How Scientology Exploits Foreign Workers
England, 1994. Tina was 14. Her parents lived at Scientology compounds in the United States, and church officials wanted Tina to come join them by using an R-1 visa — a permit recently created by Congress for religious workers, good for five years. The officials told Tina (a pseudonym) what to tell anyone who asked: that she would be attending a special Scientology school and volunteering for the church part time. It wasn’t true. Once approved, Tina worked shifts as long as 24 hours doing construction, building furniture, and performing administrative tasks. “None of it’s voluntary,” she told me.
Hungary, 1997. Attila Sonkoly, then 21, was getting as many as five calls a day from Scientology officials urging him to come work for the organization in the U.S. on an R-1 visa. He finally agreed, and to help him pass his interview, the recruiters shared a psychological profile of the person who would screen him at the U.S. Consulate. The visa was approved, and soon Sonkoly was off to Clearwater, Florida, where Scientology has one of its headquarters. An official there took away his passport and made him sign contracts in English, a language he didn’t understand. Sonkoly saw that what he’d been instructed to tell the consulate — that he’d be performing religious duties as a minister — was a lie. “They needed us to do disgusting work,” he said, and “very, very heavy manual labor.” He estimated that two-thirds of the people working in Clearwater were from overseas.
Canada, 2001. Haley Keldani, then 17 and living near Vancouver, was fielding calls from a recruiter who wanted her to get an R-1 and move to Clearwater. Her parents were Scientologists and had sent her there a year earlier to take classes; during the visit, Keldani says, she was raped in a pool by a man in his 40s. Church officials had made her take responsibility and punished her. (A spokesperson said, “There was no report of rape to the Church.”) Now the recruiter was telling her exactly what to say to pass her R-1 interview. After getting the document and entering the U.S., Keldani was taken to do demolition work at a property the church owned. Several men were struggling with a heavy roll of industrial carpeting, and they handed the job off to Keldani and another girl. “I fucking destroyed my spine and my neck,” Keldani says. Today, she regards Scientology’s operation in Florida as a forced-labor camp. “This was clearly slave work,” she said. “The R-1 visa itself was false. There was no religious volunteering taking place. I was not a minister. I’d never done any minister certification or training. I was just a young girl.”
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