Out of the Shadows and Into the Fire

A common refrain from amnesty advocates and legal immigration apologists is that their policy will protect the illegal population and allow them to avoid the exploitation that comes from lurking in the shadows of the black market in labor. Some call this “dignity” or any other euphemism they can muster to avoid the “A-word,” but the chilling facts of our legal immigration system debunk the fantasy that legal equals safe and non-exploitative. The truth is that the legal immigration system is producing the same exploitation as the black market in labor, including wage theft, violence, discrimination, and slavery. While it is true that our legal immigration system has extensive regulations enforced by three separate Federal Departments on paper, the reality on the ground is that inmates run the asylum, and oversight is largely a fiction. Thus, in the real world, amnesty brings illegal workers out of the shadows and into the fire. 

H-2A: Gold Standard Slavery Visa

Mike Rios, a Department of Labor (DOL) regional agricultural enforcement coordinator, was quoted in a caustic report on H-2A labor abuses as saying H-2A recruiters operated like traffickers:

“Unfortunately, recruiters take advantage of the most needy, the desperate, the ones who will give someone almost anything they own … for the opportunity to work in the U.S.,” said Rios, noting that in some cases, workers have given recruiters the deeds to their homes.”

Members of Congress smeared Mr. Rios for daring to speak the truth about the rot in the H-2A program. Senators Cassidy and Budd wrote to the DOL Secretary complaining about Rios telling the truth, as did Rep. Kevin Kiley and Rep. Virginia Foxx. 

The gist of these letters, trying to fire an honest government employee, was to point to the regulations on paper. After all, how could the H-2A program be abused when page after page of regulations barring exploitation are located in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR)? In other words, do not dare believe your eyes when you can be comforted by the words on the page. 

Explaining the disparity between the real world and the regulations is simple enough. The DOL set a record for the lowest number of investigations closed on farms in 2022. No matter how extensive the regulations are, there is no one enforcing the law in the real world. 

Joe Martinez, leader of a nonprofit labor recruitment agency called CIERTO, wrote in the Sacramento Bee:

“One woman I met assumed she would need to pay us a bribe to avoid being trafficked or abused. She had 60,000 pesos (about $3,000) hidden in her bag, believing she had to pay to stay safe. She had heard of women being trafficked if they didn’t pay. Her own brother, who had worked in the U.S. under H-2A visas, had always paid to avoid problems. When we told her there were no fees, she cried.”

There is not enough space to list all the examples of abuse in H-2A, but here is a short list:

• “You came here to suffer, not for vacation,” farm workers at Sarbanand Farms in Sumas, Washington were warned during the blueberry harvest in 2017. As wildfires choked the Pacific Northwest, workers were told by upper management that unless they were on their “deathbed” they could not call in sick, and they were repeatedly threatened that if they did not meet a specific production quota they would be fired. On August 4, 2017, a farmworker named Honesto Ibarra who worked at Sarbanand was hospitalized. Honesto died three days later.”
• “That scheme, which allegedly netted conspirators more than $200 million, trapped migrant workers in conditions akin to 'modern-day slavery,’ according to federal prosecutors. The investigation that yielded the indictment was dubbed “Operation Blooming Onion.”
• In 2013, the Southern Poverty Law Center released a report on H-2A entitled “Close to Slavery” and documents wage theft, document seizure, and squalid living and working conditions. 
• Farmworker Justice issued a report entitled “No Way to Treat a Guest” that found extensive abuse of legal workers, including wage theft: “in 2007, 80 H-2A workers in Georgia sued their employer for routinely underpaying them and missing paychecks. The employer had allegedly prepared backdated checks to hide late payments and false checks to hide non-payments, and had made the workers endorse blank checks. In another class action suit in 2007 in Florida, an H-2A employer was sued for failing to report all the hours employees had worked, in order to pay them less than required…”
• White Mississippi farmers have openly bragged to The Economist about replacing African American workers with South African aliens. They even forced the black farmworkers to train their replacements.
• A Polaris review of data collected by the National Human Trafficking Hotline included this story:

“Nearly 40 men from Mexico with H-2A visas were packed into the back of a truck and driven for hours – without a single rest stop – to a farm somewhere in the rural southeast. Some got sick along the way. Upon arrival, all were told they would not get fed - ever - until they handed over their passports. It got worse. The $9 an hour in their contracts turned out to be $3 per crate filled. The housing they were promised turned out to be roach-infested trailers with a dozen men packed into each and no running water. The men had spent hard-earned money for the opportunity to work but realized they weren’t safe. Several snuck away on foot, walking several days on end and sleeping in fields until they finally found a place they could call for help.”

H-1B: Exploitation Even in the Upper Echelons 

Speaking of Americans being forced to train their foreign replacements, the most famous examples of that shameful practice are in the H-1B visa category. The stories of abuse of our immigration system are tragic to hear: “I just couldn’t believe they could fly people in to sit at our desks and take over our jobs exactly,” said one former worker, an American in his 40s who remains unemployed since his last day at Disney on Jan. 30. “It was so humiliating to train somebody else to take over your job. I still can’t grasp it.”

