It was the stuffed sheep's fault. Fuzzy, faded, beloved by Andrea Villa's 4-year-old charge, and remarkable to others only for its talent for disappearing. The toy, known as Sheepy, would disappear at least once a week, inspiring fits of crying from the little girl and a frantic search by her parents and Villa, their Colombian au pair.
Desperate to break the cycle, Villa turned to a tactic she'd learned from watching Supernanny: The little girl would put Sheepy in a special spot by the window each time she was done playing with it.
The strategy worked, until one day it didn't, exacerbating simmering tensions that resulted in Villa's expulsion from the house in northern Virginia where the 28-year-old had worked for three months.
Villa, now 32, chuckles ruefully at the memory while sitting in her tidy Alexandria, Va., apartment. It's sparely furnished but for a few mementos: a framed certificate from Georgetown University, a purple vase of fabric flowers.
Since that incident in 2012, Villa has graduated from business school and, under her student visa, is learning about payroll, invoices and estimates at a painting company. By all measures, she's come a long way from the time she lost her job, her residence and, potentially, her visa status in one swoop. But the memory still stings.
"I felt awful," she recalls. "Scared. I was thinking, 'Where will I stay? Maybe I have to go back to Colombia.'"
Thousands of 18- to 26-year-old foreigners become au pairs annually under a 12-month State Department cultural-exchange program. In 2015, 17,588 au pairs worked in the United States, according to State Department data, with 3,062 of them in Washington, Maryland and Virginia. (There were eight au pairs working in Arkansas in 2015 through the program.)
Drawn by promises of American adventure, educational opportunities and the warm embrace of a host family, the au pairs provide up to 45 hours of child care a week in exchange for room, board and a weekly stipend of $195.75, about $10,000 a year. At 45 hours, that would work out to $4.35 an hour. The federal minimum wage is $7.25; many state minimum wages are higher.
Many au pairs have wonderful, formative experiences, seeing much of the country and building lifelong relationships. But others say they have been subjected to mistreatment by host families or agencies. One Arlington, Va., au pair -- who worked up to 75 hours a week, plus nights, caring for a colicky baby -- became the subject of American University law professor Janie Chuang's critique of the au pair program, published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender in 2013.
Critics of the au pair program -- including current and former participants, advocates for migrant and domestic workers, private lawyers and legal scholars -- say au pairs are vulnerable to sexual harassment and assault, though few are willing to press charges, and only a handful have gone to court.
"These are the people who care for our children," Chuang says. "How much do they have to suffer for us to care about them?"
It is important to note that not all au pairs are responsible, loving caregivers, yet the very nature of the au pair program, critics argue, makes it most susceptible to misuse by agencies and host parents.
"The agency, they are making money with our work," Villa says. "But the families are their customers, so the agencies aren't on our side if we have a problem."
Parents who think they are obtaining "one of the most affordable childcare options available, especially if you have a gaggle of kids," in the words of one agency, GreatAuPair, are hiring au pairs being told by the same agency that they will have the opportunity to visit "great cities, improve your English and learn more about American culture." This can lead to clashing expectations and disputes.
The Department of State declares the Exchange Visitor Program, under which the au pair program falls, "first and foremost an educational and cultural exchange. The primary goal is to allow participants the opportunity to engage broadly with Americans" and, if there is a work component, "learn new skills or build skills that will help them in future careers."
The 16 designated U.S. au pair agencies, most of them for-profit businesses, recruit, select and train au pairs, connect them with host families and oversee their visa status. Although the department's au pair program brochure concludes with a disclaimer -- "Please Note: No guarantee of performance or competency is made by the designation of sponsor organizations" -- it instructs au pairs who have concerns to turn first to their sponsoring agency.
Critics such as Chuang say oversight of the program is inadequate. The approximately 100-employee Office of Private Sector Exchange is tasked with monitoring all 15 of the J-1 Visa Exchange Visitor Programs, which include more than 300,000 participants coming to the United States annually to work, study or teach.
Villa's story
Villa's first au pair experience involved a family she had stayed with in 2009 as an exchange student taking English at the International Center for Language Studies in Washington. The Clarks lived in Arlington, had twin girls she adored and were warm and genuinely interested in her life. When they asked her in 2011 to return as their au pair, she leaped at the chance. The Clarks turned to Au Pair International, based in Boulder, Colo., to handle the process. In Bogota, Villa says, she completed the process through Cultural Travel Colombia.
She went through a barrage of tests and certifications: English-language interview; CPR- and first-aid certification; a psychological-assessment test; swimming test; even a pregnancy test. But the most startling requirement was the $1,600 fee that Villa says she was asked to pay to begin the application process -- more than twice the average monthly salary in Colombia. Villa emailed the Clarks, who were just as surprised. It didn't make sense to them that she should have to pay to get a job when they were already paying a U.S. agency thousands of dollars. Nevertheless, the Clarks told Villa they would cover the expense.
