Report: Scientology Church Violates Immigration Laws to Import Low-Wage Workforce

new Church of Scientology
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Neil Munro

The Church of Scientology has been abusing the visa system to import powerless, minimally-paid workers for decades, according to New York Magazine.

Under the headline: “How Scientology Exploits Foreign Workers: The church has used an obscure visa to bring in thousands of laborers — and benefit from their toil,” reporter Kevin Dugan wrote:

For decades, scrutiny of Scientology has tended to focus on the outrageous and the glamorous, missing how the church aggressively used an obscure visa program and created a pool of exploited laborers numbering in the thousands

…

Over the past 30 years Scientology’s use of foreign workers has probably saved the church hundreds of millions of dollars and potentially more than $1 billion.

The article is based on testimony from some of the church’s former acolytes, including a girl from the United Kingdom:

England, 1994. Tina was 14. Her parents lived at Scientology compounds in the United States, and church officials wanted Tina to come join them by using an R-1 visa — a permit recently created by Congress for religious workers, good for five years. The officials told Tina (a pseudonym) what to tell anyone who asked: that she would be attending a special Scientology school and volunteering for the church part time. It wasn’t true. Once approved, Tina worked shifts as long as 24 hours doing construction, building furniture, and performing administrative tasks. “None of it’s voluntary,” she told me.

The Scientology organization is now being sued by some of the workers.

For decades, the federal government has quietly supported massive labor trafficking by criminal gangs, companies, and supposedly non-profit organizations. The government’s supportive policy — dubbed “Extraction Migration” — has cut wages for millions of Americans and raised their housing costs while fattening company profits and Wall Street stock values.

Much of the labor trafficking is camouflaged by the asylum programs for poor southern migrants. In February 2022, the Department of Justice convicted five members of a family-run Latino sex trafficking organization that operated between 2006 and 2017.

The trafficking is also hidden among the many “temporary” visa worker programs that supposedly allow employers to overcome claimed “labor shortages” in an economy of more than 165 million employees. These visa programs keep a foreign workforce of at least 2 million people in U.S. jobs, including at least 1.5 million foreign workers in white-collar jobs.

Other companies import legally import people on B-1/B-2 tourist visas and put lease them to other businesses under the shared pretense that they are temporary legal visa workers. This August, federal officials finally jailed a Ukrainian who was part of a gang that trafficked illegal workers to Florida’s Key West since 2007.

Organizations that claim religious status use visa laws to smuggle in cheap workers. In 2021, federal officials shut down a labor trafficking scheme by a Hindu sect that used R-1 visas for religious workers to import lower-caste Dalit workers so they could be used illegally to build temples in the United States.

In the Scientology case, the imported workers were allowed to the United States enter after they got R-1 visas for religious workers. The visas were awarded at U.S. embassies in Europe and elsewhere.

“This is an entirely predictable and almost guaranteed result — and that’s why Congress should just get rid of the program,” said Jessica Vaughan, the Director of Policy Studies for the Center for Immigration Studies. She added:

Managers in agencies want these visas rubber-stamped without too many questions because they are susceptible to pressure from the employer groups, and because they are in denial about the abuse of these programs that can occur.

Moreover, “there’s no reason to have this category — if bona fide religious institutions need workers, they should be able to apply through other [visa worker] programs — they’re nonprofits and are not subject to any cap,” Vaughan said, adding “There’s no shortage of people who could work as church secretaries.”

Federal officials have done little to curb the labor inflow to the Scientology groups, Dugan wrote:

This [federal] blind spot even seems to extend to law enforcement. In 2018, Serge Gil met with investigators at the FBI and Department of Homeland Security in Los Angeles to discuss human trafficking. He hasn’t heard anything since. The same year, Mike Rinder says, he met with an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Tampa Bay to raise similar concerns. He also doesn’t know if investigators have acted on his information.

The labor extraction process is protected by lobbyists and legislators.