In addition to being forced to train their cheaper replacements, American workers are systemically shut out of the workforce altogether, as extensive discrimination has been discovered against American workers in the hiring process:

• Facebook/Meta was busted in 2021 for discrimination against American workers for cheap foreign labor. 
• In 2022, Amtex Systems Inc. was also caught, along with SpringShine Consulting, Inc. and Technology Hub Inc, discriminating against Americans in the hiring process.
• A jury found Cognizant guilty of discriminating against American workers in 2024.
• In 2025, Epik Solutions settled for discrimination against American workers. 
• ProPublica published a report in June 2025 highlighting the systemic discrimination against Americans in the hiring process.

For further proof of the abuse of the legal immigration system, tech companies broke records with H-1B applications at the same time as mass layoffs. Microsoft is the latest company to engage in a layoff spree while simultaneously applying for thousands of H-1B aliens.  Do companies break the law desperately seeking to avoid hiring Americans out of altruism? Is it really the case that Americans are just terrible workers and thus companies have to circumvent the law to hire the Einsteins in H-1B? The wage theft suggests otherwise, as Bloomberg reported in June 2025 that H-1B workers were tens of thousands of dollars cheaper than an American applicant. Plainly, the search for an ever larger profit margin is the motive. 

The discount doesn’t start at H-1B for many companies, as they begin by hiring the aliens when they are recent college graduates. They do this through an illegal program called Optional Practical Training (OPT). Through a loophole in the law, alien graduates from colleges and universities can work while being exempt from payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare, known as FICA taxes. American graduates simply cannot compete with the thousands of dollars in discounts for foreign graduates, just as they cannot compete with the discount Bloomberg exposed for H-1B employees. Tech companies first hire the aliens as FICA discounts and then can sponsor them for H-1B and ultimately sponsor them for legal permanent residence (LPR). Ironically, stapling a green card to an alien’s diploma would render them less able to compete with H-1B job applicants, and the cycle continues.

It is not just tech companies abusing H-1B, and the employers are not content just to pay foreign workers less while shutting American workers out:

• In 2017, over 300 teachers from the Philippines were paid for an H-1B scheme described as "psychologically coercive and financially ruinous trafficking scheme that subjected the teachers to exorbitant debt and forced labor.”
• A 2020 article for Oxford American entitled “Trafficking in Teachers” said, “Between 2007 and 2012, the Garland Independent School District recruited hundreds of foreign teachers. Dozens of those teachers learned upon arrival in Texas that they didn’t in fact have jobs, but they would still owe fees to their recruiters. The district’s human resources director, Victor Leos, was eventually sentenced to twenty-four months in prison for falsifying immigration documents. (Leos also admitted to getting kickbacks from recruiters.) School district officials could have helped some of these teachers apply for trafficking visas by issuing a statement denouncing Leos’s crimes, but never did.”
• It isn’t just H-1B abusing teachers, as employers have expanded to abusing the J visa. “Hobbs Municipal Schools alone has hired 39 teachers from the Philippines on J-1 “cultural exchange” visas. Lured by recruiters who charge a premium to work in one of more than a dozen New Mexico school districts, foreign teachers each shell out between $5,000 and $15,000 in recruitment fees, plus thousands of dollars in additional costs.”
• In 2021, the Economic Policy Institute reported evidence of widespread wage theft in the H-1B program.

Federal Oversight Overwhelmed

Exploitation is baked into the legal immigration cake. And yet the system keeps rolling in with extraordinarily high approval rates. Despite all the discrimination and wage theft in H-1B, approval rates have been over 90 percent from FY19-FY23. H-2A, while experiencing the cascade of abuses documented above, has quadrupled in usage from about 74,000 aliens in FY13 to 310,000 in FY23. Keeping in mind that the abuse was extensive long before the H-2A explosion in usage and recalling in 2022 that DOL had set a record for the lowest closed investigations, one can only shudder at what is happening on farms right now. 

And this lack of real oversight and investigation of the legal immigration system is not tied only to H-1B and H-2A. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has abdicated its enforcement responsibilities across the board on a systemic basis across legal categories. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is a good chronicler of their dereliction of duty:

