Lawsuit: College Sold Foreign Students to Work at Dog Food Factory

A community college used the State Department’s J-1 visa program to import and then trade 14 foreign students to work at a local dog food factory, according to a lawsuit filed by the fraud victims.

College officials told the 14 Chilean students they were accepted into “a two-year program in which Plaintiffs would study at Western Iowa Tech Community College] WITCC and complete internships related to their field of study and at which they would work no more than 32 hours per week,” says the lawsuit, which was revealed by TheCollegeFix.com.

The lawsuit alleged:

After Plaintiffs arrived in the United States, they were assigned jobs at Defendants Royal Canin and/or Tur-Pak. The jobs to which Plaintiffs were assigned had no educational value and were completely unrelated to their intended fields of study. Plaintiffs were expected to work more than the 32 hours a week they had been told they would be working.

“The students made $15 an hour working for each of these firms, though they themselves kept $7.25 per hour,” according to TheCollegeFix. “The rest was paid to WITCC and J&L Staffing, in part to cover students’ housing, tuition, and fees,” it added. 

The lawsuit does not say if the federal government has charged the Americans with crimes.

The state department reveals little about the J-1 program. It has at least 14 sub-programs, which allow employers to annually import several hundred thousand foreign workers for periods of up to three years. Most of the workers are used for cheap seasonal labor at hotels, holiday camps, and resorts.

But some programs deliver white-collar foreign workers into better-paid jobs at universities and research laboratories that would otherwise be filled by young U.S. graduates. This year, border chief Alejandro Mayorkas created a new J-1 work-permit program for tech companies without any approval from Congress.

In turn, the J-1 is just one of many visa-worker programs that the government uses to import temporary workers to help companies cut wages owed to Americans. The programs include the H-1B, OPT, L-1,  H4EAD, TN, H-2A, H-2B, E-2, EB-4, and other labor programs that are often unmonitored and abusive. For example, many Central American migrants work in slaughterhouses in exchange for government-provided citizenship.

This diverse contract workforce keeps about 2 million workers in various jobs throughout the United States. That imported labor force minimizes the domestic labor shortages that allow Americans to win higher wages from employers.

President Donald Trump curbed the use of the J-1 visas in 2020 during the coronavirus crash. That policy opened up many seasonal jobs to young Americans. “Our applications from college kids are up pretty significantly over prior years” Jim Laing, the head of human resources for Aspen Skiing Co., said in 2020. “We are targeting college-age applicants, but they seem to be targeting us as well — that’s a bright light in this mess.”

The inflow of the 14 Chilean workers caused economic harm to Americans in their Iowa community.

If the imported foreign workers were not working those factory jobs, local Americans would have been able to bargain for better wages and working conditions.

Also, the factory owners might have purchased new labor-saving machinery that would have helped their employees earn more money each day.

The smuggling loss also reduced local spending — so hurting nearby shops, as well as local tax receipts — because the workers were unable to buy much from local stores.

In Iowa, the Chileans’ lawsuit is “doing [legal] discovery,” said the Chileans’ lawyer, Devin Kelly, an associate attorney at Roxanne Conlin & Associate. 

The judge dismissed some of the Chileans’ complaints but agreed that the Chileans and their lawyer could file claims under laws against human trafficking, contract violation, fraud, and emotional distress.

The lawsuit named several Americans, including Terry Murrell, the president of the community college. It also was filed against labor brokers Premier Services, Inc. and J&L Staffing and Recruiting, Inc., and also against the dog-food factory, Royal Canin USA.

Extraction Migration

Since at least 1990, the D.C. establishment has extracted tens of millions of legal and illegal migrants —plus temporary visa workers — from poor countries to serve as workers, managers, consumers, and renters for various U.S. investors and CEOs.

This federal economic policy of Extraction Migration has skewed the free market in the United States by inflating the labor supply for the benefit of employers.

The skew makes it more difficult for Americans to get married, advance in their careers, raise families, or buy homes.

Extraction migration has also slowed innovation and shrunk Americans’ productivity, partly because it allows employers to boost stock prices by using cheap stoop labor instead of productivity-boosting technology.

Migration undermines employees’ workplace rights, and it widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ big coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland and southern states. The flood of cheap labor tilts the economy towards low-productivity jobs and has shoved at least ten million American men out of the labor force.

An economy built on extraction migration also drains Americans’ political clout over elites, alienates young people, and radicalizes Americans’ democratic civic culture because it allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.

The economic policy is backed by progressives who wish to transform the U.S. from a society governed by European-origin civic culture into a progressive-directed empire of competitive, resentful identity groups. “We’re trying to become the first multiracial, multi-ethnic superpower in the world,” Rep. Rohit Khanna (D-CA) told the New York Times in March 2022. “It will be an extraordinary achievement … we will ultimately triumph,” he boasted.