Monday, July 13, 2009, 2:22pm EDT
Yang gets jail time for harboring illegals

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A Duluth, Ga., man who ran an employment agency in Chamblee was sentenced on Monday to five years in prison for harboring illegal aliens.

Laing Yang, 37, was convicted of the charges on April 23 after a trial.

Yang had previously operated an employment agency in Atlanta from 2001 to 2003, which found jobs in Chinese restaurants, predominantly for illegal Hispanic workers. Yang returned to the employment agencies and his illegal activity in November 2007. Yang was fluent in Spanish and two Chinese dialects and he served as the broker between the illegal workers and Chinese restaurants looking for cheap labor. Yang was able to place these illegal workers in jobs and also provide the illegal workers’ transportation to the restaurants without any initial payment by the workers. The transportation fee and Yang’s commission would be paid up-front by the restaurant owner, who would then deduct that cost from the wages paid to the worker.

The investigation included surveillance and undercover agents posing as undocumented workers seeking jobs from Yang at Dong Sheng Employment Agency in Chamblee. Neither the undercover agent nor the other aliens present and seeking employment were ever asked for documentation that they were authorized to work in the United States. The undercover agent captured on tape the defendant offering a job working seven days a week, for 12 hours a day, for the salary of $1,000 per month.

Two men who had driven the aliens to jobs in Ohio, Kentucky, Alabama, South Carolina and Georgia testified at trial against Yang and said they would drive the workers to Chinese restaurants where they would be paid a referral fee that ranged from $800 to $1,000 per worker, and they would return that fee to Yang.

Testimony at trial showed that Yang was placing up to 10 workers a week, and he harbored more 100 illegal aliens in a four-month period.


http://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/stor ... a=from_rss