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Washing dishes at the house where you're holidaying, as a guest's courtesy, is not "working". It seems the letter of law may prohibit it, but that's absurd and clearly not the same thing as people who sneak in to get actual paying jobs. The standard for deportation should be proving that the individual received wages for something, not just that they did vaguely work-like activities in their free time.
We are on a few layers of speculation at this point, but I believe the issue is she may be an illegal maid or nanny. If she admits to past illegal work on a tourist visa then CBP may be skeptical of her story about staying for months with people she never met before and also ""helping"" out around their home.
I get that we don't want law enforcement dragging your European friend to a detention center because they helped clean up after hanging out with you. But we do want them identifying illegal nannies and deporting them. Such as probably this woman.
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Doing housekeeping in exchange for room and board is "working", even if no wages are received.
Nah. Washing dishes at the house where you're holidaying, as a guest's courtesy, is not "working".
No, it's not, which is why you don't need to extensively research before you come if "washing dishes" is tourism or working. The fact that Burke. by her own family's admission, was trying to find out the loopholes around working versus tourism makes me suspect she was working for a 'host' family and getting money in exchange, e.g. au pair or something similar. I'm guessing here, but she may have gone legitimately on a visa for au pair work back in 2023 and this time round decided she could skip all that paperwork, do some 'guest work' for a 'host family' on the side and get spending money while on her tourist visa, and if questioned then fall back on "oh I'm staying with friends/friends of friends, and I just help out round the house as a thank-you'. Except the plan didn't work out for her.
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This one is so conceptually difficult. It's super easy to let the economist's mindset take over and view everything as "exchange" or "working". When we got married, my wife lived in the US with me but was not legally able to work for a period of time. I was also required by the government to support her. Of course, since I was working and she wasn't, she's not going to just sit around and drink mai tais all day. She made some meals, did dishes or laundry or whatever. Just stuff around the house to keep herself occupied, while also obviously doing other things, too. Is that "working"? Should we deport every single one of those people who legally come here, on a legal path to being authorized to work, if they so much as lift a finger to put their spouse's dishes in the dishwasher one time? I have to imagine that most people think obviously not.
On the other hand, there are obviously schemes in place where people essentially hire a housekeeper under the table. Distinguishing between different types of situations and what "counts" as "working" is extremely hard in general.
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This seems a very silly way to look at it. Say I travel to Canada, and I have a cousin there. He lets me crash on his couch because he is my cousin. We have dinner together. I offer to help with the dishes, because, after all, I'm the one who got half of them dirty so it's only fair. Am I "working" for my cousin? Is he paying me by letting me sleep on his couch? Of course not. My cousin would have let me stay over even if I'd bailed out on the washing dishes; in fact he wouldn't have needed help with the dishes if my presence hadn't gotten extra dishes dirty. Even to the extent that my track record of being a helpful houseguest might be a factor in him allowing me to stay, it's not as if he'd let a perfect stranger come to his house in exchange for that minimal amount of "housekeeping", or as if there's some citizen he would be paying normal wages for that work if I hadn't stepped up. Come on. In no universe should this be any kind of violation. It's pure chicanery.
(Or are you saying that, while the above is innocent, we need to outlaw it anyway in order to 'catch' some rampant problem of criminals who are in fact becoming unauthorized housekeepers for perfect strangers in exchange for room and board in the US? I suppose that would be less insane. But also, fuck it. Letting some people functionally enslave themselves on the margins is worth not outlawing basic politeness as a houseguest. To the extent it might be happening, I still don't believe it's a blight on the economy that warrants making regulations such a PITA for ordinary people who want to pull their weight with their hosts.)
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