Employment USA Style

Vijay Kumar was working as a contract welder in the sweltering United Arab Emirates two years ago, far from his wife and family in southern India, when he spotted an advertisement offering welders and pipe fitters "permanent lifetime settlement in the USA for self and family."

Kumar answered the ad to find that workers were being recruited to rebuild oil rigs in Mississippi and Texas destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. He returned to India, signed a contract and paid a recruiter $20,000 to travel to the United States. He told his wife, who had just given birth to a son, that he would send for them as soon as he could.

"I sell my house, my wife sell her jewels, we borrow money from friends. We dream of living in America together," Kumar, 34, said yesterday. He stood outside the U.S. Justice Department during a protest with several dozen other Indian workers, all of whom have been staging a hunger strike in Washington for weeks.

When about 500 Indian recruits reached Mississippi in the fall of 2006, Kumar and the others said, they found that they had been deceived. Their new employer, Signal International Corp., had hired them as temporary "guest" workers with 10-month H2B visas. There was no possibility of obtaining permanent residency for themselves, let alone their families back home. Signal denies that it knew the workers had been promised U.S. residency.

source article

P.S. Signal didn't know the workers had been promised U.S. residency? Yeah, right. It certainly didn't care. It did care though, and greatly, to avoid employing American welders. American welders are spoiled afer having livable wages in the past.