Labor Recruiter CEO and GOP Donor Arrested for Trafficking

Mordechai Orian, CEO of the Los Angeles-based labor recruiting firm Global Horizons Manpower, was arrested over the weekend for human trafficking. He and his company have been implicated in enslaving over 400 Thai workers in the U.S. And what did Orian do with all that money he earned from human trafficking? He donated some of it to the Republican Party.

As CEO of Global Horizons Manpower, the firm who recruited and trafficked hundreds of workers, Orian was the man behind one of the largest identified human trafficking schemes in history.  Over 400 Thai workers were brought to the U.S. and sent to work on farms from Hawaii to Florida to Texas. Global Horizons promised the workers lucrative jobs in the agricultural industry, but once they arrived in the U.S., their passports were confiscated and they were threatened with deportation if they tried to leave. Working conditions varied from site to site, but were worst in Hawaii and Washington, where many of the workers were sent. The FBI has discovered that the trafficking scheme stretched all the way back to 2004.

In an interview with Mother Jones, Orian bragged about how easy the holes and shortcomings of the American immigration system were to exploit. His thoughts on the Thai workers who, after losing homes or families in Thailand, desperately travelled to the U.S. under false pretenses,

When it comes to money, people will do crazy stuff. You cannot stop it and come to blame me.

But we can blame you when you create a system to exploit need and profit from the exploitation and slavery of other people. And what did Orian do with all that money he earned through his labor recruiting company? Between 2004 and 2006, he donated over $30,000 to the Republican Party and a GOP-affiliated PAC. Does that mean that the GOP has tens of thousands of dollars of slavery profit in their piggy banks right now? And if they do, will they think about giving it back to the workers who deserve it?

No one should profit from human trafficking, not a wealthy CEO and not the National Republican party. So GOP, will you consider returning some of that money to the 400 workers who earned it?

Photo credit: marcopapale.com