[felixmc]

In the early 2000s my dad left his cushy job as an electrical engineer at a nuclear power plant in eastern europe to come to the US with an H1B to fix AC systems for a company owned by an eastern european that only hired immigrants.

They would count the price of plane ticket, technical training classes, english classes, etc to a "debt" that you had to pay off. You would get paid a salary, but depending on how much money you made the company each month, this debt would either go up or down, and the company claimed you wouldn't be able to leave the company until you paid off this debt (eventually my dad figure out that this was not true or at least not legal, but this policy still goes on as we speak).

You can imagine most people who worked there struggled for years to pay off said debt.