Scientology shows no sign of slowing down its use of religious visas for foreign labor

 
Last year in January we reported on some stunning new data that researcher R.M. Seibert managed to pry out of the US government with help from the MuckRock website. For years, Scientology watchers like Jeff Jacobsen had noticed that Scientology seemed to rely on foreign workers at its major bases, and that they were being brought in under a “religious worker” visa, also known as R-1.

But rather than do “religious” work, these foreigners were brought in to labor in Scientology’s “Sea Organization,” where workers sign billion-year contracts, work 112-hour weeks for only about $50 a week when they’re paid at all, and often do only manual or administrative work. With fewer Americans interested in joining Scientology’s hard-core Sea Org and its ascetic lifestyle, the church seemed to be turning to people from other countries who perhaps didn’t know what they were getting into.

But how many of them were there?

Seibert noticed that a change in the law that occurred in 2009 made it possible to obtain records of how many R-1 visas were being applied for and granted. So she convinced the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to fork over actual numbers, and they were pretty startling. In the period from 2009 to 2015, various entities of the Church of Scientology had received a total of 3,447 visas for foreign workers, with the single largest source coming from Russia (17 percent) and the single most frequent place they were going to the Flag Land Base in Clearwater, Florida (75 percent).

“Those numbers are outrageous. It’s outrageous for an organization that is so small,” former top Scientology spokesman Mike Rinder told us last year. “Even if you take seriously the number they advertise for the size of staff at Flag — two thousand people — those visa numbers suggest that since 2009 they’ve had a complete turnover of that many people.”

Now, Seibert has badgered the government into sending us new numbers that show the church continues to rely on these visas to fill Sea Org jobs at their major bases, and again primarily at Flag.

She found that in 2016, Scientology entities arranged for 564 new R-1 visas, and that so far in 2017, there have been another 301. So the new total since 2009, when these numbers first became public because of a change in the law, Scientology has brought in 4,158 “religious” workers to get paid about 40 cents an hour at its major bases.

To get some idea how significant these numbers are, it’s important to note that Scientology has never had the “millions” of members that it has claimed for many years. At its greatest extent, around the year 1990, former top officials tell is there were about 100,000 active Scientologists around the world. By 2008, those officials were telling us that number was down to only 40,000. And now, based on new defectors and other lines of evidence, we believe that the global number of active church members is fewer than 20,000. So bringing in more than 4,000 foreign workers to staff bases is really a significant development, and helps explain how Scientology keeps those bases running even as its overall numbers dwindle.

We have a couple of breakdowns of the data. First, here’s the number of visas that were approved, and the small number not approved, by year:

 
And here’s the list of places which applied for those visas (including those that were denied):

 
And which country the workers originated from:

 
And Seibert had one more revelation. As of April 2017, despite the large number of visas requested by the Church of Scientology, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has not performed a single site inspection of the church to make sure that its requests are on the up and up. Not one!

 
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What Scientology sounds like

Thank you to Rod Keller for finding this gem, a woman who is planning the “Ideal Org” in Austin, Texas. Just let this religious fervor wash over you.

 
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Posted by Tony Ortega on August 23, 2017 at 07:00

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