In November 2009, seven men got off a bus in Monterrey, Mexico, and made their way through the crowded and chaotic downtown to the concrete box that housed the United States Consulate.
Inside, the men told a consular officer that they had been invited to work as janitors at the Sugar Mountain ski resort in Banner Elk, North Carolina. They had gone the previous season and were returning; all they needed were their new guest worker visas, which had already been approved, and they would be on their way north.
The Monterrey consulate is one of the world’s busiest, processing more than 400,000 visas each year, and it’s the single largest issuer of the kind the men were awaiting: H-2 visas, given to unskilled “guest workers” for temporary jobs in everything from tobacco farms to landscaping to shellfish peeling. The consulate cranks out an average of nearly 300 every single day.
But on this day, the State Department employee hesitated, then placed a call to the ski resort. It had been a warmer autumn than usual, and Sugar Mountain wasn’t yet open to the public; the consular officer was told that the resort needed snowmakers, not janitors. Stranger still was that the guest worker visa application, filed by a year-old company called Winterscapes, proposed sending nearly 250 Mexican janitors to two small ski resorts in the Blue Ridge Mountains that winter.
Something wasn’t right.
The visas were denied. And the consular official dashed off an urgent cable raising serious doubts about Winterscapes. Two months later, federal agents launched Operation Hammerlock, a criminal investigation that quickly grew, spreading over multiple states and encompassing several federal law enforcement agencies as its focus shifted to the country boy in North Carolina who helped line up the visas.
He lobbied Washington, worked the courts, and negotiated the underworld of Mexican recruiters to provide customers across the country the cheap foreign labor they wanted — and build himself a vast and lucrative empire.
That man, a former state employee by the name of Stan Eury, is widely credited as the largest importer of H-2 guest workers in American history: a legal coyote who saw in the complicated crenellations of federal immigration law a way to expand a little-known program into a giant. He lobbied Washington, worked the courts, and negotiated the underworld of Mexican recruiters in order to provide customers across the country the cheap foreign labor they wanted — and in the process build himself a vast and lucrative empire.
Living unobtrusively in Vass, North Carolina, playing drums in his church band, and providing devoted care to a disabled daughter, Eury, 63 years old, has kept a relatively low profile in the immigration debates that have roiled the country. But over more than a quarter of a century, he has been responsible for procuring hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers on H-2 visas for farmers, landscapers, seafood processors, restaurants, golf courses, concrete companies, and ski slopes. There are strong indications that some of those workers never returned home, as required by law. And at virtually every step — from recruiting the workers, to busing them north, and even to charging them for baggage — Eury’s businesses collected a fortune in fees from all concerned.
Perhaps most importantly, he became the guest worker industry’s dominant power broker, an implacable visionary who helped shape the program into what it is today. Thousands of companies directly employ H-2 workers, and giants such as Wal-Mart and the U.S. Forest Service have relied on their labor indirectly by buying from or contracting with those companies. Just this month, Congress voted to dramatically expand parts of the visa program.
But as previous BuzzFeed News stories have shown, employers frequently exploit foreign H-2 workers, stealing their wages, housing them in squalid conditions, and even endangering their lives. At the same time, many companies use the program to avoid hiring qualified Americans, who by law are are supposed to get first crack at those jobs. Officials at the U.S. Department of Labor say the H-2 program is “part of a wider immigration system that widely acknowledged to be broken.” They claim they have only limited power to fix problems and protect workers, foreign or American.
Overshadowed by the larger immigration debate, the H-2 program is virtually unknown to the general public. But one major constituency champions it: American business, which prizes the steady supply of cheap and pliant labor. The entire program, from its expansive reach to its weak regulation, has been shaped by the businesses that benefit from it. No one personifies that influence more than Stan Eury.
Stan Eury and his wife, Susan.
Via facebook.com
He has waged and won battle after battle in the courts and in Congress to push wages down, to reduce regulation, to bat back worker protections, and to discourage and disqualify American job seekers. Most importantly, he has fought and won to maintain the flow of Mexicans — and money.
In 2014, more than 150,000 workers came into the country on H-2 visas, far more than the roughly 13,500 that came in the year before Eury first helped a North Carolina farmer look to Mexico for its staffing needs. Last year, Eury’s companies won approval for more than 20,000 visas, charging clients roughly $1,000 for each one.
Eury has built up an ample array of critics and former friends who say he has made a mockery of an already broken immigration system. In addition to his work as a labor broker, some of them claim, he also procured H-2 visas outright for people for whom no jobs were waiting, even people just looking for an easy way to get into the United States.
But Eury’s tactics have also earned him boundless loyalty from the thousands of employers who became dependent on the guest workers he was so good at getting. Even after federal investigators alleged that Eury and companies he created were defrauding clients by charging them millions of dollars in spurious fees, few, if any, customers walked away.
All that seemed to matter was that Eury, more than anyone else, could get them what they wanted: cheap, abundant, uncomplaining, desperate, pliable, dependable foreign labor.
Standing on his front porch last month in worn jeans, brown slip-ons, and a gray sweater, Eury eagerly discussed the H-2 program and his role in its growth, noting that he has spawned many imitators.
“Back in the day, there were no agents except us. And it became something much bigger,” said Eury, who talked enthusiastically for three-quarters of an hour before his wife, Susan, summoned him to end the conversation.
Before disappearing, however, Eury waved off talk of the government’s investigation. “I had a long and contentious relationship with the Department of Labor,” he said, squinting. “This is political.”
