A Horrifying Path to America for Hotel Workers
Racida Eslabon came to the U.S. expecting to send money back home to the Philippines. She still hasn’t told her mother what happened after she arrived.
Four people in need of work went to the first meeting and gave the man money, but Racida Eslabon was the only one who made it to the United States. She had already worked in a factory in Japan, and when she got back to the Philippines, she wanted to leave again so she could send money home to her mother, who was sick. She had been trying to get a job through a placement agency but with no success, so it seemed like very good luck when she met Alfred Briones in June 2008.
Eslabon’s decision to pursue a job through Briones, made in desperation in the Philippines 10 years ago, began a chain of events that left her trapped in fear and debt. She was eventually able to escape and obtain a T visa, a type of visa reserved for trafficking victims who have cooperated with law-enforcement investigations and would face extreme hardship if removed from the U.S. An applicant must submit evidence that she meets these requirements, typically including a declaration from federal law enforcement or government officials that she has faced trafficking and been helpful to law enforcement. In Eslabon’s case, the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division provided Eslabon with a certification, based on its investigation of her experience and conversations with her. The details in this account are drawn largely from this certification, as well as The Atlantic’s interviews with Eslabon.
Briones worked for a placement agency in the Philippines bringing workers to the United States though a U.S. counterpart, Coastal Ventures, in Destin, Florida. Briones told Eslabon he could get her a job working as a housekeeper in Miramar, Florida, according to Eslabon—all she had to do was pay him about $600 to $700 within a week’s time to get the visa interview at the U.S. Embassy. And she had to decide quickly; otherwise, he said, he would offer the job to someone else.
To Eslabon, the job—a cleaner at a hotel—seemed worth the risk. According to the contract she received, it promised 40 hours a week at $7.50 an hour, plus $11.25 for overtime, though she would have to pay $75 dollars a week for the home she would share with other female Filipina workers, $7 dollars for utilities, and $15 for transportation to and from work. After this initial payment, her visa would be renewed at no extra cost every six months. She hurried to get the papers and the money together to meet Briones at a mall in Quezon City in the Philippines.
Eslabon’s story is illustrative of a hole in America’s labor protections—a hole into which desperate foreign workers can fall. Originally, Racida Eslabon entered the United States in 2008 on an H-2B visa, a temporary work visa to the United States. The visa is tied to a single employer (Eslabon’s visa reads “Holiday Inn DBW Coastal Ventures”), though many of these employers aren’t employers so much as recruiters, bringing workers to the United States for temporary low-skill jobs at other companies. In today’s fragmented, contractor-heavy economy, many hotels, restaurants, and other facilities no longer directly employ their workers. This employment arrangement may seem strange, but “it is very common for hotels in the U.S. to contract with labor recruiters in the Philippines (and other countries like Jamaica) to recruit temporary seasonal workers on H-2B visas,” said Laura Berger, formerly of the City Bar Justice Center, a New York–based pro bono legal organization that represented Eslabon in her immigration case. This leads to situations like Eslabon’s, in which no one takes responsibility for the imported workers and they often face exploitative work conditions.