The federal government has opened an investigation into a staffing company that allegedly supplied illegal workers to a controversial food company in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, according to a local TV report.
Prosperity Services allegedly supplied illegals to Charleroi’s Fourth Street Foods, a company that assembles prepared meals for sale across the country.
Fourth Street employs 700 migrants for low-paying jobs, most of whom are supplied by third party staffing companies that do not offer normal workplace benefits, such as health care. However, Fourth Street executives say they only hired workers with legal work permits, according to WTAE-TV.
Still, the investigators say at least one contractor, Prosperity Services, is suspected of paying migrants cash and adding them into the pool of candidates for Fourth Street Foods even though they are not legally eligible to work in the U.S.
Federal officials reportedly said the contractor “knowingly paid undocumented non-citizen employees with cash” and “transported and housed undocumented non-citizens for employment purposes.”
The investigation continues on the tail of a raid on the offices of Prosperity owner Andy Ha where a million dollars in cash and company records were seized.
Fourth Street Foods owner David Barbe has insisted he has no knowledge of deceptive practices the feds have accused Prosperity of perpetrating. He added that Fourth Street Foods is cooperating fully with the federal investigation.
In September, Barbe insisted that he favors hiring migrants because they will do jobs Americans won’t take. “If I had 300 Americans come in today and they wanted to work, we’d make room for them,” he exclaimed in an interview with CBS News.
The flood of migrants coming in to take low-paying manufacturing jobs causes a lot of pressure on small-town communities like Charleroi. While some Republican officials love the cheap labor, problems have reverberated in many other areas by causing housing costs to soar for Americans, education budgets to bloat as school systems rush to cater to migrant children, and healthcare services face budget shortfalls after being flooded with indigent patients.
While the left claims that the migrants add to America and are a boon to the country, many are not willing to actually become Americans. A resident of Charleroi, who is also a migrant, noted that his fellow migrants, especially Haitians, don’t really try — or even want — to assimilate into American culture.
A migrant named Rene recently told City Journal that many migrants have little to no education, and they don’t trust white people.
“They’re all ‘country,’” he said of many migrants who come to the U.S. to work, “and don’t trust white people because they say white people are racist and don’t like them. They don’t want to talk to white people. I’ve seen people work at Fourth Street for two years and still not speak English or understand the traffic signs and traffic laws,” Rene told the magazine. “Many Haitians fail their driver’s test here. Some of them blame racism for why they keep failing their driving test.”
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