May 20, 2007
Charges in LI case are part of a growing trend that needs to be addressed in the immigration debate
When "Nona" left Indonesia more than five years ago to work in the household of a wealthy Indian couple from Long Island, it must have seemed like a dream too good to be true. On a visa, she willingly traveled to the United States to take the job living in a mansion financed by a multimillion dollar perfume business, itself evidence of what immigrants can achieve in the United States.
This past week she was found by authorities hiding in a closet under a staircase in the couple's Muttontown mansion. She and fellow Indonesian worker "Samirah," who led police to her, had cowered in fear of another beating, another cut and other physical and emotional tortures allegedly used by Varsha Mahender Sabhnani, with her husband's knowledge, to ensure total submission by the women as they worked 21 hours a day. Samirah claimed that instead of the $300 a month promised her, only $100 was being sent back home to family members; it is unclear whether Nona got paid anything.
Is this merely a case of a sadistic employer, one who hardly needed to save a few hundred dollars a month? Or, as the prosecutors' claim, is it a case of slave trafficking more akin to the 2004 bust of another Long Island couple, José Ibañez and Mariluz Zavala, who held 69 Peruvian compatriots as indentured servants in houses in Amityville, Brentwood and Coram? A lawyer for the Sabhnanis said the case would prove to be "much more involved and complicated."
For the two women now in safety (they are identified only by first names in court documents) it hardly matters what we call their torture, only that they have escaped. In the end, however, how authorities understand and define this case will matter to everyone, from the severity of the penalties to the legal status of the victims.
Details are still emerging, but already this case has pushed lawmakers in Albany to agree on anti-trafficking legislation. And the widespread existence of such slavery, typically involving illegal migrants, also needs to inform the immigration debate now occurring in Congress.
The Senate's immigration reform bill simultaneously offers hope to those already here illegally through potential amnesty while adding more hurdles for those still waiting to enter.
This solution is designed to appease two very different agendas - on one side, a humanitarian desire to accommodate immigrants already here, and on the other side a desire to take control of the country's borders, largely to keep out terrorists. The effect is to create a speed trap of immigration reform that surely will lead to greater levels of indentured servitude and slavery.
By granting amnesty to 12 million immigrants, the bill supports the view of many around the world that once you get across the U.S. border, there's always a way to become legal. But people entering illegally become easy prey to the worst cases of abuse, including slavery.
This is a piece of the big picture that is rarely debated when we focus narrowly on the evildoers at the center of a trafficking ring or slave-holding operation.
Most illegal migrants view themselves as law-abiding heroes helping themselves, their families, their countries, U.S. employers and American consumers. Many of them do not view their decision to break immigration laws as a "real crime." But fear of being turned in can keep them in perpetual servitude.
Potential migrants around the world have correctly drawn the conclusion that most Americans, including President George W. Bush, do not consider it a serious crime to break U.S. immigration laws in order to work here.
At a minimum, we are a confused and conflicted country when it comes to this issue. We are much less confused about our willingness to hire the immigrants, even as we make their journey to get here more dangerous and legally precarious.
At the same time, the growth of a borderless global economy has led in many places to a local booming migration industry that exports migrants much the same way that countries export any other commodity.
Many regions and even some national governments offer a range of for-profit services that help facilitate migration abroad. This includes money lending, employment brokering, and transportation and communication services for the immigrants. None of these legal businesses and services could operate without the smuggling operations. The paradox is that it has become both easier and more dangerous than ever to sell your labor to the highest bidder.
People who are tempted, willingly though not gladly, to live in a legal limbo also are vulnerable to the more soul-crushing dark side of migrant smuggling, whether death by dehydration, drowning or suffocation en route or the increasing risk of enslavement at the end. Their willing participation also leads to some difficulty in establishing legally who is a victim in a trafficking case. (The legal distinction in U.S. law is that smugglers move people across the border, and traffickers enslave or abuse them once they are here.)
The essence of most con games is that the mark is lured to break a relatively minor law or social norm and is then told what the price will be to avoid going to jail or violence. Although the majority of migrant smugglers deliver on their promises, traffickers use this fact to threaten their captives.
They have two advantages over most con artists. First, the work of luring people into the minor crime of crossing a border illegally is already done for them; they just need to gain the mark's trust. Second, the immigration crime also conveniently isolates the mark from their social networks and home cultures, giving total control to the traffickers.
The 69 slaves held by the Zavalas found in 2004 were ostensibly being held with the ruse of paying off the debt they owed to the Zavalas for being willingly smuggled by them into the United States. Rather than physical violence, the Zavalas relied on credible threats to do harm to their families back home and financially ruin them. The biggest threat, however, was that the illegal immigrants would be turned in to police.
Because the migrants had colluded to break U.S. immigration and labor laws when they signed away their land back in Peru as collateral for the clandestine journey, it was hard for them to not believe that the danger of escaping was greater than the danger of staying.
The confidence games of immigration are multiple, of which only one leads to slavery for an unfortunate minority. It is more important than ever that immigration reform, and even the discussion of it, not lead to a misplaced confidence as tens of thousands are deciding if and how to take that job in America.
BY DAVID KYLE
David Kyle is associate professor of sociology at the University of California Davis and co-editor of "Global Human Smuggling: Comparative Perspectives."
