They came from the Philippines, from South Africa and from Kosovo, dozens of young people eager to experience the best that America had to offer.
Some had emptied their savings. Others had borrowed from their families. All had traveled to New York under a U.S. government program meant to foster cultural exchange, and they were eager to learn on the job at Kurt Weiss Greenhouses, one of the largest plant nurseries in the nation.
But when they arrived at the sprawling compound on Long Island, with its acres of flower beds, busy forklifts and speeding conveyor belts, it was nothing like what they had been promised.
Instead of receiving mentorship and time off to visit beaches, they spent 10-hour days stuffing soil into pots on an assembly line, or rose before dawn to plant flowers in the fields, or toiled past midnight loading heavy cartons of hydrangeas onto trucks bound for Costco, Walmart and Home Depot. They slept in filthy trailers on the property, sometimes two to a bed, choking on the dust kicked up by passing trucks and recoiling at the mice and cockroaches that skittered through their kitchen cabinets.
One visa worker, a student from Brazil, was made to tend plants in a greenhouse while laborers in protective suits sprayed chemicals around her. Given no safety gear, she fell violently ill, vomiting as her skin broke out in angry red spots. Another, a man from Eastern Europe, had his hand crushed beneath the wheels of a forklift. A third, an ambitious 22-year-old from Kosovo who was at the top of her class, winced as her bosses screamed at her to work faster — and threatened to have her deported if she did not.
“There was no treating you like a human,” the student, Behare Mlinaku, said. “We were just cheap labor.”
Every year, tens of thousands of young people come to work at companies like Kurt Weiss on J-1 visas, as part of a program that is supposed to provide an exhilarating taste of the American way.
Instead, a New York Times investigation has found, many of them have suffered abuse and mistreatment by American businesses in a poorly regulated program that is ripe for exploitation.
Treating the visa program as little more than a pipeline of cheap foreign labor, these companies have forced workers to can dog food on assembly lines, made them hose out blood and feces from the pens of pigs bound for slaughter and ordered them to pressure renters into signing leases in run-down apartment buildings, all under the guise of cultural exchange.
This pipeline, largely invisible to most of America, has widened significantly in recent years, admitting some 200,000 people last year alone. And while the Trump administration has sought to end protections that allowed hundreds of thousands of immigrants to work in the United States, it has left the visa program largely untouched.
To examine how J-1 workers have fared, The Times reviewed thousands of pages of legal and business filings and regulatory records, interviewed labor experts and lawyers and tracked down dozens of former visa holders from around the world. The investigation focused on New York, one of the top destinations for visa holders each year, and on those who experts say are most susceptible to abuse: seasonal workers, interns and trainees.
Over the past decade, some visa workers in New York have fainted from heatstroke, suffered burns or had their bones broken by heavy equipment.
Others have been sexually harassed and propositioned by co-workers at architectural studios, financial firms and other businesses. Seven visa holders said they were choked, spanked or kissed against their will by their employer at a Shelter Island cafe.
Still others were lured to office jobs by bosses who later refused to pay them and then fired them when they complained.
For some of the workers interviewed for this article, conditions were so bad that they left their jobs, returned home and forfeited the money they had paid to obtain their visas. Others felt compelled to stay on because they had gone into debt to pay labor recruiters or needed to complete internships to receive college credit.
All felt deceived after having signed up for a program that was never meant to be about work. Started in the 1960s and run by the State Department, the J-1 visa was supposed to foster “mutual understanding” between the United States and the world.
Approached by The Times, representatives of companies that employ J-1 workers either denied mistreating workers, declined to discuss the program or did not respond to requests for comment.
In an interview, Kurt Weiss’s former facilities director, Bill Zalakar, strongly defended the company’s safety record but did not address specific examples of worker injuries. He said most employees had positive experiences and that the greenhouse treated all visa workers with respect.
“If we were not a conducive and very trustworthy group of people,” workers would not be sent to train with the company, Mr. Zalakar said, adding that agriculture was not for everyone.
“I don’t think you’ll find 100 percent of people that will say that things are perfect,” he said. “But I know for a fact I would not send somebody out to do something that I would not do myself.”
Not all of the visa workers interviewed by The Times reported having bad experiences. Some, like Deni Zeqo, described their jobs in glowing terms.
“They were great people,” Mr. Zeqo, a student from Albania who worked at a Lake George inn in 2024, said of his bosses. “They gave me hope for America.”
