Recruitment Abuses Emerge in Immigration Reform Debate

By Michelle Chen, In These Times
June 12, 2013

Archiel Buagas thought she was doing everything right. The young Filipina nurse secured a special work visa to come to the United States and arranged a job at a New York nursing home with the help of a recruiting agency. Things started to feel wrong when they refused to give her a copy of her contract. She and the other nurses in her group soon found themselves working frantically to care for 30 to 60 patients per shift, without regular breaks, and she was soon driven to exhaustion by the indecent pay and relentless stress.

“I was so scared of going to work that before my shift," she later testified to labor advocates. "I would be crying, I’d be [vomiting] because of anxiety and nervousness. I would have diarrhea.... [T]he only thing that made me sleep was the fact that I’m so tired .... I wanted to go home.”

Buagas learned the hard way that her path to American prosperity would be fraught with betrayal. It wasn’t because she didn’t have the right papers, it was because her papers offered her no protection against an industry that preys on the hopes of migrants seeking a better life abroad.[...]

Read the full article:
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/15136/recruitment_abuses_emerge_in_immigration_reform_debate/