The NYMag.com article also quotes a November 2021 letter by GOP Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) objecting to the reduced inflow of R-1 workers —  partly due to the 9/11 atrocity, but also because of increased scrutiny of the R-1 visas under President Donald Trump. The letter was sent to Alejandro Mayorkas, a pro-migration zealot who is President Joe Biden’s border chief:

There are many more religious workers waiting outside of the United States, unable to serve in our communities. These challenges have been compounded by COVID-19- related suspensions of visa services at U.S. embassies and consulates around the world in 2020 and 2021, resulting in lengthy visa processing wait times for religious workers seeking to complete consular processing abroad.

The Collins letter included a wish list from 17 religious groups, including the Scientologists as well as Jewish, Christian, and Muslim groups.

One of Biden’s pro-migration deputies responded to Collins in February, promising faster processing and reduced fraud checks:

USCIS has reallocated personnel to address the backlog of religious worker petitions and worked with its Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate to arrange for the waiver of the pre-adjudication verification site visit requirement for certain petitioners that have demonstrated a history of compliance with that program.

But the long-understood problems in the R-1 program are obscured by business lobbies that use other visa programs, Vaughan said.

“All of these cheap labor employers will defend each other, whether it’s the Catholic church, big tech, or big agriculture,” she said.

The NYMag.com article includes a denial from the church:

Karin Pouw, a spokesperson for Scientology, said by email that the organization “strictly complies with U.S. immigration policies” and “works directly with immigration counsel to ensure compliance with the immigration policies and regulations of the United States.” She added that my sources were liars engaged in a “coordinated and premeditated conspiracy to level false allegations.”

Extraction Migration

It is easier for government officials to grow the economy by importing people than by growing exports, productivity, or the birth rate.

So the federal government officially — and unofficially — extracts millions of migrants from poor countries and uses them as extra workers, consumers, and renters.

This extraction migration policy both grows and skews the national economy — but it prevents tight labor markets, and so it shifts vast wealth from ordinary people to investors, billionaires, and Wall Street.

It makes it difficult for ordinary Americans to advance in their careers, get married, raise families, or buy homes.

Extraction migration slows innovation and shrinks Americans’ productivity, partly because it allows employers to boost stock prices by using stoop labor and disposable workers instead of the American professionals and productivity-boosting technology that would allow Americans and their communities to earn more money.

This migration policy also reduces exports by minimizing shareholder pressure on U.S. companies to build up beneficial and complementary trade with people in poor countries.

Migration undermines employees’ workplace rights, and it widens the regional economic gaps between the Democrats’ cheap-labor coastal states and the Republicans’ Heartland and southern states.

An economy fueled by extraction migration also drains Americans’ political clout over elites, alienates young people, and radicalizes Americans’ democratic civic culture because it gives an excuse for wealthy elites and progressives to ignore weak Americans at the bottom of society, such as drug addicts.

This economic strategy is enthusiastically pushed by progressives who wish to transform the U.S. from a society governed by European-origin civic culture into an economic empire of jealous identity groups overseen by progressive hall monitors. “We’re trying to become the first multiracial, multi-ethnic superpower in the world,” Rep. Rohit Khanna (D-CA) told the New York Times in March 2022. “It will be an extraordinary achievement. … We will ultimately triumph,” he boasted.

But the progressives’ colonialism-like economic strategy kills many migrants. It exploits the poverty of migrants and splits foreign families as it extracts human resources from poor home countries to serve wealthy U.S. investors.

Progressives hide this extraction migration economic policy behind a wide variety of noble-sounding narratives and theatrical border security programs. For example, they claim the U.S. is a “Nation of Immigrants,” that migration helps migrants, and that the state must renew itself by replacing populations.

Similarly, establishment Republicans, media businesses, and major GOP donors hide the skew caused by migration. They suppress any recognition of the pocketbook impact and instead tout border chaos, welfare spending, migrant crime, and drug smuggling.

Many polls show the public wants to welcome some immigration. But the polls also show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs U.S. graduates need.

This “Third Rail” opposition is growing, anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that American citizens owe to one another.

 

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