Story Time.
45yrs ago I worked as a welder at a small mfg plant in Texas.
Nearly half the employees were wetbacks.
There was a Mexican "Coyote" landlord who worked at the plant and acted like El Jefe(the boss) of the illegals.
Most of them lived in big groups in his slum houses.
Every Friday when we went to the local store to cash our paychecks,
He stood outside and the wetbacks walked by and paid him their "rent".
El Jefe basically owned them.
And he was almost like their union boss when it came to dealing with the company mngmt.
If anyone had a problem with any of the illegals it went through El Jefe.
These H1B Visa "Body Shops" sound real familiar.
→ Cheap Labor Undercutting American Jobs.
Silicon Valley's “Body Shop” Secret: Highly Educated Foreign Workers Treated Like Indentured Servants
(NBC - October 27, 2014 • Updated on May 16, 2016)
A year-long investigation by NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit and The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) raises questions about a well-known visa program setup to recruit foreign workers to the US: Is it indentured servitude in the high tech age? Or is it a necessary business model to compete in a quickly changing high tech economy?
NBC Bay Area and CIR’s team discovered an organized system that supplies cheap labor made up of highly-educated and highly-skilled foreign workers who come to the US via H-1B visas.
Consulting firms recruit and then subcontract out skilled foreigners to major tech firms throughout the country and many in Silicon Valley.
Those who work for these third party firms that skirt the law often call them “body shops” and sometimes they get caught.
“It virtually makes these employees a slave,”said one worker who came from India more than a decade ago.
“The body shops have a specific business model,” the worker said. “They make business and profit by having cheap labor.”
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/silicon-valleys-body-shop-secret/78781/