This reporting is better. Maybe the operation was even better, I would like to hope so. In the end most of the migrants will undoubtedly be deported, but perhaps without unnecessary trauma inflicted by the police?
23 arrested in human smuggling bust in NYC
Julian Cummings, 7 October 2010, CNN
New York — Federal officers on Thursday arrested 23 people suspected of smuggling up to 70 men from China to work in Chinese restaurants in and around New York City. “We allege that this was a for-profit smuggling scheme,” said Jim Hayes, Immigration and Custom Enforcement special agent in charge of the investigation. He told CNN that the men were brought into the United States by business owners and illegal recruiters, who would get families to pay a fee of up to $75,000 each.
“The employment agency would arrange for them to be brought into the United States and the restaurant owners would harbor them and transport them after engaging the employment agency to get the type of worker they desired,” he said. None of the illegal workers was arrested, Hayes said. “We’re working through that group of people to determine who were knowing participants, who may have been exploited, who may have desired to leave and weren’t allowed to leave,” he said.
The investigation found instances in which workers were paid as little as $3 an hour and were forced to live in sub-par living conditions in Connecticut, New Jersey and on New York’s Long Island, he said. “Many of these aliens were housed in squalid conditions and unsanitary conditions, certainly conditions they were not desiring to live in.” he said.
The ongoing eight-month investigation is part of a new initiative by the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to target employers of illegal aliens rather than the workers. “It’s different in that we are looking to eliminate the magnet that draws the workers as opposed to focusing on the employees themselves,” Hayes said.
The status of the workers remains uncertain. Some will be witnesses, which could lead to benefits for them, and some may face deportation. All of them, according to Hayes, did not get what they came to the United States for. “They believed they were coming over for the American Dream, but the fact of the matter is, whether their families paid it or not, that $75,000 is not something they are going to be able to pay off in their natural lifetime,” he said. “It’s certainly much, much less than they bargained for.”
Three additional suspects remain at large, according to a statement released Thursday afternoon by the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office.
– Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist
The wording is different since the victims are male manual workers instead of female sexual workers ;-(
To make this prototype for sex work raids media reports, the experience and notion has to change from sex as an intimate private experience (customer perspective) to e.g. a public sportive activity (service provider perspective).
This is not going to happen, as long as people value sexuality as the currency and life force to fuel their private relationships and build families as last resort of stability (jointly with institutions who are eager to prevent sexual and political anarchy).
Unless the construction of society and economy (monetary system) can not provide basic unconditional security to all people, this may be unlikely to change.
no, that’s not so – that the only reason this article is better is that it is not about sex. if you look on my blog at articles on raids against non-sexworking undocumented migrants you will see a very different treatment is common from what is in this article. sex is not the only problem, and claiming that sex work is uniquely stigmatised doesn’t help. many migrants are in low-prestige jobs but more important all undocumented workers are subject to very bad, rude, stigmatising treatment by the police. this particular article is quite different.
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The article does come from more of a human-rights perspective, which is impressive.
I am still sad they will get deported.
I am reminded of a young man I knew as a waiter in an Indian restaurant in a city where I used to live. He was from a tiny village in Nepal, and would come to work in the US for 3 months at a time. He lived in a small one-bedroom apartment with up to 6 others, and made about $4/hour cash (local minimum wage was about $6.25/hour then). He had to work 14 hours a day, 6 days a week. On the seventh day, I believe he got only half the day off. The owner treated him miserably (I used to cringe when I heard the way he spoke to him).
But he loved the opportunities this job gave him. He would work three months, then travel all over the world with the money he was able to save. He understood the situation wasn’t the best, but he wouldn’t have wanted to risk losing the job (and the opportunities it afforded him) by trying to change anything. I learned a lot from knowing him.