4 ms·

No mention of the J1 visa, which employs hundreds of thousands of immigrant students in US summer jobs: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/opinion/americas-swea

• chrisbennet 10y ago
  Wow. That was the first I'd ever heard of that.
• dsfyu404ed 10y ago
  Yup, total f###ing scam. The local employers in the tourist area I grew up in load up on Irish and eastern European college students every summer. They give them barely enough hours to make ends meet if they live two and three to a room, ride a bike ~10mi or more to work and pick up another part time job on the side. Standard practice was/is to hire too many people so that everybody would be fighting for hours and firing people at the drop of a hat wasn't inconvenient. The main benefit is getting a bunch of employees who are totally clueless about their workplace rights in the US and is dependent on remaining employed by the company that sponsored their visa in order to keep their visa. The supermarkets and hotels were businesses who would usually sponsor J1s so they were the ones who treated them like crap. The actual tourism parts of the tourism industry only hires the foreign workers secondarily (since all the foreign workers had at least two jobs) and treated them like anyone else. This kind of behavior is particularly scummy since it would cost very little, if any) additional money to pick up the phone and call a temp agency since managing a primarily foreign workforce is inefficient. It's not about money, it's about having employees you can treat like sh#t. (Source: worked summer jobs with J1 students as coworkers)