October 18, 2016 โ Among the revelations in a batch of Hillary Clintonโs emails recently released by WikiLeaks is an exchange about an incident at an Alaska fish processing plant that drew attention of the top levels of the U.S. State Department but was never known to the public until now.
The situation involving young foreign workers from Central America laboring in a remote Alaska fish plant in the Aleutians occurred in January 2012, when Clinton was secretary of state.
At the time, the U.S. State Department was dealing with an onslaught of bad press about its J-1 Summer Work Travel visa program, which allows young foreign students to work seasonal jobs and travel in the United States as a โcultural exchange.โ
The visa program is supposed to be a tool of soft diplomacy, but critics have charged that workers have been exploited by employers and work in conditions that offer no cultural experience of the United States.
The previous August, J-1 visa workers laboring at a Hersheyโs chocolate factory in Pennsylvania staged a boisterous protest over poor conditions, leading to front-page headlines in the New York Times.
The State Department had begun to investigate their sponsor, the nonprofit Council for Educational Travel USA. The group, known as CETUSA, was one of the leading companies placing J-1 workers in the U.S., including many in Alaska seafood jobs.