Workers on Hunger Strike Say They Were Misled on Visas WASHINGTON — About a dozen metalworkers from India staged the fourth week of a hunger strike here this week, camped under a shade tree on Embassy Row.
The workers, who walked off jobs in Gulf Coast shipyards in early March, say they were victims of human trafficking when they were brought to the United States under a temporary guest worker program. The hunger strike is meant to pressure federal officials, and comes as Congress is debating an expansion of the guest worker program, known as H-2B for the type of temporary visa the workers receive.
The Indian workers say they were deceived by Signal International and labor recruiters when they paid as much as $20,000 for visas they believed would allow them to work and live permanently with their families in the United States. In fact, the H-2B visas are for short-term contracts.
“Everyone has a dream,” said one of the protesters, Paul Konar, a 54-year-old worker from the Indian state of Kerala, speaking in Hindi through a translator. “If we could come here legally to live with our families, that was my dream.”
Signal International, a marine oil rig construction company based in Pascagoula, Miss., insists it also was misled about the visas and has filed a lawsuit against the labor recruiters on the Gulf Coast and in India who obtained them for the workers.
“This whole thing got started because of bad recruiting practices,” Richard Marler, the chief executive of Signal, said in an interview. “I wanted these workers to be happy employees. Why would I bring someone in and make them unhappy so they would be less productive in their work?”
Most of the workers, who are metal fitters and welders, lost their legal immigration status when they left their jobs. They adopted the risky strategy of a public hunger strike, they said, to step up pressure on the Justice Department, which has the power to allow the workers to remain in the United States during an investigation of their case.
In a letter this week, three top Democrats in the House of Representatives — George Miller and Zoe Lofgren of California, and John Conyers Jr. of Michigan — asked the Justice Department and immigration officials to investigate the workers’ fraud accusations and offer them protection as victims. The Justice Department this week confirmed it had opened an investigation...
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