Thread: Biggest Illegal Alien Raid Much Worse Than You Think

I received this email from one of my contacts. It is interesting.

How THIS company imports ALIENS LEGALLY!!!

http://projectusa. org/2008/ 05/18/biggest- immig-raid- ever-much- worse-than- you-think/



This is long, but you get some of the details of HOW big business
profits by importing ALIENS LEGALLY....

Note the wages offered and the POVERTY LEVEL in this town...

The Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained 390 illegal
immigrants May 13, 2008 in the largest single-site immigration raid in
US history. The raid took place at Agriprocessors, Inc., the nation's
largest kosher meatpacking plant, located in the tiny town of
Postville, Iowa.

Federal officials have declined to comment about possible charges
against the owners of Agriprocessors, and jaded Americans can be
forgiven for assuming the employer will receive a slap on the wrist,
if it receives any penalty at all.

But before you shrug and move on, it's worth noting that the feds
aren't following the typical routine around the Postville raid. There
may yet be some arrests higher up the ladder in the offing, with
serious felony charges to follow.

As well there should be. The 390 detainees who were working in
Agriprocessors' slaughterhouse are the vanilla surface of a much
darker story underneath. It's a deeply troubling story that demands
the owners of Agriprocessors, among others, be prosecuted under the
full weight of the law.

If this story doesn't end with major prison sentences handed down,
there is, as they say, no justice.

An astonishing criminal enterprise

I first picked up the Agriprocessors story in May, 2004. It began far
from Iowa's cornfields with the arrival at San Francisco's
international airport on Cathay Pacific Airlines Flight CX872 of a
Chinese national named Hu Yao Bin with his wife and two children.

The paperwork Mr. Hu presented to immigration inspectors at the
airport was all in order. It showed that a US employer named Aaron
Rubashkin, president of Agriprocessors, Inc. of Postville, Iowa, had
petitioned successfully for the visa that Mr. Hu and his family now
presented to inspectors—an EW-3 visa, which covers those coming to the
United States to perform unskilled labor.

It should have been another rubber stamp entry. But no sooner had Mr.
Hu and his family been cleared to enter the United States,
permanently, than Mr. Hu blundered badly. He asked the inspecting
officer to forward his Legal Permanent Resident card to his intended
address in San Francisco's Chinatown—not to the kosher slaughterhouse
in Iowa that was to be his place of employment.

Oops. That's one heck of a commute. Mr. Hu was promptly referred to a
second agent for questioning.

He confessed everything in the second interview. In a sworn statement,
Mr. Hu said that his friend, Mr. Hu Shu Bin, had obtained the
immigrant visa from the American consulate in Guangzhou, China, for
which he had paid his friend US$30,000—the standard fee "snakeheads"
charge to bring Chinese nationals into the United States.

In the statement, Mr. Hu Yao Bin stated that Mr. Hu Shu Bin had
arranged for the family to immigrate through an American lawyer named
Christopher A. Teras.

Mr Teras has processed hundreds of these cases, Mr Hu told the agent.

When the interview was over, Mr. Hu received a "deferred inspection".
He was released with a request that he reappear voluntarily at a later
date.

After Mr. Hu and his family left to start their new lives as
Americans, an ICE agent telephoned Agriprocessors. It happened to be a
Jewish holiday, so the plant was closed. A security guard named Warren
Timmerman was on duty, however, and he showed no reluctance to talk to
to the agent.

He told the agent that, yes, "hundreds of Chinese" immigrants come to
Postville to work at the slaughterhouse for a couple of weeks in order
to fulfill their visa requirement, then disappear.

Interesting.

The agent then called Mr. Hu's attorney, Christopher Teras, a member
of the American Immigration Lawyers Assn whose office in Washington,
DC, as it turned out, was just five blocks from my own. A "Ms.
Kim-attorney secretary", answered the telephone at the law firm. She
too was very forthcoming. In a heavy Asian accent, she told the agent
that $30,000 was a typical fee for someone like Mr. Hu, and that, yes,
the firm "has successed for hundreds of such".
A brief explanation of how the labor certification process works

Mr. Hu and his family entered on an immigrant visa after the filing of
an EW-3 petition by an American employer for an unskilled worker. This
is also called a "labor certification" . To secure a labor
certification, an employer seeking to import a foriegn worker has to
demonstrate it cannot find an American to do the job the employer
wants filled. In this case, Agriprocessors had to demonstrate that it
could not find an American to pack kosher meat.

The employer demonstrates it can't find any Americans to fill a
position by advertising for a worker in a local newspaper's help
wanted section. In the ad, the employer must describe the job and
offer the "prevailing wage" rate. The prevailing wage is determined by
the Department of Labor (DOL).

