The housekeeping jobs paid as much as $14 an hour, were located at a hotel in the middle of the United States and came with housing and three free meals a day.
Beatriz de Molina, whose client company was looking to supplement its local workforce by hiring temporary foreign workers under the federal government’s H-2B seasonal-worker visa program, had just the right workers: four young men in Haiti. Hopeful that they would all be approved, De Molina helped them fill out the necessary paperwork, and got them fast-tracked appointments at the U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince while her U.S.-based client waited.
“I thought one of them for sure was going to get it,” De Molina said. “He had a visa to the United States before. He had been granted a two-week visa to go to some sort of photography competition.”
