When three trained engineers from Mexico accepted opportunities to come work in Georgia as industrial engineers, they believed they had received tickets to white-collar work in the U.S.
But according to a lawsuit filed in Georgia federal court, the engineering job offers were fake, and the Mexican professionals were instead asked to perform assembly line labor at a building materials plant in Calhoun.
Their claim of an “employment bait-and-switch scheme” accused the operator of the Calhoun plant, LX Hausys America Inc., along with two Georgia staffing companies, of violating Georgia’s version of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as RICO — among other infractions.
Last month, a Georgia federal judge ruled the RICO claim was strong enough to survive an effort to have the case thrown out of court.
“Plaintiffs have successfully alleged a RICO enterprise,” wrote Magistrate Judge Regina Cannon, of the Northern District of Georgia. They “have alleged enough facts to suggest Defendants coordinated together as a continuing unit with a common purpose — specifically, to fraudulently recruit cheap labor from Mexico under the pretense of the (Trade NAFTA) visa program.”
The Trade NAFTA, or TN, visa is a mechanism that allows employers to fill high-skilled jobs in the U.S. with Mexican and Canadian professionals. According to a list published by the U.S. Department of State, jobs as engineers and technicians are among the professions covered by the TN visa program. Assembly line work is not.
U.S. authorities vet TN visa applications and job offers before migrants travel — and when they first arrive in the country — but experts say there is no oversight of the program once migrants actually report to work.
The Mexican nationals behind the suit are Sinuhe Cabrera Torres, Pedro Dominguez Balderas and Angel Manuel Santillan Sanchez. They each had between four and 14 years of work experience when they applied for the listed engineering jobs between November 2021 and the summer of 2022.
In a letter meant to support the men’s applications for TN visas with the federal government, defendants wrote that the main duties of the jobs offered “will include, among other things, providing engineering expertise to develop engineering solutions, improving the production process, applying mathematical analysis to evaluate work statistics, and analyzing production capacities.”
Instead, once they made it to Calhoun, the engineers were allegedly given jobs that required production-line labor with no technical skill. The suit says Cabrera cleaned plastic kitchen-counter molds, Dominguez operated a crane to fill containers, and Santillan made resin slabs and transported them with a crane.
Dozens of other TN visa professionals were allegedly employed and given similar tasks at the plant. Plaintiffs were paid about $14 per hour, less than the $18 per hour paid to local, non-Mexican workers, according to the suit.
At least six other lawsuits have been lodged in Georgia federal courts in recent years from university-educated Mexicans alleging they were lured under false pretenses to work menial, assembly-line jobs, mostly in the auto parts sector.
Not all workers take legal action.
In August 2022, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution interviewed a Mexican engineer named Pedro who said he had bachelor’s and master’s degrees and accepted an engineering job offer at the LX Hausys plant in Calhoun, then was given menial labor. The AJC agreed to use just his first name because he feared retribution and worried speaking out might complicate his chances of obtaining another visa in the future.
Pedro said he lasted just a few months before quitting and flying back to Mexico.
“There wasn’t even one day of engineering work. Literally, zero percent,” he said.
Credit: Miguel Martinez
Credit: Miguel Martinez
According to Pedro, he was asked to move materials around the plant and clean some of the industrial machines used to produce slabs.
“Just so much frustration and disappointment,” he said of the alleged deception.
Late last month, migrant workers with TN visas met with representatives from the U.S. Department of Labor and the Mexican Consulate in an Atlanta summit to call out fraud and ask for strengthened protections.
“I was offered an engineering position, but I was put to work as a ‘picker,’ carrying heavy auto parts. Job, pay, housing, transportation: nothing was like they said,” said Rosalinda Soriano, a TN worker who participated in the summit.
The Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, a migrant workers organization that operates in Mexico and the U.S., offers legal representation to Mexican professionals alleging TN visa fraud.
The organization has documented abuses in the visa program since 2017, and says the number of TN visas issued has surged by nearly 250% in the past decade and that abuses remain unchecked.
“All of us at CDM believe that laws and policies must reflect the voices and experiences of the people directly impacted by them,” CDM Executive Director Rachel Micah-Jones said in a statement. “And this is precisely what this summit was all about: shaping a shared vision of the future and developing an advocacy agenda informed by the needs and priorities of migrant TN workers.”
Micah-Jones added that data transparency and access to justice for misled TN workers “will be our priorities moving forward.”
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