Investigation Gives More Examples of Indentured Servitude in Nursing

While nurses are overworked and underpaid, the elite remain baffled as to why there is a labor shortage in the profession. The largest strike in the recorded history of the healthcare industry occurred last year. We covered the lawsuit of a foreign nurse alleging indentured servitude before but, now there is a new report on the treatment of foreign nurses imported to do a job Americans won’t do for serf wages. It details how the healthcare industry is trapping these nurses in contracts that require exorbitant fees if they want to quit: 

“Moreover, Rachel had also signed a contract with a Florida-based recruitment agency, Professionals to USA (PTU), that had arranged the job at the hospital and handled her immigration paperwork. The agency had charged her a $2,500 fee as part of the application process, she said, and she had to shoulder thousands of dollars in additional costs, such as a job offer letter and a medical clearance exam. Rachel also said her PTU contract included a $30,000 breach fee, a common practice among agencies that recruit nurses to work in the United States.

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Quartz and its partners spoke with migrant nurses in Florida and other states, including nine nurses who were recruited to work at Tallahassee Memorial through Professionals to USA. To keep them in line, many of these nurses said, PTU or its CEO threatened to sue nurses for tens of thousands of dollars in contract breach fees or report them to immigration authorities if they left their jobs early. This type of treatment is pervasive in the international nurse recruitment industry, according to lawsuits against other agencies and interviews with nurses and advocates.”

There is no way to describe this other than indentured servitude. This neo-feudal treatment of foreign nurses explains exactly why the booming healthcare industry is focused on expanding their recruitment of foreign workers. To increase recruitment of American nurses they would have to hire more nurses to reduce workloads and pay them a wage commensurate with the skill and effort the profession warrants. But why do all of that when you can recruit vulnerable foreign nurses and threaten them to work at threat of debt peonage and deportation?

If you are wondering how any of this is legal, companies across the country have found a legal loophole. This loophole is the creation of staffing agencies. Staffing agencies give the direct employer a plausible deniability. We see this in H-1B where the staffing agencies farm out foreign workers that then get lower wages and lower-skilled work than promised. When children are found illegally employed, some of the employers say they were unaware because they used a staffing agency.

These nurses are neither temporary nonimmigrants under H-1B nor are they labor trafficked children, most are coming as EB-3 permanent residents. Legal permanent residents (LPR) are supposedly more legally protected because they do not have restrictions in the law on where they can work. In fact, many people that defend expanding legal immigration suggest that doing so would reduce exploitation because the foreign workers would have more rights. However, the companies have already found their loophole with these staffing agencies.

And what is the Federal government doing about this? Well they certainly have not taken steps to rein in the staffing agencies that keep popping up in the multitude of labor exploitation cases across the immigration landscape. When this report sought Federal government comment it replicated the passing of the buck witnessed in the New York Times investigation of child labor trafficking. 

“A spokesperson for the US Citizenship and Immigration Services said employment agreements “are outside the scope of USCIS.” The Department of Labor said in an email that the agency “doesn’t have a role in enforcing the contracts of EB-3 visa holders.” US Customs and Border Protection, whose officers review passports and immigration documents at airports and other points of entry into the country, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.”

See, this is the reality sitting behind all those statutes, regulations, and policies that we hear so much about. Laws without enforcement are just suggestions. We see this in the multitude of abuse in the H-2A program, including forced labor. We see it in extensive wage theft in H-1B. The legal immigration system is regulated only on paper. In reality, it is as unregulated and vulnerable to exploitation as the black market in labor that illegal aliens face. So much for expanding legal pathways to protect foreign and American workers. 

The truth is that the so-called labor shortage is a crisis of the business community’s own making. Their business models are built on a race to the bottom cutting labor costs by shorting wages and understaffing. When you overwork and underpay you will suffer massive employee attrition. This business model can be profitable only if there is a steady stream of uninitiated workers desperate to get into the field. Expanding legal immigration persistently is the only surefire way to ensure a perpetual pool of cannon fodder for industries to burn through. We see it in everything from nursing to agriculture, to construction and everything in between. Just like a Ponzi scheme, it needs new recruits constantly to keep the scam going. 

While many advocates for expanding legal immigration may have the best intentions, the end result is feeding business models built on labor exploitation. They are seeking foreign recruits because the alternative would be hiring more Americans at higher wages. Foreign workers that are threatened with deportation and contract breach fees are far less likely to complain about the overwork and low pay. Anyone interested in reducing labor exploitation has to stop offering expansion of legal immigration as the solution. Expanding legal immigration to stop labor exploitation is like opening the border to stop human trafficking.