This evening's reminder of modern-day American slavery

On a panel at the National Immigrant Integration Conference this morning, Saket Soni of the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice shared these two stories:

On August 29^th this year, the 6^th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, a group of undocumented immigrant workers met in a parking lot to receive their paychecks. Their employer, the only home-elevation industry contractor in New Orleans, had withheld their pay for weeks and had promised to deliver their paychecks to them at the meeting. Thousands of dollars of wage theft were represented by their meeting. When the workers arrived on-site, they were not met by their employer, as promised. Rather, they were met by Immigration, rounded up, arrested, and detained. Their employer had staged a meeting under false and cruel pretenses in order to conduct an immigration raid. The workers were deported, unpaid and silenced and their employer, who exploited their labor, refused to pay them, and turned them into Immigration, is somehow in the legal “right” and will continue this practice.

Take another example from New Orleans: Hundreds of immigrant laborers, mostly from India, were working on visas in a large factory. They were being paid $2/hour, and charged rent for their provided “accommodations” sleeping on the factory floor. They were threatened, abused, and if they tried to file a complaint, they would be fired and, since their work visa is a contract with a single employer, they would no longer be able to work in the U.S. The legally-employed live in indentured servitude under the threat of cancellation of their visa.

For many immigrant workers, there are two paths:

Work legally with a Work Visa in contract with a single employer, who can dictate your hours, wage, and living conditions. You are potentially are subject to indentured servitude and have no labor unions to organize under. Any attempt at organization or complaint often gets you fired, and you are sent back to your country of origin.

Immigrate “illegally” and work without legal authorization. In this undocumented state, you can’t turn to law enforcement or legal resources if you are suffering abuse from your employers for fear of deportation. You cannot organize, and you are not protected by a union. Your employer can refuse to pay you or can pay sub-standard wages because you have no voice to protest. You are vulnerable. You are disposable. If your employer decides your labor is no longer needed or he/she doesn’t want to pay you, they can turn you into Immigration.

In Alabama’s HB 56 (or or “Governer Bentley’s Disintegration and Persecution Law” or “American fascism and legally-condoned domestic slavery”) employers are heavily penalized for knowingly employing an undocumented immigrant. However, the bill states “This term [employer] shall not include the occupant of a household contracting with another person to perform casual domestic labor within the household.” In other words, if you are paying someone under-the-table [or not-paying someone] to do your house-work, yard-work, etc, you are exempt from this law. In other words, if you hire an undocumented immigrant as house-hold labor, without protection of labor-rights, with or without pay, you are in Alabama’s legal right.

Decades ago, the South wouldn’t get on-board with labor rights laws because they didn’t want to grant protections to African-American workers. Since they couldn’t legally exclude a group of people from labor laws based on their race, they instead excluded the fields of work that were mostly employed by African-American workers. They excluded domestic workers and farm laborers from union and labor rights, therefore excluding most African-American laborers from protection of labor laws. The same applies here – except in this case the intended target is the Latino undocumented immigrant.

Slavery is an active and common business practice in the United States. It is not merely an artifact of our past. It is an injustice of our present state.

Even though state law and policy may not explicitly state ‘Hey, slavery is okay!,’ slavery-like conditions exist and are permitted through legal avenues. Even though a bill may not explicitly state, ‘Brown people are not allowed the same rights and dignity as white people, and Latinos are not welcome here,’ legislation with racial implications exists and is enforced; “low-income housing areas,” “domestic workers,” “farm laborers,” “contract laborers,” “immigrant workers,” “foreign-born,” are markers of racial implications that often target Latino communities, esp. those of Mexican and Central American origin. Under programs like 287(g), AL HB 56, Arizona’s SB 1070, etc., law enforcement officers are mandated to act upon “reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States,” (HB 56) without defining what qualifies for reasonable suspicion – i.e., if someone ‘looks Mexican,’ that is sufficient justification for apprehending them and demanding their papers.

We must read between the lines, speak beyond cleansed language, hold ourselves and our legislators accountable, and look behind the bars.