Trafficking Foreigners to America for Slave Labor

America's Modern Slave Trade

When one thinks about slavery in the U.S., they immediately think of the the Plantation Slavery of African Americans in the South.  Though our nation was officially founded in 1776, it took decades of campaigning & a brutal Civil War to finally end this form of slavery.  Unfortunately,  many don't realize that labor slavery has not ended in the U.S.  Every year thousands of foreigners are trafficked into the U.S, & a many end up trapped in a hidden system of slave labor that exists throughout the country.  


Throughout the country, traffickers have created a number of false organizations posing as job recruiting agencies, but are in reality selling foreigners as slaves.  In seeking for cost-effective help, resorts, hotels, & country clubs sometimes knowingly or unknowingly hire these agencies that are in truth fronts for slave labor.  Traffickers often go to Mexico and other nations looking for cheap labor.  They charge desperate people to cross the border and assure them that once they find work, they’ll be able to pay them back.  However, once they arrive, they’re at the mercy of the traffickers.  Many are tricked and taken to undisclosed locations for slave labor.  Along the way they’re charged for food, gas, lodging, and are expected to pay it back with labor.  They’re sold like animals.  Many of these people are being worked in fields and factories.  Traffickers take advantage of the foreigners ignorance of American laws and culture and use their ignorance to fuel their fear of seeking help, warning that if they do they'll face deportation and once deported, they traffickers would no longer protect them and vent out reprisal against them and their relatives back in their native countries.  

Ohio Chicken Farm Where Dozens of Guatemalan's Worked as Slaves

One of the most infamous examples of modern slavery took place in American Samoa.  There, a garment factory known as Daewoosa, Ltd.  Recruited women from Vietnam and other South Asian nations to come work at the their facility, luring the women with promises of good wages and living conditions.  After paying the agency $3000 to be hired, these women were brought to Samoa only to learn that they'd been lied to.  They were kept in a guarded compound where they were forced to live under horrific conditions while being fed three meager meals a day.  They had to work grueling hours sewing garments for major U.S. Department Stores and were beaten if they protested.  One worker was beaten so badly she lost an eye.  Though the authorities managed to break up this slave shop in 2003, it's but one of the many examples of slave labor in our nation.  Individuals from all over the world have been deceived and forced into numerous forms of slavery.  Some are coerced into signing contracts that warn of severe financial repercussions if they back out (these foreigners don't know that such contracts are illegal) or they'll held in compounds and forced to work as slaves.  

Shyima's Testimony

Not even children are spared from this.  In nations such as Guatemala, criminal traffickers hold great power and they threaten to kill poor families unless they hand over their children to them.  The children are then taken across the border and sold.  Not all child slaves come from south of the border.  At times families immigrate legally from other nations and bring children with them that they claim are theirs, but this is not always the case.  In Irvine, CA, and Egyptian couple was arrested for keeping a child by the name of Shyima imprisoned in their garage for years.  Shyima was not their daughter.  They had bought her in Egypt and brought her over to the U.S. to work as their maid, and she was forced to work as a domestic slave for years.  Although most nations abroad ban the practice of purchasing children as slaves, the authorities in many of these nations, including Egypt, take little action to enforce those laws.  Shyima later wrote a book about her experience entitled: Hidden Girl: The True Story of a Modern-Day Child Slave.  In her book, Shyima credits the United States Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) for rescuing her from slavery.  

Slavery is not "a think of the past" here in the United States, it's alive and well.  If we're to truly fight for these foreign migrants who have come here for opportunity, only to end up in slavery, then we must unite and take action against it.  We must observe and understand how these slaves are brought in.   We must report all suspicious activity to the authorities.  We must work in conjunction with foreign governments to fight this trafficking as the markets and bases for these traffickers is often in these foreign countries.  Most of all, we must secure our borders.  If the traffickers discover that it is becoming too risky to bring in slaves through secure borders, then this trade will come to an end.  

Sources:

Belles, Nita.  In Our Backyard: Human Trafficking in America and what We can do to Stop It.  Grand Rapids, Baker Books, 2015.

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