Staffing Company Stockpiled Visas In Hispanic Names
12/15/2009
US: Pa. firm stockpiled temporary-worker visas
By MARYCLAIRE DALE (AP) — 6 hours ago
PHILADELPHIA — A Pennsylvania staffing company gamed the nation’s visa program by obtaining hundreds of work visas under names culled from a Mexican phonebook and supplying the paperwork to illegal immigrants placed in landscaping and other seasonal jobs, authorities said Monday.
"They were almost like a shadow government, because they procured all these visas, and they were the ones able to control who’s getting them," Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin R. Brenner told The Associated Press. [More]
The company above, in stockpiling visas for imaginary workers from Central America and Mexico, was at least partly helped by the fact that Spanish doesn’t have that many different names. There may be tens of thousands of people named, for example, Juan Hernández, so that if you stockpiled phony visas in the name Juan Hernández, you might be able to sell it to someone who actually had that name.
I know that if I’m searching online for what I think of as the Juan Hernández, a Mexican government functionary/American academic, last seen working for John McCain, I might find any of these others:
- Juan Bautista Hernández Perez (born 1962), Cuban boxer
- Juan Gerardo Hernandez, Cuban writer
- Juan Hernández Ramirez (born 1965), Mexican football (soccer) player
- Juan Hernández Saravia (born 1880), Republican officer in the Spanish Civil War
- Juan Hernández Sierra (born 1969), Cuban boxer
- Juan Martin Hernández (born 1982), Argentine rugby player
- Juan Hernandez (diplomat) (born 1955) Mexican diplomat and attorney
- Juan Carlos Hernández (born 1989), La Ceiba Honduras
And in the news Juan Hernández is a basketball player for Temple, a Santa Rosa businessman, and a guy who got arrested Saturday in Nacogdoches. Instead of foreign aid or a Marshall Plan, maybe Mexico needs more names.