Public Schools Abuse Immigration Laws

You may not believe who is abusing America’s immigration laws to secure cheap labor — public schools.

“The foreign teacher trafficking business has stretched from the Prince George’s County, Maryland, school district (which was ordered to pay $5.9 million in back wages and penalties for H-1B abuses in 2011) to the East Baton Rouge, Louisiana, school system (which required H-1B teachers to pay a $50 interview fee, $5,000 job application fee, and a $7,500 additional fee to a recruitment agency) and beyond,” Michelle Malkin and John Miano write in their new book,  Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires and Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are Screwing America’s Best and Brightest Workers. “While a few violators have received fines, lackluster enforcement is once again the norm.”

“A foreign teacher trafficking outfit called the Teachers Placement Group (TPG) in Newark, New Jersey, for example, illegally required recruits to pay the group 25 percent of its wages and threatened to revoke H-1B visas if teachers did not comply.”

Malkin, a nationally syndicated columnist, is the author of a half a dozen books, including this one. Miano is a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies.

“For the past decade, foreign teachers in the Garland, Texas, school district fell victim to the H1B-to-green-card hustle,” Malkin and Miano report. “The Garland schools had a growing Spanish-speaking student body, but few Spanish-speaking teachers.”

“The school system applied for more than six hundred H-1B visas to recruit foreign teachers from the Philippines, Colombia, Mexico, and other countries and successfully imported 280 to America. The human resources director of the Garland school system, Victor Leos, seized the opportunity to enrich himself. He charged potential foreign teachers a one-thousand-dollar fee for a job interview and a four-thousand-dollar kickback to be hired.”

“Leos also required the job-seekers to rent rooms from his stepson and required them to use a law firm that employed another relative. “

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