation that would write the exception into law by creating a new category of visas for part-time students.
The pending legislation would allow new part-time students as well.
Lawmakers have said allowing Canadians and Mexicans into the country to shop or attend a sporting event, but not to take classes other than on a full-time basis does not make sense.
It is unclear how many Canadian and Mexican students cross into the United States once or twice a week for college study, but the number is thought to be in the thousands.
D'Youville College in Buffalo, for example, reported in the spring that 160 of the private college's 2,300 students were Canadians studying part-time. Most are nursing students.
Aren't you a bit too paranoid here? Are you also dumped by your professor? Or are you also a Chinese?
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