Victor zavala sr. Was in a panic. His sons and daughter-in-law had just been arrested by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's immigration division, part of a sweep last October of 250 illegals who held cleaning jobs at Wal-Mart stores in 21 states. Zavala waited on a call from Kenneth Clancy, who had put him and his family to work at the giant retailer in Old Bridge, Piscataway and Toms River, N.J., and would get them out of this horrendous scrape. Clancy did phone, says Zavala. But it was to tell him to put together a new crew to clean that evening. The case has focused on Wal-Mart. A federal grand jury is trying to determine how much executives knew about illegal aliens working in their stores. What has grabbed little attention is a more pervasive problem: the thousands of middlemen, sometimes illegals themselves, who entice foreigners to come to America, hook them up with menial jobs and take a substantial cut of their livelihoods, often for years, as the immigrants work off their debts. Companies like Wal-Mart rarely deal directly with such illegals―or with the shadowy contractors who hook them up with service companies that offer cheap labor to corporate America. (Wal-Mart says that these decisions were made by individual store managers and that it has now given up outsourcing its cleaning crews.)
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