Wouldn’t it be something if the anti-US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agitators who disrupt so-called “criminal” illegal alien roundups paused to think about the abjectly cruel and grossly exploitative shadow underworld they are upholding by their actions? As the street posturing continues to garner sympathetic big-box media attention, another case of massive labor abuse involving vulnerable “migrant” workers has quietly reared its sinister head.
“A federal grand jury returned a 35-count indictment, unsealed [on Feb. 20], charging three Mexican citizens for trafficking Mexican farmworkers into forced labor and harboring them in the United States after their visas expired for the defendants’ financial gain,” the Justice Department (DOJ) announced late last month. The criminal ring involved is extensive, impacting farms in Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida.
As usual, the case centers on gross misuse of the system allowing foreign workers into the United States.
‘Force Them to Labor in Inhumane Conditions’
“Three individuals have been indicted for exploiting the H-2A visa program to lure vulnerable workers from Mexico to the United States with promises of legitimate employment, only to then confiscate their identity documents and force them to labor in inhumane conditions,” Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division revealed.
The alleged abuses once again bring to the fore ugly accusations of slave labor in modern America that have tragically become a norm over the first quarter of the 21st century.
“Martha Zeferino Jose, 42, a permanent resident of the United States and citizen of Mexico, owned and operated Las Princesas Corporation (Las Princesas), a farm labor contracting company based in Washington, North Carolina[,] that recruited workers from Mexico to come to the United States on temporary H-2A agricultural visas,” the DOJ detailed.
Her partner in the venture was Jose Rodriquez Munoz, “a citizen of Mexico illegally residing in the United States,” along with her son, Jeremy Zeferino Jose.
The department outlined what it stated was the fate that awaited these Mexican nationals brought in to perform the back-breaking, cheap labor that lazy American citizens “won’t do”:
“Recruiters working for Las Princesas allegedly charged the workers significant fees for the opportunity to come to the United States, saddling them with debt before they even arrived.
“Once the workers were in the country, the defendants allegedly confiscated their passports, visas, and identification documents to prevent them from leaving. The workers were then allegedly compelled to perform physically demanding labor at farms and plant nurseries across three states under degrading conditions.
“According to the indictment, the defendants made the workers labor for extensive hours without adequate breaks or access to water; housed them in crowded, unsanitary residences that lacked heat, air conditioning, hot water and bedding; failed to pay required wages; withheld food; and denied medical care.”
One can’t help wondering how much of a chuckle the profitable operators involved in this disreputable employment system enjoy as they watch fawning television news coverage of angry leftists harassing ICE agents working to dismantle the illegal immigration colossus that allows them to tap into this exploited cheap labor pool.
Tankard Nurseries is a “wholesale nursery serving the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states,” the company’s website proclaims. It clears annual revenues of $18.1 million, according to the latest information found on ZoomInfo. This large and thriving nursery is contracted with Las Princesas. In December, Tankard agreed to a financial settlement in a class action lawsuit involving migrant workers who claimed they were denied fair pay, decent housing, and appropriate meals while working for the company, as indicated in the DOJ charges above.
“The allegations ranged from labor trafficking to wage theft,” The Daily Press newspaper in Newport News, VA, reported.
Willful Ignorance Fuels Illegal Alien Employment
Here’s the crux of the matter. Working with outside hiring firms such as Las Princesas allows these large American employers to claim denial of responsibility for the abhorrent abuses they should manifestly know by now are part and parcel of the cheap foreign labor service industry they intentionally sign up to do business with.
“Tankard Nurseries had no role whatsoever in the recruitment, hiring, paying or immigration arrangements of Las Princesas and its employees,” Glen Robertson, an attorney who represented the company, said of the settlement, the paper related. “No one from Tankard Nurseries had any knowledge, or even suspicion, of any illegal actions by Las Princesas or any of its owners or employees.”
Robertson took care to stress Tankard’s limited responsibilities under the law.
“Joint employer liability under these laws does not require involvement or even knowledge of the claimed violations by Tankard Nurseries, and it strenuously denied either,” he added.
They don’t even have to know? Is this really how it works? Legal definitions are parsed to create space between employer and abused worker.
“There’s an intentional way to split liability between the contractors and the employers and who’s doing what and responsible for what,” is how Jason Yarashes, attorney and co-director of the Worker Justice Program at the Legal Aid Justice Center, which worked on behalf of the plaintiffs, put it.
This is not merely a handful of illegal aliens we are talking about here. The Tankard settlement (which included other farms and work sites) involved “366 agricultural workers who came to the US from Mexico through the H-2A visa program,” the North Carolina Justice Center stated in a December news release.
As part of the settlement, Tankard agreed that if it “uses H-2A workers or other agricultural workers over the next three years, [it] must employ them directly instead of using a labor contractor.”
What a revolutionary concept in American employment practice. Require agricultural employers to have direct knowledge about the workers who labor for them and clear obligations as to their general well-being on the job.
Amazingly, the leftists protesting against ICE in the streets of American cities, towns, and neighborhoods are playing their part in assuring that such basic and vital components of societal decency are not imposed on those making a fortune off the illegal immigration and “migrant worker” pipeline.