"I was so lucky," Villa says. "All the other au pairs have to pay because they don't have someone to fight for them."
Legislative efforts to do away with recruitment fees have run into opposition from the agencies, which have encouraged host families to join them in lobbying against bills that the agencies argue would increase costs. Using an au pair for child care is a good deal, especially in high-cost areas such as Washington. Factoring in agency fees of up to $8,500, the fixed au pair stipend and $500 toward the au pair's required course work at a post-secondary institution, families pay roughly $19,000 a year. Even considering the expense of supplying room and board, that's a considerable savings over the average cost for a full-time nanny in Washington, which, according to the New America think tank, is $33,366 -- the highest in the nation.
In addition to unexpected recruitment fees, au pairs are often startled by the predominance work takes after they arrive.
"They do say you have to work 45 hours a week, help the family," says Caroline Nascimento da Silva, a Brazilian who worked as an au pair in Arlington. "But they don't emphasize it."
Au pairs also can experience difficulties obtaining the cultural and educational experiences they've been promised. Families who live in the suburbs do not always make transportation available, for example, and the $500 host parents pay toward educational expenses doesn't stretch far beyond basic English-as-a-second-language classes in the Washington region.
When their year-long experience comes to a close, au pairs have the option to extend for up to 12 more months. Villa was eager to stay in the United States to continue her course work, she says, but the Clarks no longer had enough hours for her. So, at the suggestion of Au Pair International, she put up a profile on Care.com, a website that connects caregivers and families, to find another match. When a new family got in touch, Villa was relieved. The husband, wife and two daughters, 4 and 6, also lived in northern Virginia and seemed kind. Eager to nail down her visa, she did not wait to see if anyone else would contact her.
The new family, who declined through an intermediary to be interviewed for this story, timed Villa's arrival to coincide with the last week of their exiting au pair. Having been bitten by a dog as a child, Villa did not want to care for the family's large Saint Bernard, and the family acquiesced. She also balked at the extra hours. Her first hosts, the Clarks, suggested she ask for an additional $12 to $21 an hour for the overtime. Villa says the second host father agreed to $6, which disappointed her.
The days with the second family could stretch to 12 hours, and those days into 60-hour weeks, Villa alleges. She says she would wake up at 6:30, feed the girls breakfast, drop the older girl off at school, bathe, care for and feed lunch to the younger one, pick up the older one at school, feed the girls snacks, and manage their activities and homework until their parents came home around 7, and made dinner. In between, she says, she would clean the kitchen and vacuum the whole house -- chores she believed went beyond the au pair responsibilities to do light housework related to the children.
After her long workdays, Villa would collapse in her basement room. She had little energy to study, she says, and had the gnawing sense that the parents saw her less as a member of their family and more as someone who could be squeezed for more work.
Villa's state concerned her first host mother, Eva Clark. "It just seemed they were really taking advantage of her," Clark says. "I could see her getting very down, and Andrea's a very upbeat, positive, super-helpful, super-friendly person."
Then, three months into Villa's stay with the second family, Sheepy disappeared.
Villa felt overworked, underappreciated and undermined in her authority to care for the girls. She called her agency, which contacted the host family, then called her back and told her she'd have to leave by the end of the week. But when she got home, the host father told her to leave the next day.
Although her local agency representative offered Villa a place to stay at her house, Villa declined. She stayed with friends while she scrambled to find a new family through the rematch process, a high-stakes undertaking in which she had to find a new job within a "reasonable period" (as stated in her contract) or fly home at her expense. Permission to rematch is a matter of agency "discretion," her contract says, as is agency assistance in finding a new family or temporary housing.
Villa says that in her case, the local agency representative told her to put her profile back up on Care.com and did not offer any further assistance in finding a family. Au Pair International, Villa's agency, did not respond to multiple calls and requests for comment.
"I felt awful," she says now. "Awful."
Villa did find a rematch, via an au pair friend who was heading home and recommended Villa to take her place.
Advocates have called for moving oversight of the au pair program to the Department of Labor, or for reducing the number of required work hours to 30. When asked about moving the program under Labor, State Department spokesman Nathan Arnold said the agency believes it belongs under cultural exchange.
"Our discussions with au pairs indicate that they are motivated to come to the United States mainly in order to practice their English, learn about the country through living with a host family for a year, and through travel," he says.
"Sometimes I think America has a double face, especially the immigration system," Villa says, reflecting on her experience. "They say this program is for you to come and learn English and travel while you take care of kids. But ... no one will make sure you have a good family and a good schedule. The au pair doesn't have protections."
Family on 11/16/2016