Tech Factories Luring Migrants Risk U.S. Labor Violations

Sita Magar is a single mother of four who earns whatever she can wring from six goats and the muscle of a rented water buffalo. After paved roads end, it takes four hours to reach her farm along a trail where felled trunks, like twisted balance beams, span a raging stream. Even so, a recruiter feeding migrant workers into the global electronics industry found Magar in her mountainside Nepalese village last year. He convinced her to borrow more money than she’d ever seen, about $1,000, and pay him to get her daughter a position at a factory in Malaysia.

After a year, the girl was dismissed and sent home when a company-mandated pregnancy test came back positive, leaving the family still impoverished and with years of added debt.