Foreign Workers

GRIPKI, Russia - This is the end of the road for some of Moscow's foreign workers, the Severny Detention Center, a four-story jail in a suburb of scruffy dachas and industrial plants. Behind barred windows and locked behind 3-inch-thick doors languish about 450 inmates awaiting deportation. Many are economic refugees from Central Asia or Eastern Europe, lured by labor brokers with promises of wages 10 times what the workers could earn at home. But they arrive at one of Moscow's major construction sites only to become virtual prisoners - stripped of their passports, on the job 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., seven days a week, and locked up at night in dormitories or battered trailers on the site.

Jack Brooks and other leaders of Maryland's seafood industry have faced the same problem for more than a decade: a shortage of seasonal foreign workers to pick out the morsels of crab meat that wind up on dinner plates across the country. But this summer, Brooks and the operators of other Eastern Shore picking houses are dealing with an entirely different challenge. Brooks has plenty of workers, but he's not sure whether he'll be able to afford to keep them. Seafood processors along the East Coast are steamed about a new Labor Department requirement that would force businesses that use foreign workers to increase their wages by as much as 50 percent.

The General Accounting Office has thrown water on a legislative effort, pushed by the nation's agricultural employers, to allow entry of more foreign farm workers by concluding in a new report that there is "no national agricultural labor shortage at this time."Several farm industry associations are pressing to expand the number of temporary work visas for the so-called guest workers, arguing that some regions face labor shortages, which are bound to increase as immigration officials step up efforts to keep out, and send back, illegal aliens.

Maryland seafood processors, desperately short of hands to pick crabmeat, are rushing to apply for visas for foreign workers after the federal Department of Homeland Security declared Thursday that 25,000 seasonal immigration permits have gone unclaimed for this year. The unexpected discovery that some of the annual allocation of 66,000 seasonal worker visas were still available was a welcome relief for the operators of Eastern Shore crab "picking houses," some of which had remained shuttered when the season started in the spring because they could not find enough help.

AMMAN, Jordan -- Islamic militants battled Libyan security forces last week in a significant challenge to the government of Col. Muammar el Kadafi, Arab officials and foreign diplomats said yesterday.At least 30 people were killed in clashes Wednesday and Thursday in the northeastern Libyan city of Benghazi, the diplomats said, basing their reports on accounts of travelers who had gone from Libya to Egypt, Lebanon and Sudan. Some accounts put the death toll as high as 70.News reports quoted travelers as saying that the clashes had come as security forces were rounding up foreign workers from countries such as Sudan in which Islamic militants have bases.

THE U.S. SENATE'S passage last week of a measure that will temporarily expand a visa program for foreign seasonal workers was an important step toward solving a problem that threatened Maryland's seafood processing industry, and a good example of sensible bipartisanship that distinguishes the forest from the trees. The measure sponsored by Sen. Barbara Mikulski, the Maryland Democrat, would allow workers who participated in the program in the past to return to work here this year and next, effectively exempting them from a 66,000-visa limit reached in January that left Eastern Shore crab and oyster processing plants without workers.

The YMCA of Greater New York joined forces two years ago with a man with a history of skirting immigration laws to import nearly 4,000 foreign workers and students under a federal visa program to work in hotels and resorts across the country. At the time the business relationship began, David C. Marzano and his company, Global Staffing of Atlanta, were under investigation by federal authorities. The investigation centered on allegations that he was illegally transporting and concealing foreign workers from Czechoslovakia and other countries who were assigned to jobs at resorts from Missouri to California.

Maryland seafood processors and advocates for the Hispanic community are working together to solve a labor shortage that could cripple the summer crab-picking season. The seafood processors learned last month that most of the temporary workers who have picked crabs and shucked oysters for more than a decade would not be able to return to their seasonal jobs this year. The workers are being denied entry because of a nationwide limit that Congress established for the number of seasonal working permits, known as H-2B visas.

HOD HASHARON, Israel -- Israel is on the verge of replacing virtually all its Palestinian workers with cheap foreign laborers, a key step toward the government's goal of segregating Arabs from Jews.The move is needed for Israel's security, the government says. But the imported workers bring problems of their own, while cutting off the chief source of wages for the Palestinian economy."For 28 years they have forced us to be attached to the Israeli economy, and now they say go find another job," complained Ra'ed Shedeh, 23, a Palestinian who now is barred from going the three miles from a Palestinian refugee camp to Jerusalem to look for work.

NAHAL ME'AROT RESERVE, Israel -- Ranger Nir Angert bumps his jeep along a banana grove, a lone patrol trying to keep Israeli wildlife from becoming Thai food.Ever since Israel began importing laborers from Thailand about eight years ago to replace Palestinians, environment officials say, wild animals, birds and fish have disappeared into the cooking pots of the workers."They eat everything on the ground, everything in the air that's not an airplane, and everything in the water that's not a boat," said Mr. Angert, a ranger for the Israel Nature Reserve Authority.