When I was at AMF, I met many people in this program. Almost all of them were Korean. They would come to AMF with 250 hours and get type rated in a Metro or a 1900. They would sit in the right seat and log SIC time. Some were pretty good, and a really big help. Others were terrible and told not to touch anything. The 1900 and Metro are technically single pilot airplanes (most of the time), but AMF had some sort of ruling from the FAA to allow the FO to log time if there was one on the flight.

AMF does have a few paid FO's on the Brasilia, but that is it for guys with less than 1200 hours. Everyone else had to have 1200 hours to get a job. The vast majority of these guys were not authorized to work in the US, but instead were paid by their sponsor airline to be in this program.

These guys DO NOT take jobs from other pilots. If they were not paying money to be in those seats, then those seats would be empty. On the other hand, I would imagine that in the past several years that this program has been going on, the FO's have helped the Captains several times with callouts or altitude deviations or other such things that could have prevented an accident or a violation.