A lobbying group for the cultural exchange industry, citing a poll it conducted, said a vast majority of participants make lifelong friendships and gain valuable experiences. And it is difficult to quantify how widespread the problems within the program are because the State Department has refused to release that information.
A department spokeswoman said that it “takes every case of alleged abuse seriously” and works with law enforcement and other organizations “to safeguard the health, safety and welfare of every exchange visitor.”
But it is the hands-off approach that the State Department has taken toward the program — it has largely outsourced the job of oversight to private organizations — that has created the potential for problems to continue.
The organizations, an assortment of nonprofits and for-profit companies, charge applicants fees in exchange for help securing their visas and placing them with American businesses.
Known as sponsors, the groups are supposed to vet employers and intervene when things go wrong. But their bottom lines depend in large part on maintaining relationships with those employers, giving them little incentive to act as tough regulators.
More often, sponsors have served as cheerleaders, pitching the program to industry groups as a cheaper, less regulated alternative to other guest-worker programs.
“It’s very economical,” one visa recruiter told attendees at a national pork producers’ conference in 2021. “Almost the whole cost of this thing is on the employees and not the employer.”
For those employees who land at exploitative workplaces, there is often little recourse, experts said. Most simply tolerate the abuse or return home without reporting it, leaving their employers free to continue using the program.
“There’s something malicious about calling it a cultural exchange program,” said Amal Bouhabib, a lawyer who has represented J-1 visa workers, “where people think they’ll be learning and experiencing American society, and then making them work for cheap in dangerous and physically hard circumstances.”
Tapping the Pipeline
The State Department has been faulted repeatedly for poor regulation of the program, but abuses have continued.
In 1990, auditors found that some visa holders were laboring at farms and auto body shops and receiving none of the educational experiences they had been promised.
But rather than overhaul the program, Congress authorized its expansion several years later, saying its diplomatic value outweighed any problems. Lawmakers liked that it was self-funding — paid for by fees from foreign workers. Companies liked that it allowed them to save on payroll taxes.
“That’s when private industry was really given the keys to the bus,” said Catherine Bowman, an associate professor of sociology at Austin College who has studied the J-1 program. “And it’s no accident that, after that, you start to see more abuse and exploitation.”
An Associated Press investigation in 2010 found that some students were being forced to dance at strip clubs; others were being paid less than $1 an hour after labor brokers deducted fees.
A year later, a Hershey Company packing plant was caught putting visa holders on grueling overnight shifts. (After students protested and walked off the job that year, the plant said it would stop employing the visa workers.)
The State Department tightened the program’s rules, but problems persisted.
An upscale resort in Utah called the Grand America Hotel turned to the program in 2016 after it was investigated by the government for employing undocumented workers, records show. The hotel lured visa workers from the Philippines under false pretenses and forced them to work 16-hour days as pantry chefs or cafeteria workers for paltry wages, according to a 2019 lawsuit that is pending in federal court.
The hotel’s lawyers did not respond to requests for comment.
More than a dozen Chilean students who came to Iowa to learn about robotics and the culinary arts in 2019 were forced to work at a meat-processing plant and a dog food factory, according to another lawsuit filed in 2020. One student was given the evening shift assembling Lunchables at the meat plant, Tur-Pak Foods, where conditions were so vile, and the smell so intense, that workers were regularly sick to their stomachs.
(The suit’s claims against two of the defendants, Tur-Pak and the dog food manufacturer, were dismissed after the companies reached a settlement with the students last year.)
And three men from Guatemala scraped together money to work at a pork production plant, Livingston Enterprises, in Nebraska in 2022, expecting to receive training in breeding animals.
Instead, they were made to do some of the most dangerous jobs at the facility, according to a third lawsuit, filed last year, that is continuing.
One man, given a power washer and told to hose down blood and feces without proper protective gear, developed nosebleeds after inhaling fumes and fecal matter. Another burned his face with scalding water but felt he had to keep working. A third was charged by a sow, leaving him seriously injured, the lawsuit said. But when he told his boss, he was instructed not to seek medical help. It would run up the company’s insurance costs.
Lawyers for Livingston Enterprises did not respond to requests for comment.
‘It Was a Disaster’
When Behare Mlinaku arrived at Kurt Weiss Greenhouses in New York, she was full of excitement.
It was her first time in the United States, and she was about to start a yearlong program studying plant cultivation and immersing herself in American life.
She was 22 and had rarely traveled beyond her home in Kosovo, so when a recruiter offered to help her get a visa and an internship with the American greenhouse company, she eagerly paid about $2,000 in fees and packed her bags.
