Illegal aliens recruit workers

SASABE, Mexico — A growing number of U.S. employers in need of cheap labor are turning to illegal workers to recruit friends and relatives back home, and to smugglers to find job seekers.

“It continues to become clear who controls immigration: It’s not governments, but rather the market,” said Jorge Santibanez, director of the Tijuana think tank Colegio de la Frontera Norte.

When Pedro Lopez Vazquez crossed illegally into the United States last week, he already had a job.

His future employer even paid $1,000 for a smuggler to help Mr. Vazquez make his way from the central Mexican city of Puebla to Aspen, Colo.

“We’re going to Colorado to work in carpentry because we have a friend who was going to give us a job,” Mr. Vazquez said.

Mr. Vazquez, 41, was interviewed along the Arizona border after being deported twice by the U.S. Border Patrol. He said he would keep trying until he got to Aspen.

His story is not unusual.

Darcy Tromanhauser of the nonprofit law project Nebraska Appleseed said companies in need of workers rely on the underground employment networks to “pass along the information more effectively than billboards.”

“It started out more explicitly, where [meatpacking] companies used to have buses to transport people to come up, and they would advertise directly in Mexico,” she said. “Now I think that happens more informally.”

At the same time, it has become less risky for companies to recruit illegal aliens. Since the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, U.S. prosecution of employers who hire such workers has dwindled to a trickle as the government puts its resources toward national security.

The few cases that are prosecuted, however, highlight how lucrative a business recruiting undocumented workers has become.

In one case, a single smuggler purportedly earned $900,000 over 15 months placing 6,000 migrants in jobs at Chinese restaurants across the upper Midwest.

Shan Wei Yu, a 51-year-old Chinese-American, was sentenced in December to nine years in federal prison on charges involving the transportation of 40 of those migrants. Investigations involving the others continue.

Rick Hilzendager, special agent for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Grand Forks, N.D., said Yu connected 6,000 migrants from Latin America with jobs in Chinese restaurants in Illinois, Michigan, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin.

Based in Yu’s home in McKinney, Texas, the Great Texas Employment Agency placed ads in Chinese-language newspapers in the Chicago area offering cheap labor from Latin America, investigators said.

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