If the ad is unsuccessful, it is considered proof there are no
Americans available to do the job, which the allows the employer to
file the EW-3 petition with the DOL for the certification that will
allow it to import a foreigner.

When the DOL approves the EW-3 petition for foreign unskilled labor,
the sponsoring employer receives an approval letter, and the
prospective immigrant or his attorney files an I-140 visa petition,
which is the foundation for permanent residency.

When the I-140 is approved, the alien or his attorney receives a green
card. However, thanks to a decision in a famous lawsuit we'll get to
in a bit, the visa is transferable from one prospective immigrant to
another. This transferability allows for all sorts of mischief. In the
present case, the visa was transferred to Mr. Hu Yao Bin on the street
outside the American consulate in Guangzhou for $30,000.
The labor pool in Postville

The visa transferred to Hu Yao Bin in Guangdong Province for $30,000
was issued on the strength of Agriprocessors having proved to the DOL
that it was unable to fill a position at its plant in Postville, Iowa.
Because no Iowan was available to take the job, the meat-packing plant
found it necessary to send all the way to China for a meat-cutter.

Under those conditions, one would suppose Postville enjoyed an
extremely tight labor market, with labor priced through the roof. But
Census Bureau data show the opposite to be the case.

Of the 2,273 people who live in Postville, one in eight (12.7 per
cent) lives in poverty—including one in eight children. And even
though the little town plays host to Agriprocessors, Inc., Iowa's
seventh largest employer, the per capita income in Postville is only
$14,264—less than half the transfer fee Mr. Hu paid in China for the
visa that would allow him to uproot his family and travel all the way
to Iowa to take the job that had gone begging among the locals.

Something is clearly amiss. While the working conditions at
Agriprocessors are reportedly abusive and deplorable, and not only for
the employees, how could it be that in a town with so many living in
poverty, no one would take a job that was so attractive to someone on
the other side of the world he was willing to pay a fee exceeding two
years at the average local American salary just to get the position?

The answer, of course, is that Mr. Hu never intended to take the job
for which he was issued a visa, any more than Agriprocessors intended
to find an American worker through its placement of the help wanted ad
in the local paper.

The key is in the wage set by the DOL. At the time Mr. Hu Yao Bin's
unskilled labor visa was petitioned for, the wage set by the DOL
(since raised) for a meat cutter in Allamakee County, Iowa, where
Postville is located,was $6.50 per hour.

That hourly wage translates into a yearly salary of just
$13,000—substantiall y lower than the already low per capita income in
town, and 25 per cent below the poverty line for a family of four
living in Iowa at that time.

No wonder no American was available to take the job.

Just think for a minute about that real world consequences of this
legal fraud—this modern scam. Imagine a guy trying to support a wife
and two kids and just barely staying afloat, financially. With his
family hovering at the brink of poverty, he wants to change jobs so
that he can provide a better future for his kids. But, if he wants the
slaughterhouse job Agriprocessors is advertising, at the rate set by
his own government, he would have to accept a 25 per cent pay cut.

If there is anybody to whom society should be giving a hand up, in my
view, it is that struggling guy with a family to support. But, instead
of helping him, his government helps the employer avoid having to
offer higher wages to him by giving the employer the right to import a
cheaper human from abroad. The government helps ensure that the
prevailing wage will never rise, and the struggling guy is cut off at
the knees.
Wrong, but perfectly legal. Or is it?

If a foreign national enters the United States under the conditions
just described, he has entered legally.

But wait. Legally? If Agriprocessors is cutting its struggling
neighbors off at the knees legally, then why were those 390 mostly
Guatemalans detained as illegal aliens in Postville last week?

agriprossesorsIn general, these Central Americans will have entered
the country illegally, and none of them will have paid a smuggler
anywhere near $30,000 to be smuggled in. They are on the lowest
economic rung of all. In fact if you're a Guatemalan illegal alien,
you can forget about that princely $6.50 per hour Agriprocessors
advertises for the Americans. At Agriprocessors, according to the
charges in a lawsuit reported by the Cedar Rapids (IA) Gazette,
"Immigrants were paid $5 an hour and after three or four months,
bumped up to $6."

Agriprocessors, you see, has two lucrative and pernicious schemes
going. One scheme involves driving wages down to bare subsistence by
hiring desperately poor illegal immigrants to work in its
slaughterhouse— the criminal enterprise that made the news last week.
The other involves fraudently claiming that the United States has run
out of native-born meat-cutters and then, with the help of American
Immigration Lawyers Association member Christopher Teras, securing
work visas for foreigners worth $30,000 each on the street in Guangzhou.