The entrance to the North Carolina Growers Association in Vass, North Carolina.
Andrew Craft for BuzzFeed News
A BIT OF “DUMB LUCK”
The business that would do more than anything to influence the shape of America’s guest worker program was born from a drug bust.
It was a Wednesday afternoon in the hot middle of July 1989, and Moore County Narcotics Detective Sergeant D.T. Monroe and his partner had rolled out to check on a tip that almost 200 marijuana plants were growing on an unsuspecting farmer's land.
The officers found the drugs and then, to their surprise, heard voices amid the rustle of the leaves. There, in a bit of “dumb luck,” Monroe said, they found Craig Stanford Eury Jr., whom everybody just called Stan, with his friend and colleague Ken White, watering their contraband crop.
Ten minutes earlier or later, Monroe would have missed them and been forced to dig up the plants himself. Instead, Monroe arrested Eury and White and forced them to help with the work. The department also seized the Subaru the two had driven to the field, Monroe said. “We used it for a long time for undercover work.”
Eury — who just weeks earlier had signed a pledge to abide by his employer’s “Policy for an Alcohol and Drug Free Workplace” — was able to escape serious legal trouble. But he lost his job as a North Carolina rural manpower representative, a kind of agrarian matchmaker who helps farmers find seasonal workers to plant, tend, and harvest their crops.
For a father of three small children, including a 7-year-old daughter severely disabled by cerebral palsy, losing a $24,000-a-year government salary might seem like a crisis. But Eury turned it into an opportunity.
Stan Eury and his wife Susan with their daughter Sarah.
A month after being fired, Eury founded what would become his biggest and best-known outfit, the North Carolina Growers Association. The group’s articles of incorporation pledged it would “operate as an agricultural trade association,” helping its members “by providing assistance in the areas of labor management, legislation, marketing and other such related activities.”
Eury would do essentially the same job he had done for the state. Except this time, the workers would come from Mexico on H-2 visas. And Eury would collect fees on every one. White soon joined him in the venture.
Their timing couldn’t have been better.
Three years earlier, Congress had passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which made it illegal to knowingly hire an “unauthorized alien,” and which set the stage for massive government raids on employers, including farmers who had long relied on undocumented workers.
He has won battle after battle to push wages down, to bat back worker protections, and to discourage and disqualify American job seekers. Most importantly, he has maintained the flow of Mexicans — and money.
To encourage legal employment, the bill also resuscitated the little-used H-2 guest worker program, which dated from a generation earlier, creating a special category just for agricultural workers, H-2A, and another for nonagricultural workers, H-2B. Critically, it also contained provisions for special associations that could apply for visas for all of their members at once.
Rather than relying on local workers who might make demands about their working conditions, or risk hiring undocumented workers in an era of immigration raids, farmers could now get government permission to bring in foreign laborers who were desperate for the work. Under the program’s rules, guest workers could stay here legally for up to 10 months, but they were tethered to the employer that sponsored their visa and could not seek any other job. When their visa expired, they had to leave the country.
The North Carolina Growers Association offered busy farmers a turnkey guest worker experience. It would serve as a joint employer, applying for all the visas its members wanted en masse, busing the workers across the border from Mexico, and then moving them from farm to farm as needed. And in addition to a membership fee, the growers association could charge for each and every visa, rolling in the cost of transportation and a nice chunk of overhead.
In 1990, the North Carolina Growers Association brought in its first batch of visa holders: 400 workers for a handful of farmers, more than double the number that all the farms in North Carolina combined had imported the previous year.
By 1999, the association was getting approval from the Labor Department to bring in 10,000 or more workers a year.
The back of the North Carolina Growers Association office in Vass, North Carolina.
Andrew Craft for BuzzFeed News
On top of his own familiarity with North Carolina’s agricultural employment regulations, Eury hired a number of former state officials who brought their own knowledge and connections to his business.
His team included Jay Hill, another rural manpower representative with agricultural ties thanks to his father, a prominent tobacco and sweet potato farmer in the state. He rounded out his inner circle with Lee Wicker, a graduate of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who had been working as a rural manpower representative, and Mike Bell, a Spanish speaker who had lived in Latin America and had also been working in the same agency.
Perhaps Eury’s most important contact was the man he didn’t hire. William “Bubba” Grant, an avid East Carolina University football fan and the brother of an actress who played a pageant official in the 2006 film Little Miss Sunshine, had been Eury’s direct subordinate when he worked for the government.
Grant took the job Eury vacated and rose quickly; by the mid-1990s he was running the whole division. Every H-2 visa application in the state crossed his desk, which made him a great person to know, particularly since the North Carolina Growers Association often requested more than 80% of all agricultural guest worker visas in North Carolina. For years, employers in North Carolina obtained approvals for more such guest worker visas than employers in any other state.
By law, jobs must go to qualified American applicants before any H-2 workers can be hired. But Frank Gore, a former Rural Manpower Representative who retired in 2009, said it seemed to him that state regulators didn’t prevent the growers association from passing over American workers in favor of cheaper, more pliable foreigners.
Grant did not respond to requests for an interview. A spokesperson for the North Carolina Department of Commerce said the agency is in compliance with federal law.
Gore said he noticed that many of his colleagues did not even bother referring local workers to North Carolina Growers Association jobs, despite their obligation to do so. He said he quickly discovered one of the reasons why.
By law, jobs must go to qualified American applicants before any H-2 workers can be hired.
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