a.) your German friend would likely have not been in the kafala system since that is for the labour force.
b.) the kafala system has been banned in the UAE since 2005, with a pretty punitive fine regime, although that hasn't done enough to eliminate it (Govt. lenient treatment for its cronies vs independent contractors, both who follow the practice). It's still in force in other countries in the region.
c.) Your friend will likely have been staying at a township for workers, which is often the common pattern for mining towns in most countries in Asia. Conditions usually tend to be luxuriant, and nowhere near the labour camps (which are actual camps).
I had a project in Dubai a couple of years ago, and all the people I was inc contact with were foreigners, on all levels. GM of logistics companies, warehouse workers, manaement, everyone was a foreigner. At the higher levels of management that changes, so.
In my town, all the immigrants worked at those places, and they lived 15 to a small house. Not surprisingly, no Canadian was willing to do those jobs.
While obviously not nearly as bad as the conditions in the article, it's certainly in a similar vein.
You could argue that a less organized de facto system of slavery exists for migrant workers in many other countries including the USA. Migrants roam in and work but really have no rights as they are undocumented. People can intimidate them or worse largely with impunity because who would bother investigating? Sure technically it’s illegal to abuse migrants but nobody’s watching.
Migrant work is something that really demands a coordinated international effort to reform.
Then you have Uyghur forced labor in China.
Slavery has not been abolished in anything but name.
Taking away someone Visa is a crime too.. and preventing them from leaving is a felony. And we prosecute people all the time for that.. human traffickers, for example.
To give a deliberately extreme example, Wikipedia says this about the Constitution of North Korea:
"""Citizens have the right to elect and be elected (Article 66), freedom of speech, the press, assembly, demonstration and association (Article 67), freedom of religious belief (Article 68), right to submit complaints and petitions (Article 69), right to work (Article 70), right to relaxation (Article 71), right to free medical care (Article 72), right to education (Article 73), freedom in scientific, literary and artistic pursuits (Article 74), freedom of residence and travel (Article 75) and inviolability of the person and home and privacy of correspondence (Article 79).""" - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_North_Korea#...
This means they will have to weight-in the deportation cost to them. So they have half-rights compared to someone who doesn't have to be concerned with that...
EDIT: wasn't picking on the US, just saying it's only part of their journey, and once they're in the US, lots of stuff goes unreported.
Additionally:
- In some cities ("sanctuary cities"), reporting a crime does not lead to deportation.
- They can also apply for amnesty if the conditions in their home country are that bad.
- Agencies accept anonymous reports. The immigrant doesnt even need to be working at the place at the time of the report.
So depending on the circumstances of the abuse, there may be no consequences to the illegal immigrant for reporting.
Solve the problem of employers hiring illegal immigrants, and the issue of these employers abusing the inherent power imbalance disappears as well.
When they say they want to punish immigration they mean punish immigrants.
For example, if the asylum seekers during Trump had been able to take advantage of their rights, they would not have had their children stolen from them.
You would take out a loan or lose a costly war and there were whole shopping districts like Keramikos (pottery shops area) in Athens where the slaves had shops and tried to earn their way out of slavery. Any similarities with present societal structures purely circumstancial ofcourse.
You can do whatever you want while you pay back loans today as long as you keep your contact information current. Just try and move without informing your lenders. That can be treated as a default. And if you can do whatever you want while maintaining a suitable income to make these sort of loan repayments, your experience is an outlier for all but a very small portion of Americans.
This could be run like a regular factory with bookkeeping techniques where labor cost was certainly not zero even though laborers were not getting paid nor free to do anything else but go back to picking cotton.
Labor cost could be reduced to a single line on a spreadsheet like any other business.
After the war with slaves now being paid and free to work elsewhere if they could manage it, this would be offset by the workers paying their own upkeep after the slaveowner had become the employer.
There would have been pressure to keep labor cost from escalating at all if possible.
So things could go forward with as little change in financial risk as could be.
A lot of companies today still have the same type structure as these places had after the war, which can be not much different than the structure they had before the war, and Wall Street is still in the same place it was before the war . . .