If it is the pattern and practice of Mr. Rubashkin, the sponsoring
employer, Mr. Teras, the immigration lawyer, and Mr. Hu Shu Bin,
almost certainly the agent of the sponsoring employer, to sponsor
employees who consistently leave after two weeks, or who never show up
in Postville at all, it militates against a finding that there ever
was any intent to employ the alien for a reasonable period of time.
The employer's defense of employment intent is removed. He is
indictable. He and all parties are amenable to being charged with
conspiracy, racketeering, labor certification fraud, money laundering,
making false statements, and, perhaps, tax evasion. [ US Code ]
Unquestionably profitable

The Department of Homeland Security severely restricts the public's
access to information it possesses about, for example, the number of
visa applications a particular attorney has executed (why?).
Therefore, it is difficult to say how much profit the Teras-Postville
scheme generated.

However, Mr. Timmerman, Ms. Kim, and Mr. Hu all claimed, according to
the charging document in the Hu case, that the Teras-Postville scheme
generated "hundreds" of such cases.

Let's say the Teras-Postville scheme collaborated on 200 such visas.
At $30,000 per person, 200 such entries would have generated $6 million.

But hundreds of such cases? Isn't it a little hard to believe such a
large scale fraud involving so many people could go undetected for years?

The famous case against an immigration lawyer named Samuel Kooritzky
is instructive. While in that case labor certifications were being
filed for nonexistent businesses, or for business that actually
existed, but without the business's knowledge that the certifications
were being filed, the Kooritzky case shows how the scheme operates,
and on what potential scale. A DOL special agent testified at
Kooritzky's trial in December, 2002, that the immigration lawyer
"filed 2,200 phony labor applications last year alone." Kooritzky v.
Herman DC U.S. Court of Appeals, 1999

From an article by Tom Jackman, who covered the Kooritzky case for the
Washington Post:

"There's every reason to believe this is going on all over the
country," said Ben Ferro, a former INS district director in Baltimore.
Ferro said the INS doesn't have enough agents to track internal visa
schemes, particularly with increased border scrutiny and other changes
in priorities since Sept. 11. "There are many, many areas of
immigration law that, because INS doesn't have the ability or
willingness to monitor and stamp them out, it goes unchecked," he
said. "And when these things are found, they're usually only
prosecuted when they reach the kinds of numbers you're talking about
here."

Kooritzky was convicted of filing thousands of petitions and led away
from the courtroom in handcuffs to serve time in prison. But there is
more to the Kooritzky case.

In 1991, the DOL published an "interim final rule", which terminated
the right of employers to substitute one immigrant applicant for
another in the labor certification process. petitioning process for a
foreign worker, it would no longer be able to substitute in another
worker midway through the process. The rule change would have made it
much harder to sell labor visas on the street outside the American
consulate in Guangzhou.

Kooritzky sued the Secretary of Labor, arguing that the rule had been
published unfairly. The district court ruled in DOL's favor, but the
US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia reversed, concluding
that DOL had promulgated its rule without adequate notice and comment.
Kooritzky v. Reich, 17 F.3d 1509 (D.C. Cir. 1994).

The ability to substitute in any prospective foreign worker makes it
much easier for immigration lawyers to engage in wholesale visa fraud,
as Kooritzky himself did with a vengeance, as it turns out, but
Kooritzkt wasn't satisfied with his victory. After prevailing on the
merits, Kooritzky sought to recover attorney fees from the DOL—even
though he had represented himself in the suit. He even sought to
recover attorney fees for other immigration lawyers who, he claimed,
had helped him on the case, even though no other attorneys had entered
an appearance on Kooritzky's behalf during the merits phase of the case.

The DOL declined to pay Kooritzky Kooritzky's attorney fees, so, on
March 1, 1995, Kooritzky moved for an award of attorney fees of
$427,662 in district court. The district court awarded Kooritzky and
his co-counsel a portion of that amount. Both sides appealed to the US
Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which eventually denied
Kooritzky any fees at all. Arguing the appeal for Kooritzky was one
the immigration lawyers Kooritzky claimed had served as co-counsel in
the original suit against the DOL. That attorney was Mr. Christopher
Teras, the Washington, DC attorney for Hu Yao Bin, the imported
meat-cutter for Agriprocessors of Postville, Iowa.
The tentacles unexamined obstruct justice

I received the information about the Hu Yao Bin case back in 2004 from
an ICE agent who told me, "You know, Craig, this stuff goes on all the
time. It's like we are waterboys for the snakeheads, performing our
part by stamping these visas approved. It's wrong, but it just seems
to go on forever. We mostly get used to it, but sometimes it really
bothers me."

He asked me to do what I could to bring attention to the case so that
it didn't just disappear.

I passed the information on to a member of the Iowa congressional
delegation, who duly called the special investigations unit in San
Francisco, which wondered why he was calling. The visa was perfectly
legal, he was told, and so he let the matter drop.

I sent the story to several newspapers, but only the Omaha World
Herald ran a small bit, if I remember correctly.

One reporter I contacted was Tom Jackman of the Washington Post, who
had covered the Kooritsky trial in 2002. When I described the
documents I had in my possession, he became very excited. I'm on
deadline now, he said, but as soon as I file this, I'll call my editor
to get the go ahead, and then get back to you.

I didn't hear back from him, so I called him again. He was apologetic,
and said his editor had nixed the story.

The same thing has happened to me three times. Three times I have
contacted a Washington Post reporter with a story, the reporter would
be excited about the information initially, but then end up telling me
his or her editor had killed the story. The other two times involved
an aspect of the Jack Abramoff case, her coverage for which the
reporter I talked to won a Pulitzer, and the manifestly corrupt
activities of Congressman Chris Cannon of Utah (during the
investigation of whom I first came across the name, Christopher Teras,
a Cannon contributor) .

So, to the agent who asked me to help bring attention to this case:
I'm sorry to have failed you; you see what we are up against.

But perhaps I didn't fail completely. I also forwarded the information
to the ICE office in Iowa that led the arrests last week in Postville.
If the arrests are limited to Guatemalans, to the people on the very
bottom rung of the ladder, I'll know I have truly failed, and so will
our society have failed. I hold out hope that more arrests are coming.
The heart of the problem

The biggest obstacle I see to cleaning up our nation's immigration
mess—bigger than the American Immigration Lawyers Assn and the greed
of its members,
bigger than subversive editors, bigger than contemptible employers—is
the governmental corruption that seems to have this country by the throat.

One form of that corruption is campaign contributions— a practice that
is destroying our democracy and simply has to stop. From 2000 to 2004,
Agriprocessors contributed $2,000 to Congressman Noach Dear of
Brooklyn, $2,500 to Congressman Jim Nussle of Iowa, $2,000 to the
National Republican Congressional Cmte, and $14,000 to Senator Arlen
Specter. Each of these recipients during this time period actively
worked against the wishes and well-being of the American people on the
immigration issue in Washington.

From 2000 to 2004, Agriprocessors also gave $3,550 to the Republican
Party of Iowa, which repeatedly acquiesced in the betrayal of Iowans
on the immigration issue during Governor Tom Vilsack's administration,
and $5,500 to Stan Thompson, an Iowa Republican who challenged
Democratic incumbent Leonard Boswell in Iowa's 3rd congressional
district in 2002 and again in 2004.

How is Stan Thompson on immigration? When ProjectUSA put up billboards
in Des Moines during the 2004 campaign advertising the fact that, in
Washington, Rep. Boswell supported amnesty for illegal aliens, the
immigration issue exploded into the race. billboard-congressm an
Leonard Boswell supports amnesty for illegal aliensRep. Boswell was
left hurling invective and fuming, but ineffectively, since our
billboards were accurate. Enter challenger Stan Thompson. Thompson not
only failed to capitalize on the gift he'd been handed, but neutered
our campaign by publicly condemning our completely accurate billboard
campaign and calling on us to take down the boards! To whose interests
was Stan Thompson hewing? The voters' of Iowa? The struggling guy's in
Postville with a wife and two kids to support? Or the interests of
Agriprocessors, his campaign donor?

What a story!

http://projectusa./ doesn't open for me.

try http://projectusa.org/index.php

http://projectusa.org/2008/05/18/big...han-you-think/

What a deep story of pure Greed and Corruption . I got a feeling , no i'm not going to say it . I'll just think it cause it may be true

This article points out how pervasive the targeting of American industry by special interest groups has become. It's just one small slice of the myriads of confidence games played by slick, international rackets. We've got Nigerian scams, jihadists, religious zealots, legal advocacy groups, jet-set swindlers, human smugglers, SSi freeloaders---all scheming for a piece of the dwindling American pie.

If the ad is unsuccessful, it is considered proof there are no
Americans available to do the job, which the allows the employer to
file the EW-3 petition with the DOL for the certification that will
allow it to import a foreigner.

The ad will be unsuccessful, if you don't answer the phone or say the position is filled when real people call.

No more visas! Right now, they are nothing but a gateway for illegal aliens.

Dixie

The only bright spot in this article is to once again prove to the illegal hispanic groups that this isn't something specifically targeting them....looks like we have a long corrupt history abusing every race and country of people.

Even when they post the jobs for regular citizens, they can always give any excuse they want to not hire you. Or hire you and fire you within your probationary period to look like they "tried". I would be curious to know what the conditions are like, how many injuries there are that go unreported, how many safety issues are ignored and such. In another article concerning this place I think they said this one woman worked 12 hrs. and only had a 1/2 lunch break. I thought the law required more break time than that. Just curious because if you import people from countries who don't know our laws......too scared to report them and no citizen around to stand up.....who knows what all they are getting away with.