Via comment by Christina on NC: Vass firm charged in worker visa fraud scheme
For a quarter of a century the “largest farm labor
contractor in the country,” described by an
internal state memo in North Carolina as the impresario of “the largest alien
smuggling ring in our nation’s history” according to Mother Jones magazine, has operated with impunity. He has done it
right out in the open with state and federal government approval. His scheme has been successful during the
first Bush administration, the Clinton administration, the second Bush
administration, and during Barack Obama’s entire first term. Now, after an extended investigation of
its own, Obama’s Department of Justice has, at long last, come down on him like
a ton of bricks.
We are talking about Craig Stanford “Stan” Eury, Jr. of the little town of Vass, NC. On Friday, January 31 a federal grand
jury in Greensboro, NC, handed down a 41-count indictment, running to 57 pages,
for a variety of dodges in which he and his daughter, Sarah Elizabeth Farrell,
allegedly illegally stockpiled mainly Mexican workers for assignment to U.S.
employers of their choice, regardless of who they were legally committed to
work for.
What the Justice Department has charged him with
primarily is gaming the H-2B program, the federal
arrangement for bringing in low-skilled non-agricultural workers to work in
seasonal or otherwise temporary labor for less than a year. The idea behind it—that is to say
the public rationale—is that foreign workers are brought in with special
temporary visas for jobs that American citizens are not available to
perform. Unlike its H-2A
counterpart for agricultural workers, which has no cap, the H-2B program is capped
at 66,000 per federal fiscal year.
The indictment is for multiple instances of
fraud in the operation of the company International Labor Management
Corporation (ILMC), which Eury founded in 1994 and
turned over to Farrell in 2008.
ILMC is engaged primarily in importing workers with H-2B visas. The indictment does not involve the much
larger and older North Carolina Growers Association (NCGA), a non-profit
organization run by Eury and whose operation has
garnered most of the “alien smuggling” allegations through the years. Many of the counts leveled in the
indictment relate to the unique nature of H-2B, with its cap, while the general
nature of the alleged fraud is recognizable to those who have observed Eury’s dealings in the agricultural field through the
years.
The fact that H-2B fraud and ILMC are targeted
and not the far larger H-2A and NCGA may be regarded as tactical and not a sign
that Obama’s Justice Department is merely aiming at the capillaries and not the
jugular with its indictment. Blame
is spread among all the members of the non-profit NCGA, of which, on paper, Eury is simply an employee. The target is clear in the case of
ILMC. It’s just Eury
and his daughter.
More @ DC Dave
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