The company she was joining was a family-owned business that had grown into one of the country’s largest greenhouses and plant nurseries, and it needed a steady supply of laborers to plant, harvest and transport the millions of flowers and succulents it shipped each year. But the work was grueling and sometimes dangerous, and the firm’s leaders struggled to find enough people willing to take it on.
Then, about 20 years ago, they started using the J-1 visa program.
Working with sponsors and the recruiter in Kosovo — a former Kurt Weiss employee whose firm was founded by another senior manager at Kurt Weiss — the greenhouse began signing up new foreign workers. Soon it was drawing as many as 70 J-1 workers in a given year, promising advanced training, good pay and ample time to relax on Long Island’s beaches.
“Everyone’s eyes were like when you see the stars shining,” said a Serbian student, Dino Cekic, whose time at Kurt Weiss overlapped with Ms. Mlinaku’s.
What the recruits did not know was that greenhouses consistently rank among the more dangerous workplaces in the United States. Thirty-seven workplace injuries were recorded at Kurt Weiss from 2014 to 2017.
In March 2015, a 37-year-old man died after his head was crushed between a metal pole and the forklift he was driving, leading to a federal investigation that found a number of safety violations, records show.
Ms. Mlinaku arrived about three years later and quickly realized that the job was not as advertised.
There was no advanced training, only hours spent loading plants onto heavy carts or standing at an assembly line, slapping bar codes onto flower pots.
The job was supposed to pay well, but she and the other workers earned minimum wage and received no overtime, even when they worked 60-hour weeks. They rarely had time off, and for their meager accommodations in the company trailers, they had $200 a month deducted from their paychecks.
Each day brought something new to dread: Her bosses who threatened to have her deported if she did not work faster; the other laborers, older men, who whispered sexual advances and pressed their bodies against hers; the people around her who started getting hurt.
One was a worker who had parts of his thumb and middle finger torn off in a truck’s folding loading dock. Another was a fellow visa holder whose hand was mangled under a forklift.
A third was Mr. Cekic: One day, he was lifting a heavy planter onto a large metal cart when the cart crashed down on top of him, dislocating his shoulder and landing him in the hospital.
Within weeks, Kurt Weiss and his sponsor dismissed him from his job and sent him back to Serbia.
Mr. Cekic had to raid his savings to pay for shoulder surgery in Serbia. “You get that beautiful story where it’s all sun and rainbows, but it’s really not,” he said. “For me, it was a disaster.”
Mr. Zalakar, Kurt Weiss’s former facilities director, said the company takes safety seriously.
“I will stand by our track record here,” he said. “I could write a book on the amount of people who have left here and gone back and started businesses, and when you hear those stories, it’s rewarding to know it started with you.”
For Ms. Mlinaku in 2018, and for the nine other visa holders interviewed by The Times who worked at Kurt Weiss in the years that followed, the experience was less positive.
Ms. Mlinaku had already lodged urgent complaints about the conditions there by the time another worker, an older woman, walked into the path of a box truck reversing near the fields.
It struck her, records show, and she was crushed to death beneath its wheels.
Afterward — after Ms. Mlinaku said she was fired for filing more complaints, after she returned to Kosovo and began to break down emotionally — she holed up in her home and grappled with what she had been through.
“I experienced the worst year of my life,” she said. “How was I supposed to explain this?”
Abuse and Harassment
Across New York, visa workers were not just put in physical danger. They were also abused, harassed and cheated out of wages, The Times found.
Vannessa Chao Wan Yi, a student from Malaysia who went to work in 2022 at a Shelter Island cafe called Marie Eiffel, said her boss, Françoise Lapostolle, spanked her in front of customers so she “would move faster, just like a horse.”
On other occasions, Ms. Lapostolle choked her and groped her breasts. She once traced a finger over Ms. Chao’s buttocks and then touched her anus through her pants, Ms. Chao said.
She and six other students sued in 2023, accusing Ms. Lapostolle, who goes by Marie Eiffel, of forcibly kissing and spanking them in a case that is pending. A lawyer for Ms. Lapostolle said she denies the allegations and “is confident she will prevail.”
Other workers landed at companies that appeared to flout labor laws.
Helen Lynch traveled from Ireland in 2023 to work at a New York apartment leasing company called Aya. Instead of the business development training she expected to receive, she and other workers were forced to use aggressive pressure tactics to harass renters into signing leases.
