The Associated Press State. Reprinted with permission.

In one week, nine immigrants being transported to work in the region have died and dozens more have been injured in three highway crashes, which should serve as a wake-up call to the exploitation and danger many face, advocates say.

Language barriers, fear of deportation and lack of employment can make many new immigrants ripe for exploitation from unscrupulous temporary employment agencies, which transport workers throughout the region - and the nation - to toil in backbreaking, 12- to 15-hour work days on farms and in factories.

"These are people who can easily be exploited by people looking for cheap labor, to work long hours at jobs nobody else wants, and who are afraid to say anything because they're afraid of being deported or losing their jobs," said Julie Cousler Emig, program manager for Congreso de Latinos Unidos, a Philadelphia community agency. "They're often desperate for work, and they don't often have knowledge about their rights or an understanding about worker safety requirements."

On Monday, a van carrying 19 temporary workers to Philadelphia from a Delaware job site hit a gasoline truck on Interstate 495, killing four occupants of the van and injuring 15 others. Federal officials are looking into the employment circumstances of the passengers after about $10,000 in cash was found in the van.

The van was carrying primarily Cambodian, Indonesian, Pakistani and Thai employees of Lam Staff Service, a temporary employment agency in Philadelphia. City licensing officials have no record of the agency.

On Tuesday morning, two Mexican immigrants died and more than a dozen were hurt after as they left Schuylkill County in search of work, possibly on a peach farm near Allentown. Their van collided with a car on state Route 309 and flipped, throwing people along the highway and into a nearby field.

On Wednesday, a sport utility vehicle carrying seven men who just arrived from Mexico and were headed to Camden, N.J., in search of work, collided with a tractor trailer on the New Jersey Turnpike. Three people were killed and three others, including the driver, were injured.

Though the deaths will hopefully shed some light on the dangers and exploitation immigrants face and the underground economy that thrives, the problem is hard to fix because it is hard to find - until tragedy strikes, said Justine Nolan, director of workers rights program for American Civil Liberties Union's Immigrant Rights Project.

"It happens in the U.S. all the time but it doesn't get any attention ... it's hard to find out anything about who's doing what and where," she said. "You have cases where people stand on the street, they're undocumented workers, and a van comes by to pick them up and takes them (to a factory or
farm) . ... It's a situation that's played out every day, all over."

The Immigration and Naturalization Service in Philadelphia declined to comment other than to issue a statement that an investigation was under way into the crashes in conjunction with other local, state and federal agencies.

"Alien smuggling and employing unauthorized aliens is not a victimless crime. People are abused and people die," INS district director Kenneth J. Elwood said in the statement Friday.

Part of the problem is that social service and support agencies, under budget and manpower constraints, can provide only limited assistance for immigrants - and others like community associations and neighbors need to take a more active role, said John Kidane, counseling supervisor at Nationalities Service Center in Philadelphia.

"Because it's an awareness issue, it has to come from their community (leaders) to take the step," he said.

It's partly a cultural issue because work situations that Americans consider exploitive are what people from other countries see as the norm, based on their experiences from home.

"It's something that the world is trying to fight," Kidane said. "Some people have such a profound fear of persecution in their own country so they come here, but there's persecution here too."