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This is labor trafficking, but it’s so quotidian that it barely registers as such to many Americans. Then the victims — who are economic refugees by any metric — are abused, blamed, and rounded up and incarcerated or deported.
And because of this employers don’t have to pay them much — if at all — or insure them or worry about pesky lawsuits. These human rights violations have been going on in the U.S. for years and created a massive shadow economy from which corporations directly financially benefit
The grey area in which undocumented workers live in the United States is deliberate, but their treatment has been obfuscated by politicians and lobbyists who also directly benefit from both this labor (and sex) trafficking and the massive security and surveillance apparatus used
to scare them into compliance and comfort frightened racists who wrongly think the true threat is coming from families trying to put food on the table
To be undocumented in the U.S. is to live on the razor’s edge, in which anyone can rape you, kill you or your loved ones, take your kids. And what are you going to do about it, call the cops? Go to the doctor? Get a lawyer? How, when every move you make will get you deported?
And that’s been going on forever. And it’s deliberate, obviously, because where are the citations for businesses employing the undocumented to take advantage of them? Slaps on the wrist at best as entire human existences are criminalized. Esclavitud.
But it’s worse in their home countries, often because American corporations come into their hometowns and destroy local economies just to save money under free trade agreements, which have helped some and screwed many others. So they’re fucked coming and going.
Anyway that’s the sort of thing I have covered for a very long time and it’s pretty appalling to see what is done in the United States’ name. So that’s the reason for all the demonization, easier to fuck over people you’ve been programmed to think of as “invaders”
Oh I nearly forgot one of the most fucked up parts of all. There are a lot of people who were brought here by their families as kids in the 1980s because of untenable violence and instability, and who have been trying to get their citizenship since but prevented because of huge
backlogs. Many of them have no memory of their “home” country. They are Americans; they pay taxes, work hard, are educated, and faithfully file their immigration paperwork. But they are still undocumented and not allowed to do anything but underpaid hard labor.
How do I know this? They’re my friends, family, community. I grew up with people whose lives were circumscribed by this through no fault of their own. They are woven into my life. Being undocumented was treated as a deep family shame for decades. It was getting a little better.
Not just the 1980s but that was when a lot was going down
But it’s all fucked up. There’s nothing good about the way undocumented people are treated by the United States when corporations and money are able to cross borders at will, and do.
Human trafficking is very lucrative.
