….and maybe your state too! That title is from an opinion piece at the Wall Street Journal today and all I can say is, ‘I told you so!’ This is the reason big business is so pro-open borders—cheap labor is the driver. In this case it was truly slave labor!
On May 27, a federal grand jury indictment was unsealed accusing a group of 12 people, mainly Uzbekistanis along with a company called Giant Labor Solutions, of running a labor trafficking ring in Kansas City, Mo., and its suburbs. If the indictment is to be believed, the scam involved the same sort of debt-bondage tricks that have pushed workers elsewhere into servitude for years.
The way it allegedly worked was this: The Kansas City ring recruited hundreds of workers from Jamaica, the Philippines, and the Dominican Republic with promises of visas through the federal H-2B seasonal worker program. To get the process started, however, the indictment says that workers had to pay the accused racketeers hefty fees.
Once in America, the workers found themselves at the mercy of the traffickers, who allegedly kept “them as modern-day slaves under threat of deportation,” in the words of James Gibbons of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
How do you think the Uzbekistanis got here—the Refugee Resettlement Program of the US State Department tops my list as a the likely source. As of 2005 we brought in a half a million so-called “refugees” from the former Soviet Union. If you are checking the numbers, it is only in recent years (2008 and 2009) that the Uzbekistanis are separated out on the data charts kept at the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
Guess what Kansas industry was using the “slaves” supplied by Giant Labor Solutions—-the hotel industry! Ring a bell anyone? Is that why the Loew’s Vanderbilt Hotel in Nashville and its manager Tom Negri are so pro-immigrant? Surely, it’s out of the goodness of his heart that Negri helped start pro-immigrant phoney-baloney grassroots groups in Nashville with Chicago-style community organizers. That’s why they gathered all the bleeding hearts of Nashville together for a press conference at the hotel just a couple of weeks ago to proclaim their love of immigrants. LOL!
The days of appreciative servitude are over now, however, and a spokesman for the city’s hoteliers told the Kansas City Star that they had nothing to do with the labor recruiter’s alleged distasteful practices.
But I suspect this problem won’t be brushed off so easily. Hotel chains may denounce their former labor recruiter, but the Web site of the hotel industry’s trade association still bellows its support for the federal H-2B visa program that may have made it all possible.
Author Thomas Frank wraps up with this!
The answer comes in another choice phrase from the Web site of the accused: Bring on Giant Labor and “your recruiting, hiring and payroll expenses will drastically drop.”
It’s a “labor solution,” all right. It’s “a win-win situation,” even. For everyone but the workers.
Note to do-gooders: This is all about an unholy alliance between big business (cheap labor) on the one hand, and using immigrants to destabilize communities on the other hand. You may care deeply about the plight of the world’s downtrodden but the driving force behind the open borders movement is BIG BUCKS for some and more Leftwing angry demanding voters for others.
Question for Ms. Sebelius, former Governor of Kansas and now Secretary of Health and Human Services that oversees the Office of Refugee Resettlement—-what did you know about this back in Kansas?