Indentured Servitude
Jun. 22nd, 2009 05:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rowynThomas Frank, the Wall Street Journal's token liberal opinion columnist, writes about what he describes as modern slavery.
I titled this post "indentured servitude" because that's more what this reminds me of.
I am appalled by the scheme, and saddened at the way our country's immigration laws have made it possible. I have second-hand experience with the crippling sense of helplessness, the sense that you cannot quit, that comes from your employer controlling your immigration status.
But I called this post "indentured servitude", even though this is rather more reprehensible than indentured servitude usually was -- indentured servitude typically ended eventually. Because the primary threats to slaves were usually imprisonment, corporal punishment, and torture. The ultimate threat was death. Deportation is bad, but it's not quite the same as being flogged to death.
That's one thing that struck me: "Once here in America, of course, they can't quit, or else they lose their visa status.".
Was that really the traffickers' ultimate trump card? Were these workers actually willing to put up with menial jobs, negative wages, and overcrowded homes because all of that was still better than going back to where they came from?
A little more research turned up information Mr. Frank didn't mention in his piece: that Giant Labor Solutions threatened $5000 fines against their employees if they returned to their home countries, and also that the visas they used were obtained using false information.
Still, I remain bewildered by Mr. Frank's solution to the problem, which appears to be 'stop offering the visas at all': "What I keep wondering is why we have such a program. Unemployment is over 9% and climbing. Why make it worse?"
I keep wondering why we have such a program, too. But what I keep thinking is that these limited, temporary visa programs make a mockery of the legend on the Statue of Liberty: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
I would like those words to be true. I would like to take this "ultimate trump card" out of the hand of these traffickers by telling these immigrants they are welcome in my country, with or without an employer to go through umpteen legal hoops to obtain a piece of paper to hold over their heads.
I would like for the end of this story for these immigrants to be that they get paid the wages due them and are free to go back to their home countries -- or stay in this one, which they worked so hard to get to.
Instead, I suspect the end to their ordeal will be deportation anyway.
Somehow, that fails to make me feel like my government is doing so much better by the would-be immigrants than the traffickers were. And weren't the immigrants the victims?
Oh, I see. I missed Mr. Frank's point entirely. I wasn't supposed to feel sorry for the people he called 'modern slaves'. I was supposed to feel sorry for the Americans who didn't get the jobs the slaves were doing. The fate of the enslaved is quite irrelevant.
... I always get that part wrong.
I titled this post "indentured servitude" because that's more what this reminds me of.
Once in America, the workers found themselves at the mercy of the traffickers, who allegedly kept "them as modern-day slaves under threat of deportation," in the words of James Gibbons of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The recruiters apparently took care to keep the workers in debt, charging them fees for uniforms, for transportation, and for rent in overcrowded apartments. Paychecks would frequently show "negative earnings," in the words of the indictment. And if the workers refused to go along with the scheme, the traffickers held the ultimate trump card, the indictment claims: They "threatened to cancel the immigration status" of the workers, rendering them instantly illegal.
I am appalled by the scheme, and saddened at the way our country's immigration laws have made it possible. I have second-hand experience with the crippling sense of helplessness, the sense that you cannot quit, that comes from your employer controlling your immigration status.
But I called this post "indentured servitude", even though this is rather more reprehensible than indentured servitude usually was -- indentured servitude typically ended eventually. Because the primary threats to slaves were usually imprisonment, corporal punishment, and torture. The ultimate threat was death. Deportation is bad, but it's not quite the same as being flogged to death.
That's one thing that struck me: "Once here in America, of course, they can't quit, or else they lose their visa status.".
Was that really the traffickers' ultimate trump card? Were these workers actually willing to put up with menial jobs, negative wages, and overcrowded homes because all of that was still better than going back to where they came from?
A little more research turned up information Mr. Frank didn't mention in his piece: that Giant Labor Solutions threatened $5000 fines against their employees if they returned to their home countries, and also that the visas they used were obtained using false information.
Still, I remain bewildered by Mr. Frank's solution to the problem, which appears to be 'stop offering the visas at all': "What I keep wondering is why we have such a program. Unemployment is over 9% and climbing. Why make it worse?"
I keep wondering why we have such a program, too. But what I keep thinking is that these limited, temporary visa programs make a mockery of the legend on the Statue of Liberty: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
I would like those words to be true. I would like to take this "ultimate trump card" out of the hand of these traffickers by telling these immigrants they are welcome in my country, with or without an employer to go through umpteen legal hoops to obtain a piece of paper to hold over their heads.
I would like for the end of this story for these immigrants to be that they get paid the wages due them and are free to go back to their home countries -- or stay in this one, which they worked so hard to get to.
Instead, I suspect the end to their ordeal will be deportation anyway.
Somehow, that fails to make me feel like my government is doing so much better by the would-be immigrants than the traffickers were. And weren't the immigrants the victims?
Oh, I see. I missed Mr. Frank's point entirely. I wasn't supposed to feel sorry for the people he called 'modern slaves'. I was supposed to feel sorry for the Americans who didn't get the jobs the slaves were doing. The fate of the enslaved is quite irrelevant.
... I always get that part wrong.
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no subject
Date: 2009-06-22 11:28 pm (UTC)I wonder if ending unemployment is important enough to people that they'd be willing for the entire country to take a 15% paycheck reduction in order to guarantee 0% unemployment across the board? (I say 15% because there'd be inevitably overhead to manage the employment-guarantee program)
no subject
Date: 2009-06-22 11:49 pm (UTC)I've heard that the overall average tax burden is 25% regardless of tax bracket right now (with regressive taxes like medicare and sales tax balancing progressive taxes like income tax).
Of course, a lot of that is spent on other stuff.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-23 10:00 pm (UTC)A) a safety net you can afford
B) one that will help people
C) one that doesn't discourage people from taking good risks
D) one that doesn't encourage people to take stupid risks
All at the same time.
I don't think any government has really got this all figured out yet.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-23 10:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-23 10:35 pm (UTC)Proving that starting any given business is a bad risk, or a good one, is a lot harder. :/
no subject
Date: 2009-06-23 09:18 pm (UTC)One thing I'd like to see tried is the "$10,000 per year stipend for being an adult citizen" welfare-substitute idea that Charles Murray proposed in In Our Hands. It addresses some of the thorniest motivation/gap problems that existing welfare/unemployment/food stamps/etc. have. (Biggest problem: aid cut-off caps that act to discourage receipients from seeking many kinds of work.)
no subject
Date: 2009-06-23 12:12 pm (UTC)[Bard is not quite so sure. -bb]
no subject
Date: 2009-06-24 05:53 pm (UTC)I don't think I'll read his article, as I've had enough hating the immigrant. I might indirectly agree with his point, the temporary programs suck, ending them might improve things.
If you let a foreigner into the country for a job, they're on a track for citizenship, one that doesn't reset. Could be the cheapest itinerant labour, could be a Nobel Laureate Physicist from Finland, doesn't matter. They start accumulating time. They get enough, they stay. Don't want them as citizens, Don't employ them. Can't find Americans to do the job, prices going up? Tough.
Same should apply for Canada, which is doing a similar thing to forest workers and skilled Africans, or Mexico with Central America, Europe with non-EU/Islamic nations and the UAE/Dubai with the skilled of the world. This temporary stuff is just ripe for abuses and "errors in paperwork = false applications".
That might work. Might not, don't know, but I have a hard time imagining it would be worse than the current maze of bait and switch hoops.