Along with this, it is highly unlikely that these workers will receive any sort of benefits for their labor; benefits such as health insurance and paid vacation time. .
A survey of non-agricultural Latino immigrant workers in Alexandria, Virginia found that most of the workers who have reported work related injuries or illnesses never received any worker's compensation benefits (Pransky et al. 2002). In fact, the Social Security Administration reported over 6.4 billion dollars in unclaimed social security taxes in 2002, according to a recent New York Times article (porter, 2005). Some researchers suggest that much of this money contributes to the so-called "suspense file", a file kept by the social security administration for people with social security numbers that either do not exist or do not match up to existing U.S. citizens/legal residents. This money is paid towards current U.S. senior citizens, even though the immigrants that finance this will never be able to claim their future benefits. .
There are many other ways in which these workers are exploited, but we rarely ever hear about such incidents because they are almost never reported and studies are unable to summarize them due to the fact that undocumented workers and illegal immigrants in general are very cautious when discussing their residential status with strangers. Some of these issues include: on the job verbal and sexual harassment, sub-par working conditions, and extremely long work days/weeks with no overtime compensation. During the course of my research, I was able to interview several undocumented workers under the promise of anonymity in order to further examine the ongoing violations on human rights. .
With regards to verbal and sexual harassment, I spoke with a girl whom I will call "Tara" who spoke with me in detail. She works as a waitress at a local restaurant and told me that she receives unwanted "compliments" on a daily basis, sometimes from regular customers, but feels that she is unable to report it to her boss out of fear of losing her job.
