SPLC Report: 'Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States'

[Sapphire Blue]

From the Southern Poverty Law Center (http://www.splcenter.org)...

Close to Slavery

You may have read in today's New York Times that we are issuing a major report about the systematic exploitation of immigrants who come to the United States legally as temporary "guestworkers."

Called Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States, our report chronicles the way guestworkers are routinely cheated out of wages; forced to mortgage their futures to obtain low-wage, temporary jobs; virtually enslaved by employers who seize their documents; forced to live in squalid conditions; and denied medical benefits for injuries.

This is not what America's all about — and we must put an end to it.

With your help, we've been pressuring the Bush administration to stop the abuses, and we've forced major corporations to pay back wages to cheated workers and reform their practices. But there is still much work to be done.

Congress now has the opportunity to right this terrible wrong. As lawmakers debate immigration reform in the coming weeks, the danger is that they will expand the shameful guestworker system. We're working to ensure that it is either eliminated or radically overhauled to make it a fair program with strong, vigorously enforced worker protections.

Your support has been crucial to our efforts to inform the country of this moral outrage. The abuse of temporary foreign workers in America today is one of the major civil rights issues of our time. For too long, we've reaped the economic benefits of their labor but have ignored the incredible degree of abuse and exploitation they endure.

With your help, we will keep up our efforts. Please take a moment to read the executive summary of our new report, and when you're through, please forward this email to someone. We're counting on you to help us bring awareness of the problem to those in your community.

As a nation, we must address the many problems in our broken immigration system, but we cannot condone a program that systematically abuses and enslaves poor workers from other countries who are lured here by false promises.

On behalf of all those we serve, thank you for your important support of our work for justice.

Sincerely,

Morris Dees

From the executive summary...

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel recently put it this way: "This guestworker program's the closest thing I've ever seen to slavery."

http://www.splcenter.org/legal/guestreport/index.jsp?splcnewsletter=newsgen-031207

[Skidmore]

1. He's right.

This is a terrible injustice and Dems need to quit talking and start doing.

[Sapphire Blue]

3. Capitol toll-free numbers: 1-877-851-6437 or 1-800-828-0498; Please call.

[Ken Burch]

2. The words of Phil Ochs about this subject

BRACERO


Wade into the river, through the rippling shallow watter
Steal across the thirsty border, bracero
Come bring your hungry bodies to the golden fields of plenty
From a peso to a penny, bracero
Oh, Welcome to California
Where the friendly farmer will take care of you

Come labor for your mother, your father and your brother
For your sister and your lover, bracero
Come pick the fruit of yellow, break the flower from the berry
Purple grapes will fill your belly, bracero
Oh, Welcome to California
Where the friendly farmer will take care of you

And the sun will bite your body, as the dust will draw you thristy
While your muscles beg for mercy, bracero
In the shade of your sombrero, drop your sweat upon the soil
Like the fruit your youth can spoil, bracero
Oh, Welcome to California
Where the friendly farmer will take care of you

When the weary night embraces, sleep in shacks that could be cages
They will take it from your wages, bracero
Come sing about tomorrow with a jingle of the dollar
And forget your crooked collar, bracero
Oh, Welcome to California
Where the friendly farmer will take care of you

And the local men are lazy, and they make too much of trouble
Besides we'd have to pay the double, bracero
But if you feel you're fallin', if you find the pace is killing
There are others who are willing, bracero
Oh, Welcome to California
Where the friendly farmer will take care of you

(Copyright 1965, Barricade Music. All Rights Reserved)

[northofdenali]

4. Morris Dees has been a hero of mine since the SPLC

began in 1971. They've been in the forefront of civil rights, workers rights, womens rights, gay rights, immigration rights since get-go; not bad for an organization that started out in a little storefront in Montgomery.

K&R

[Sapphire Blue]

6. A righteous man... and a righteous organization!

:hi: Thank you for the K&R, northofdenali.

[northofdenali]

8. No prob, Sapphire -

They've also started a "Wall of Tolerance" http://www.splcenter.org/crm/wall.jsp and I'm happy to say I'm on it!!

