Nefarious Role for Employers

Working in tandem, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Justice Department announced this week they had uncovered an immigrant-smuggling and money-laundering network that ranged the globe.

Over three years, the smugglers transported as many as 12,000 illegal workers to Moscow and then on to Cuba; from there, the human cargo was transferred to the Bahamas, Ecuador or Guatemala before being shipped to various U.S. cities.

According to officials in charge of the investigation, the smugglers might have grossed up to $220 million. The fee for each of the immigrants, mostly from India but also from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Syria, ran between $20,000 and $28,000. The money was sometimes paid by families, sometimes by employers who then required the immigrant to work off the fee.

Both the Justice Department and the INS are to be commended for this impressive catch. But there are important questions that need answering. Most important, who are the employers who hired the immigrants and in what way, if any, did they connect with the gang of smugglers? Which industries were most involved?

The government has been reluctant to release the names of the businesses, arguing that there is a continuing investigation and that no employers have been indicted yet. Whether indictments follow or not--and employers of illegal immigrants are almost never prosecuted for that crime alone--the public deserves to know more.

Every aspect of this case has echoes in California. So it is fair to demand that the INS and Justice Department also look at employers’ ties to Mexican labor. Academicians like Fred Krissman, an immigration expert at Washington State University, have thoroughly documented the reach of U.S. agricultural labor subcontractors who go deep into Mexico to hire, sometimes providing travel money or other assistance upfront. What then is the link between the subcontractors and the U.S. farms and other businesses where the illegal immigrants end up working? The lure of U.S. jobs to poor people in Mexico is undeniable, and many of course come on their own. But the tie to employers needs to be far better understood by policymakers and the public.

The breakup of the East Coast smuggling ring is a start toward broader public realization that the issue of illegal immigration is more complex than what meets the eye. As long as there is demand for cheap labor in the United States, illegal immigrants will come to fill the vacancies. Some will sneak across the border on their own, others will overstay their visas and others will be hired in their home country by smugglers working for their future employers.