Culture exchange program clashes with students’ expectation

Many young students in China want an opportunity to go abroad. Most of them like to visit the United States, where they get to see places they have seen from Hollywood movies, experience different cultures, and learn English. The U.S. government has set up a program which, for years, has been an attraction for foreign students to stay and work in the country temporarily. But there is a risk: The students may become cheap labor before they know it.

“From my experience of talking to thousands of guest workers over the years, there’s a real lack of protections in the U.S. law for these workers. And U.S. companies were really taking advantage of that [by getting] additional labor from these guest workers. It has been going on for years,” Jacob Horwitz, Lead Organizer of National Guestworker Alliance told People’s Daily Online USA.

Exploitation, he added, is wide spread.

The program, called J-1 Visa Summer Work/Travel Cultural Exchange (SWT), is set up by the State Department to offer foreign students an affordable gateway to travel to the United States. It prizes that foreign students, if granted the J-1 visa (guest worker), will be provided with “an opportunity to live and work in the United States during their summer vacation from college or university to experience and to be exposed to the people and way of life in the United States.” The maximum length of the program is four months, in which students are free to travel around the country after working for three months.

To be eligible the applicants must be post-secondary school students enrolled in and actively pursuing a degree or other full-time course of study at a post-secondary educational institution outside of the States. Many young people treated this as a valuable opportunity for cultural exposure. From the program’s information brochure issued by the US Department of State Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs, the types of jobs that students may be assigned include entry level service positions in resorts, hotels, restaurants, and amusement parks. The brochure also states that U.S. Sponsors “may not place [students] in any position in the adult entertainment industry.”

Nevertheless, depends on the students’ luck and the conscience of the sponsors and employers, they may end up working in a factory, a fishing plant, or, in some unfortunate cases, in strip clubs.