Foreign workers in the United States on temporary work visas have been targets of fraud and abuse, a federal report concluded this week.
The study by the Government Accountability Office mirrors many of the findings of a five-part Kansas City Star investigation of human trafficking published last year.
The new report could spur federal regulators to probe deeper into such abuses, said workers’ rights advocate Mary Bauer, legal director of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“I hope this is the beginning of some government oversight of this program,” Bauer said. “This is a good first step.”
The study highlighted a Virginia fraud case reported by The Star in which conspirators obtained fraudulent H-2B visas for more than 3,800 workers and then charged them exorbitant fees and excessive rent for unsanitary and overcrowded housing. The H-2B program allows employers to hire foreign workers when U.S. workers can’t be found to take the jobs.
Such workers most often are found working legally in the construction, landscaping, forestry, manufacturing, hospitality and food processing industries. The number of workers who are defrauded or abused never has been clear, and the authors of the latest study said its findings could not be generalized to the entire program.
GAO investigators also went undercover, contacting 18 labor recruiters to see if they would encourage the agents to violate federal rules. Though 15 of the recruiters made no such suggestions, three offered advice on how to evade U.S. law, the study said.
To discourage American workers from applying for landscaping jobs, one recruiter suggested having applicants “run around the shop carrying a 50-pound bag to determine (if) they were fit for the work.” He suggested scheduling job interviews before 7 a.m. and requiring pre-interview drug tests to “weed out” qualified U.S. applicants.
Investigators posing as employers also heard suggestions that they fire all their American landscaping workers and replace them with foreign guest workers, who could be paid far less.
The report sought to answer a question posed by a member of Congress as to whether the GAO could find examples of labor recruiters and employers engaging in illegal or fraudulent activity within the H-2B visa program.
Enforcement questions about the H-2B program surfaced in Kansas City last week at the trial of an Ellisville, Mo., businessman who was convicted for his role in a human labor trafficking enterprise. Evidence showed that the conspiracy used bogus paperwork to fraudulently obtain hundreds of H-2B visas.
Under questioning from Assistant U.S. Attorney William Meiners, officials from the Department of Labor and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services testified that they have no way of determining whether the labor certification and visa applications they review are fraudulent.
“They just have not been allocated the resources to properly police and regulate the type of fraud that we saw here,” Meiners said this week.
The new federal report, which reviewed closed criminal and civil court cases and conducted spot checks on current workers, should help government watchdogs know what they should be looking for. The study outlined several issues, including:
•Employers not paying proper wages or overtime. Investigators found a New York carnival operator who paid his foreign guest workers less than $5 an hour, even as he worked them up to 80 hours a week.
•Employers charging H-2B workers excessive fees. In more than half the cases investigators reviewed, fees for visa processing, overcrowded housing and transportation reduced some employees’ paychecks to as little as $48 for a two-week period.
•Employers and labor recruiters submitting fraudulent records. The documents allowed some businesses to avoid hiring American workers or to exploit foreign workers by paying them less than promised.
All of those problems were highlighted in The Star’s series and were factors in the Kansas City human trafficking scheme recently prosecuted in federal court here.
The new study also found instances of companies receiving federal contracts even though they had faced criminal charges or settled worker lawsuits over wage or intimidation issues.
Investigators conducted site visits with labor recruiters and H-2B workers. Generally, workers said they were paid and housed adequately. But investigators found some cases that made them suspicious.
A West Virginia circus operator, who previously faced allegations that he had charged “exorbitant” recruitment fees and not paid his workers properly, was housing up to seven workers in a travel trailer.
And workers at a North Carolina seafood processor told investigators that they were afraid to speak with outsiders because their employer could retaliate.
GAO reports, such as the one released this week, can provide guidance to government officials as they consider how to reform programs that are inefficient or ineffective. But changes to the federal government’s human trafficking enforcement bureaucracy have been slow.
At the conclusion of The Star’s series in December 2009, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano promised to announce a “major set of initiatives” to escalate the battle against human trafficking the next month. Ten 10 months later, she still hasn’t laid out her plans, but a homeland security representative told the newspaper that there were plans to implement parts of Napolitano’s initiatives piece by piece over time.
As part of that piece-by-piece campaign, Napolitano in July announced the Blue Campaign, a Homeland Security program that seeks to improve public awareness, victim assistance programs and law enforcement training and programs to fight human trafficking.
In testimony to Congress in September, Luis CdeBaca, the U.S. human trafficking czar, said the administration had made progress by having federal agencies coordinate and improve their grant programs.
Other reforms to the H-2B visa program have been incremental.
Last year, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis told The Star she planned to add more investigators to the Wage and Hour Division. That effort is getting noticed. In September a national hotel trade association notified its members that the Labor Department is “heavily” auditing H-2B seasonal workers.
And last month, Solis said she is seeking authority to have employers pay H-2B workers what their labor is worth.
Employment problems A new federal report on temporary foreign workers highlights several problems including:
•Employers not paying proper wages or overtime.
•Employers charging H-2B workers excessive fees.
•Employers and labor recruiters submitting fraudulent records.
@ Go to KansasCity.com to read The Star’s series on human trafficking.
To contact Mark Morris, call 816-234-4310 or send e-mail to mmorris@kcstar.com.