Some of the apartments were dangerous, dilapidated and appeared to be illegally subdivided, former workers said. Many of the visa workers paid hefty rents to live in the units themselves.
Ms. Lynch said she and the others were regularly expected to work weekends without overtime pay and were threatened with deportation if they missed monthly sales goals. After one worker from Cameroon protested in 2024, he was fired and told he had weeks to find another job or leave the country, four former colleagues said.
Aya declined to comment.
And then there were the people who went to work at Skytop Strategies.
Billing itself as a media company “where corporate insight and disruptive ideas converge,” Skytop makes money by selling pricey tickets to seminars on topics such as “commercial investing in space.”
The company’s founder, Christopher Skroupa, has cast himself as a successful business executive. But in 2021, some of his employees filed a civil complaint, which is pending, describing him as a con man who relied on fraud and deceptive business practices.
After that, Mr. Skroupa turned to the J-1 visa program.
He hired Lina Restrepo, a visa worker from Colombia, in 2022, promising her $60,000 a year, training in social media and time off to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other attractions.
Instead, she often worked 12-hour days, including on weekends, sometimes from Mr. Skroupa’s Manhattan apartment. She said other visa workers were sent to buy him lunches without reimbursement and regularly had to endure his erratic behavior and screaming fits.
Then, she said, Mr. Skroupa stopped paying them entirely. He made excuses, emails show, and promised that the funds were coming. But after months of working without pay and spending down her savings, she quit in disgust in May 2023, deeply in debt.
“You come here to the States with a dream,” Ms. Restrepo said. “I thought it was going to be a good experience, and it turned into a nightmare.”
Mr. Skroupa said in an email that The Times’s findings were “riddled with inaccuracies” but did not elaborate. He declined several interview requests.
Ignoring Complaints
Companies can continue to abuse visa workers year after year because no one entity has responsibility for holding them accountable.
The State Department oversees the J-1 program, but it leaves sponsors — who have a vested interest in staying on good terms with employers — in charge of monitoring employers and intervening if workers have problems.
And when visa holders have tried to report abuse, the sponsors and their representatives have played down, ignored or dismissed the complaints, The Times found.
In 2016, Carolina Rodriguez pleaded with her sponsor to intervene when her employer, an architecture studio in Brooklyn, refused to pay her the $2,400 monthly salary she was promised.
The sponsor, International Arts and Artists, did little to help. And when the architecture firm, Studioteka, fired Ms. Rodriguez over her complaints, the sponsor said she would need to find another job within weeks or have her visa revoked. Unable to do so, she returned to Colombia, forfeiting about $2,000 she had paid to the sponsor. She later sued Studioteka for breach of contract and received a settlement; the company did not admit wrongdoing. (International Arts and Artists did not respond to requests for comment.)
Studioteka’s chief executive, Vanessa Keith, disputed Ms. Rodriguez’s account and said she had been fired for performance issues.
Ms. Rodriguez’s sponsor told the State Department about the withheld pay, and government officials expressed concern, emails show.
But three years later, in 2019, the architecture studio was still employing visa workers. Iryna Humenyuk, a Canadian college student who is ethnically Ukrainian, arrived there by way of another sponsor, Intrax. (An Intrax representative said it follows all regulations and had no knowledge of the lawsuit against Studioteka.)
Soon, Ms. Humenyuk said, an employee at the company began sexually harassing her, saying she was attractive and asking whether all Ukrainian women “have large breasts and spend their days sowing wheat in fields.”
Ms. Keith, the chief executive, said she had never been told of sexual harassment at her company and was “heartbroken” to hear about the complaints.
“I try my best, but I am only human and am not perfect,” she said, adding that most J-1 workers had positive experiences at the firm.
Ms. Humenyuk complained repeatedly about the work environment to her college, which had helped her find the job.
“Interns walk away from terrible experiences and office cultures like this realizing how damaging corporate architecture — and America at large — can be,” she wrote in one complaint.
After the internship, she asked her college whether it could ensure that Studioteka would be barred from hiring more J-1 workers.
She never got a response.
Read by Amy Julia Harris
Audio produced by Sarah Diamond.
Susan C. Beachy contributed research. Bianca Pallaro contributed reporting.
Amy Julia Harris has been an investigative reporter for more than a decade and joined The Times in 2019. Her coverage focuses on New York.
The post They Were Promised a Taste of America. They Got Abuse and Exploitation. appeared first on New York Times.