A big part of that was the increased productivity of freed laborers being compensated by an increased cost of reproduction.
Having said that, equating all slavery to chattel slavery and thus denying that other slavery-like arrangements have existed and continue to exist today is not only a misleadingly US-centric perspective, it also removes the ability to criticize and try to reform social arrangements that severely restrict freedom in subtler and more nuanced ways.
It is not dissimilar from undischargible debt. In fact, the historians and anthropologists writing about these societies have made the link themselves.
Kept well supplied with labour thanks to Kamala Harris and her draconian persecution of marijuana related “crimes”.
> “Extending 2-for-1 credits to all minimum custody inmates at this time would severely impact fire camp participation — a dangerous outcome while California is in the middle of a difficult fire season and severe drought,” lawyers from Harris’s office wrote in a filing.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/kamala-harris-of...
Similarly the middle class benefits from the lower working class wages that come from exploitation of illegal immigrants.
:(
[0]https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/11/u-s-private...
[1]https://corpaccountabilitylab.org/calblog/2020/8/5/private-c...
Prison slavery existed before chattel slavery was rerouted through the prison system.
Everyone who is benefiting lobbies far stricter laws and harsher sentences not for societies benefit but so their labor force can grow.
This slave labor is disproportionately taken from minorities and the poor who it is more acceptable to enslave. Mostly by patrolling areas which have lots of minorities and shaking them down in hopes of finding drugs. See the fact that black and white people do drugs at the same rate but white people are far less likely to be prosecuted.
In one case they actually caught 2 judges taking bribes from private detention to hand juvenile offenders maximum sentences. Effectively selling other people's kids.
Banning private prisons only removes a fraction of the incentive.
When the prisoners make the prison owners (public or private) more money than they cost, there is pressure to imprison more people and for longer. That can lead to pressure on the enforcers to look harder for infractions… but they might turn a blind eye to infractions by their friends and bosses[0]. Pretty soon, you get feudalism.
[0] Seven of the candidates in the last Tory leadership contest (including the winner) admitted to using drugs. The government has no plans to decriminalise recreational use of any of those substances: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/09/high-tories...
Do you see anything wrong with blacks and latinos being overrepresented?
Do you see anything wrong with being such a backwater that you still have the death penalty, not to mention BS like "three strikes" laws?
Do you see anything wrong with forced prison labor undercutting regular businesses in the same areas?
Completely correct. Undocumented workers compete with those on minimum wage. It’s those who are harmed most.
Really it is abusive to let anyone into that place.
The current immigration system makes that impossible for most workers without degrees and from outside of a few select countries.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2...
Unfortunately this source doesn't break out those who entered with degrees from those who attained degrees in the US. But I have to imagine that many of those are in the latter camp, meaning they entered without degrees. Either way, the majority don't have any degree according to this.
How does your claim square with these facts?
And they are slaves inside the US but in no other country that they are in except the US?
This logic does not square for me.
So what? I imagine the very last concern of people deciding whether to move to another country in hopes of improving their family's life is whether some random internet commenter understands them.
If you actually want to understand it, writing obstreperous and ignorant forum posts isn't going to change anything. Seek out their own voices and actually listen.
They did not call themselves slaves ... someone on HN did. The logic I cannot square is how someone can say these people are slaves with a straight face.
I don't care what they do with their lives, if they want to illegally enter a racist facist hellhole where half the country are white supremacists that is their choice. What I object to is saying they are slaves because they voluntarily make this choice.
You have to believe that being a free person anywhere else than US is worse than being a slave in US for this to make sense. And I'm not a slave, and not in US, and I would much rather be anywhere else than in US, so not sure what I'm missing.
> a vastly improved life and future for your children
In USA? A white supremacist and systemically racist hellhole where cops hunt people of color like dogs on the street and put the ones they don't kill into private slave prisons? How is it better than just not having that?
I would not even visit USA if someone paid me, and I feel sorry for the people who have to live there every day of their lives and if I had more means I would do more to help the people who live in the US find other options. Surely it is some crime against humanity to make people live in a place like that.