• In 2015, GAO found: “USCIS and the Department of Justice's (DOJ) Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) have limited capabilities to detect asylum fraud. First, while both USCIS and EOIR have mechanisms to investigate fraud in individual applications, neither agency has assessed fraud risks across the asylum process, in accordance with leading practices for managing fraud risks.”
• In 2016, GAO found: “In its review of a nongeneralizable selection of files associated with EB-5 program regional centers and immigrant investors, GAO found that identifying fraud indicators is extremely challenging. For example, many of these files were several thousand pages long and would take significant time to review. According to USCIS documentation, the program anticipates receiving approximately 14 million pages of supporting documentation from its regional-center applicants and immigrant investor petitioners annually.”
• In 2019, GAO reported DHS knew a program was full of fraud and yet failed to adequately oversee the program even as usage skyrocketed by 70 percent over five years: “According to USCIS officials, the self-petition program is vulnerable to fraud, such as self-petitioners’ use of false or forged documents. USCIS has adopted some, but not all, of the leading practices in GAO’s Fraud Risk Framework. While USCIS has established a culture and a dedicated entity to manage fraud risks for the program, it has not fully assessed fraud risks and determined a fraud risk profile to document its analysis of the types of fraud risks the program could be vulnerable to. Further, the number of self-petitions filed has grown by more than 70 percent over the past 5 fiscal years.”
• In 2022, GAO reported that DHS is not conducting fraud assessments: “USCIS has conducted fraud risk assessments for three immigration benefit types in response to prior GAO recommendations. However, USCIS does not have a process for regularly conducting these assessments because no USCIS entity is responsible for leading them. Implementing a process for conducting fraud risk assessments would help FDNS better understand its fraud risks. In addition, while FDNS has documented some of its antifraud activities, it has not developed an antifraud strategy to guide their design and implementation and the allocation of resources to its highest-risk areas. Implementing a process for developing an antifraud strategy could help FDNS ensure that it has an appropriate balance of antifraud activities to address its fraud risks.”
• A 2023 GAO review of the so-called “investor” visa, EB-5, found the government asleep at the wheel for one of the most corrupt programs in the legal immigration system: “USCIS collects some data on EB-5 fraud and national security concerns that it investigates. However, it does not have readily available data about the types and characteristics of fraud unique to the program, such as those related to schemes to defraud investors. Systematically collecting and tracking this information would help USCIS better monitor, assess, and respond to evolving fraud trends and risks. Further, the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022 gives USCIS new denial and termination authorities to address fraud and national security concerns. However, USCIS does not collect data on the reasons for (1) denying EB-5 petitions and applications, and (2) terminating Regional Centers. Developing a process to collect and assess these reasons would provide USCIS with valuable insight into program risks.”
• In 2024, GAO found that as H-2A petitions surged the DOL’s audits and fraud assessments plummeted due to need to prioritize adjudications: “In recent years, DOL reported its concerns that H-2A visa program integrity may be affected by the need to process applications in a timely manner. DOL’s OFLC audits approved H-2A applications to help ensure program integrity. Because these audits are a discretionary activity, in recent years, OFLC has audited fewer approved applications, in part, to handle the rise in applications, according to OFLC officials. Specifically, in a report to Congress, OFLC reported that in FY 2018, it concluded over 500 audits of H-2A applications. In FY2023, it concluded approximately 30 audits, according to data we reviewed. OFLC officials attributed the reduction in H-2A audits to the competing priorities of OFLC staff. Specifically, OFLC officials told us that they have limited resources to conduct audits because the same staff who process applications also audit the approved applications. Further, they told us the same staff conduct audits of other visa applications, and in some years, they must prioritize audits of one program over the other due to limited resources.”

In addition to GAO reviews, the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate (FDNS) of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) reviewed the Special Immigrant Juvenile program in 2025 and released a report describing how both the program has grown exponentially in numbers while no subsequent fraud protection measures were implemented. This resulted in criminal gang infiltration and exploitation of the program while DHS slept. FDNS found: 

“Due to the unique nature of the SIJ classification, coupled with the problematic adjudicative history of the program, an alien can obtain an SIJ predicate order by fraud with relative ease.”

Though DHS was aware of this problem and the gangs exploiting it, nothing was done to remedy a clear national security and public safety concern. As you can see above, fraud assessments, much less fraud prevention, are low priorities for DHS and the legal immigration system overall. 

If you need more proof, look at the H-1B Debarment list for employers, which includes only six companies, none of which are companies that have been found to have abused the program named above in this article. The Permanent Labor Certification Debarment list includes only three employers despite ProPublica finding companies openly admitting to hiding listings from Americans. Despite extensive H-2A violations found across the industry, including common debt bondage practices similar to illegal traffickers, the H-2A temporary debarment list has fewer than 100 employers, as the program is exploding in usage, and investigations are minimal. 

So we return to the amnesty advocate and legal immigration expansionist’s argument that we need to legalize the illegal workforce to protect them from exploitation. Right now, across the legal immigration landscape, it is clear that we, first and foremost, need to prioritize restoring integrity to the fraudulent and decrepit system. The Federal government is demonstrably unable to provide adequate oversight and enforcement at the current rates of legal immigration. In this environment, the foxes are left in charge of the henhouse to the detriment of foreign and American workers alike. 

The common theme across the reviews is that the government is using the exponential growth in immigration applications/petitions as an excuse to prioritize speedy resolution over careful review and vetting. In the rush to push paper forward, the responsibility for oversight, vetting, and enforcement has been cast aside. Yet, when the allegations of abuse rise like tsunami waves, the immigration apologists rush to point to the copious amounts of rules in the Code of Federal Regulations. These individuals are uninformed or being deceptive, as the record of review for these programs is extensive and damning. The oversight for legal immigration is essentially the same as the black market in labor. Both impoverish all workers for the benefit of the few unscrupulous employers. Anyone painting a flood of foreign labor in that system as pro-worker has some serious explaining to do.