:hug:

[wryter2000]

21. They are awesome

I don't have much $$$ to donate any longer, but the ACLU, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and SPLC always get something from me.

[Sydnie]

5. K&R n/t

[Sapphire Blue]

7. Thanks, Sydnie!

:hi: :hug:

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

9. Thanks for posting this SB. The SPLC works for the people..of all colors.

Even if they don't have the "proper papers".

[Sapphire Blue]

10. You're welcome, Tierra_y_Libertad. I wish more people cared about this!

[UTUSN]

11. I've already Recommended this thread. Is there a #5 somewhere out there?!!1 n/t

[Sapphire Blue]

13. Thank you, UTUSN! And the #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, and #12!!!

:hi: :hug:

[roody]

12. great organization!

[Sapphire Blue]

14. I hope you've had a chance to read through the report & will call your Rep & Senators @

... the toll free numbers: 1-877-851-6437 or 1-800-828-0498

[Tom Joad]

15. When me and my family came from oklahoma, we was treated real bad... this is worse.

Now if we let them divide us, we will surely fail. We gotta remember, we is one great soul... just as Rev. Jim Casy said.

I'll be all around in the dark - I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be there in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be there in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they built - I'll be there, too.

So let's work together to stop this anti-immigrant shit, comin from both the Republicans and all too often dems as well. We gotta work together to fight for our rights! someday, the powers that be will fear us....

the armies of bitterness will all be going the same way. And they'll all walk together, and there'll be a dead terror from it.

[Sapphire Blue]

20. "We gotta remember, we is one great soul"

Please, God, let us remember!

[sandnsea]

16. Modeled after Tom Delay's Mariana "petri dish"

"Moved by the sworn testimony of U.S. officials and human-rights advocates that the 91 percent of the workforce who were immigrants -- from China, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh -- were being paid barely half the U.S. minimum hourly wage and were forced to live behind barbed wire in squalid shacks minus plumbing, work 12 hours a day, often seven days a week, without any of the legal protections U.S. workers are guaranteed, Murkowski wrote a bill to extend the protection of U.S. labor and minimum-wage laws to the workers in the U.S. territory of the Northern Marianas...

"But one man primarily stopped the U.S. House from even considering that worker-reform bill: then-House Republican Whip Tom DeLay...

"Later, DeLay would tell The Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin that the low-wage, anti-union conditions of the Marianas constituted "a perfect petri dish of capitalism. It's like my Galapagos Island."

http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/05/09/real.delay/

[SoCalDem]

17. In a way it's almost WORSE.. Here's why.

When someone owned slaves, he was accepting responsibility for them. Even though it was shoddy and substandard, they were provided housing and food. They were an asset to the plantation owner who bought them

The "guestworkers" are shadow-people.. people with no accounting for. Most are "off the books"..worked as long as they can , and then threatened with exposure if they don't disappear.

My guess is that there is not even any paperwork. Slavery has been exposed for the evil it was, partly because of the meticulous records that were kept.

"Guestworkers" are claimed by no one..their very existence is denied by all. Even the "guestworker" denies his/her own exixtence by living in the shadows..playing cat&mouse with the authorities.

[Elwood P Dowd]

22. I've been saying that for years and have posted it here many times.

It really is much cheaper than slavery. Free trade, globalism, outsourcing, insourcing, etc. has given us something much worse than slavery, yet most Americans are totally oblivious to it. Some DU posters even call you a racist when you oppose the policies that created this problem.

[Solly Mack]

18. There have been stories coming out for years about this

Gross abuses, threats, stolen wages...all of it.

I saw a show on it a few years back...about "workers" in Florida and Georgia.

The UN defines a migrant worker as "a person who is to be engaged, is engaged or has been engaged in a remunerated activity in a State of which he or she is not a national."

and as you can well imagine, there is a Convention for the treatment of migrant workers...and as you can also well imagine, the US has not ratified it

immigrants,both legal and illegal, do migrant work in the US

migrant workers have a long history of being abused in America...that hasn't changed

and Shame isn't a strong enough word to describe it

[area51]

19. healthcare

It's also a form of slavery to have access to healthcare tied to one's job.

[Sapphire Blue]

23. ..

:kick: