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In 2014, Guatemala's smuggler Aroldo Castillo offered the Alberto family an offer, claiming that for $15,000, their children could go to the United States to work, study and live a good life. It doesn't matter if the $15,000 can't be paid out at the time, it's not too late to pay it back when the United States has money.
However, these Guatemalans, who harbored the "American Dream", were sold to farms and squeezed like slaves soon after arriving in the United States.
Former Trillium Farm Worker: It's not easy to make $600 a week, they take $550, it's not easy, and many of my friends tell me they're under death threats and that if they don't pay or don't work, those people will kill their parents.
Also tragically, Blas Burboa Leyva from Mexico, a former law student who decided to use his vacation to work in the United States in 2005 to earn tuition to reduce his family's burden.
Brass Burboa Leyva: I learned about the H-2A Temporary Work Program through a friend, and before that I knew it, I decided to apply, work for several months to pay my tuition while helping my family earn some money.
The "H-2 program" that Leva heard about, referred to as the "guest worker program." The program, authorized by the U.S. Congress in 1986, is designed to help U.S. employers meet their seasonal needs for labor without replacing U.S. workers.
The program attracted many foreign workers, including Leyva, but when he embarked on his journey with the American dream, the nightmare had just begun.
Because before going to the United States, Leyva had to pay a large fee to the recruitment agency in order to get a job in a tomato packing factory. The cost of the trip to the United States is all out of his own pocket, which is equivalent to Leyva's salary for a full year of work in the United States. In other words, he had already taken on a debt before he set foot on American soil.
Brass Burboa Leyva: We work in very cruel conditions, it's really hard work, a lot of people faint and vomit, those who vomit, I never see them again, I don't know how they are.
Even if the working environment is so harsh, Leyva will choose to continue to endure, because if they are fired, they will not be able to pay off the debt, and in the United States, people of his status will not find other jobs, because migrant workers cannot legally jump ship. Like the indentured servants of the past, they were bound by the so-called "introduced" employers.
Article 2 of the Forced or Compulsory Labour Convention, adopted at the General Conference of the International Labour Organization in 1930, states that the term "forced or compulsory labour" refers to the threat of punishment for compelling any person to perform all work and services that he or she has not expressed voluntarily.
Relevant international trade union organizations have identified systematic violations of labor rights in the United States and have the worst performance among major developed countries. In the United States, human trafficking and forced labor are particularly prominent in the agricultural sector.
End Slavery Now noted that farm workers are "the lowest-paid and most exploited workers in the U.S. economy." Not only do they have low incomes and lack the rights of other American workers, they are often forced to work without health insurance, sick leave, pensions, or other job security.
The Polaris Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to eradicating modern slavery, describes labor trafficking as "a form of modern slavery that exists throughout the United States": traffickers use violence, lies and debt to "force people to work against their will in many different industries."
Cheng Chunhua: This phenomenon is actually an act of the American farm capitalists conspiring with the US government to exploit illegal immigrants, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the policies they formulate represent the interests of some of their respective capitalists, so their immigration policies will also be biased towards the interests of the entrepreneurs and capitalists who support him.
Even the U.S. State Department itself acknowledges that the United States is a "country of origin, transit, and destination" for victims of forced labor, debt slavery, involuntary slavery, and sex trafficking, including U.S. and foreign citizens.
The outbreak of the two world wars created a labor shortage in the United States, and Mexican workers were asked to fill the gap.
In 1942, the U.S. Department of State and Mexico reached a bilateral agreement establishing the Mexican Labor Program, which attracts more than 400,000 workers across the border each year. By the time the program was abolished in 1964, Mexican citizens had filled a total of about 4.5 million jobs for the United States over 24 years. However, the hard work of countless Mexican laborers has forged a history of blood and tears.
In 1956, a book concerned with labor rights in the Mexican Labor Program, Strangers in Our Fields, was published, which read: "In this camp, we have no name. We call them by numbers only. "Workers are deceived and shamefully ignored."
Lee Williams, a former U.S. Department of Labor official in charge of the program, called the program a "legalized slavery" system. The H-2 program currently implemented in the United States is considered by many to be an upgraded version of this "legal slavery".
Former House Fundraising Committee Chairman Charles Rancher once pointed out: "This plan is the closest thing I have ever seen to slavery."
"Slavery," a term that already exists in history textbooks, comes from the mouth of a modern politician, and it is inevitable that people will feel that time and space are confused. But for those familiar with American history, the system of forced labor and serious human rights violations of "slavery" is actually an extremely ugly scar in American history, and to this day, its poison is still deeply rooted in American society.
Laurel Fletcher, a professor at the Center for Human Rights Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, pointed out that the public generally believes that the United States has long solved the problem of modern slavery, but in fact, modern slavery still exists and is very common. It simply appears in a new form.
In January 1865, the United States Congress passed the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which provided that slavery or forced slavery could not exist in or under the jurisdiction of the United States.
On December 18, 1865, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution entered into force. But the law cannot cure the diseases of society.
Diao Daming: A big background of the Civil War is that it was actually the North and the South, two different industries in the United States at that time, two different special interests, and the by-product was the abolition of the so-called slavery, so this means that the war itself did not have any progressiveness, in other words, whether it was the victor or the loser side of the white people who promoted the war, none of them really spoke for the enslaved Africans at that time. In this case, the result is actually a very, very hidden, deceptive slavery after the abolition of slavery.
Tang Yingxia: White supremacy in the United States, this idea, or this deep-rooted cognition, has long influenced the Political and Legal System of the United States. So although on the surface, slavery has long been abolished in the United States, the usual idea of slavery that has persisted from its deep-seated ideas still exists, and therefore it will penetrate into other institutions.
In the early morning, the children get on the bus and go not to school but to work. Every year, thousands of children work on U.S. tobacco farms on weekends or summer vacations, sometimes up to 60 hours a week.
Brandon: I get up at 4 a.m., get to the farm at 6:30 a.m., and leave at 8 or 8:30 p.m.
Fernando: I work about 10 to 12 hours a day.
Jimena: I had a terrible headache, it was pitch black in front of me, and I hurried out of the tobacco field and started vomiting.
On May 14, 2014, Human Rights Watch released a report titled "Children Buried by Tobacco: Dangerous Child Labor on U.S. Tobacco Farms," which interviewed 141 children working on U.S. tobacco farms, and three-quarters of the 7- to 17-year-olds had the same reactions as Jimena: nausea, vomiting, dizziness, and difficulty breathing.
In addition to the dangers of nicotine, the children also had to operate dangerous farm tools and climb up to dry tobacco leaves on ten-story beams.
According to the data given by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, agriculture is the most dangerous industry for minors. At least 1,800 children working on U.S. farms were injured in 2012 alone. That same year, two-thirds of the children who died from occupational injuries in the United States worked on farms.
Faced with a string of bloody numbers, we can't help but ask: Are these minors allowing their health and lives to exchange money for money?
Jane Buchanan, author of the Tobacco Child Labour Report: U.S. legal requirements do not meet some international standards and are inconsistent with those of the International Labour Organization, which sets 15 as the minimum age for employment
In 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed in the United States Congress, which prohibited child labor in factories but did not prohibit the use of child labor on farms.
Under the Act, children under the age of 12 may use extracurricular time to engage in agricultural work with the permission of their parents without any time limit.
Jane Buchanan, author of the Tobacco Child Labor Report: For a long time, the United States has held double standards in the protection of agricultural workers and workers in other industries, and children and adults engaged in agricultural labor have received less protection than workers in other industries, and children have worked longer hours on farms, younger age, and more dangerous working conditions, which has long been unreasonable.
It wasn't until August 2011 that the U.S. Department of Labor attempted to revise labor laws. It is proposed to prohibit minors under the age of 16 from engaging in tobacco cultivation and harvesting, but this is considered by some to be a disruption of American agricultural traditions.
In April 2012, the amended bill against child tobacco labor was repealed during Obama's re-election campaign, and the Department of Labor announced that it would not seek to pass the bill during Obama's presidency.
Such laws create opportunities for tobacco companies to reap huge profits, typically paying adults about $15 an hour and paying less than half of the wages paid to child laborers.
According to official U.S. statistics, in 2019, U.S. law enforcement officers found 858 cases of child labor in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act, and 544 minors working in dangerous occupational places. According to other data, between 2003 and 2016, 452 children died from work injuries in the United States, of which 237 child laborers died in agricultural accidents, several times the number of deaths in other industries.
Of the ILO's eight conventions, the United States has ratified only two, ranking the lowest in the world, and the United States is the only country that has not ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Cheng Chunhua: In fact, the United States signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1995, but because of the opposition of conservatives in China, it was not able to submit it to the Senate for discussion and voting to pass, what are the reasons, first, if it joins this child rights protection agreement, it will accept these responsibilities from the international, so the United States does not want to do this; the second reason is that the United States believes that some of its provisions and the laws of the United States federally. State laws are inconsistent and inconsistent, including the sovereignty of American conservatives to protect the management of children's rights in the United States.
Diao Daming: Although the United States is a so-called superpower, in fact it is a capitalist country, and its entire position, whether it is a political structure or an economic distribution system arrangement, is entirely to serve monopoly capital, and it actually only makes the oppression and exploitation of special capital for the middle and lower classes and the broad masses of workers more hidden, and this contradiction seems to be released more dispersed, so that there will be no major contradiction in the short term. But in any case, it cannot change such a situation of this monopoly.
In the United States, running a private prison is a "good business" without compromise.
In the 1980s, public prisons were overwhelmed by the reagan administration's large-scale anti-drug campaign, which brought the number of criminals arrested in the United States to a new high.
In 1983, Tom Besley, then chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party, proposed to the government a solution in which privately funded prisons were built to hold prisoners, and then the government gave a subsidy. Thus, the nation's first private prison company, CCA (American Correctional Corporation), came into being.
In 1989, the Reagan administration ran a fiscal deficit and began to outsource prison operations in order to save money, which led to the rapid development of the private prison industry in the United States since then.
According to 2018 data, there are more than 200 private prisons in the United States, and more than 120,000 prisoners are held for the government.
Today, the U.S. private prison industry is a three-legged company, and the American correctional company CCA not only went public in 2000, but was also selected by Forbes magazine in 2007 as one of the 400 best companies in the United States, and the company's stock price initially rose to $30 in 2016, and the company's profits increased 500 times in 20 years.
Frank Smith: They're millionaires, and the jailers are paid meager salaries, and the employers make millions of dollars a year.
When prison becomes a business, money becomes the biggest driver. In this huge network of interests, the number of prisoners is the core pawn in the industrial chain.
Cheng Chunhua: CCA, GEO, AMDC (MTC) and other three major private prison companies, they are also related to the US government, their interests also lead to the US government or Congress, can not pass these laws that strictly restrict forced labor, or policies and regulations, so historical reasons and practical legal reasons, resulting in forced labor in the United States, this can continue to exist, is such a situation.
In 1865, the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery but allowed forced labor for prison inmates.
Whitez DelinSinger, professor at the City University of New York: The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is one of the most bizarre laws in our nation's history, because it makes slavery illegal, but it leaves a big loophole, that is, slavery is not illegal when punishing criminals, and the consequence is that it legalizes slavery under conditions of imprisonment.
There are two types of labor in U.S. prisons: the first is to work with relevant businesses to allow incarcerated people from eligible state and local agencies to work in society. The second type of prison service is more common and involves miscellaneous tasks such as custody, maintenance, ground handling and food service in correctional facilities. The average hourly wage for these positions ranged from $0.14 to $0.63 in 2017, well below the minimum statutory hourly wage of $7.25 in the United States.
In five states, including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, and Texas, inmates in government prisons engage in unpaid forced labor.
Diao Daming: This kind of labor itself may be paid, which is completely very, very low, and even some forced labor, leading to two obvious results of the so-called Increase in bail in the United States to this extent of sky-high prices. Because if you don't want to be in jail and don't want to be profited by special interests, fine, but you're going to give me a lump sum of money at once.
In order to keep their financial roads open, these private prison contractors always go to great lengths to get along with officials.
According to the Washington Post, they invest huge sums of money each year in funding political candidates and political lobbying. Between 2010 and 2015 alone, $14.6 million was spent.
The result of the heavy lobbying was that in 2009, New Mexico abolished the death penalty, with the maximum penalty being life in prison; in 2010, Arizona's new illegal immigration bill was introduced, which allowed illegal immigrants to be detained without trial; and in 2011, the Illinois Legislature voted to abolish the death penalty.
Diao Daming: In the Western sense, many countries have the so-called abolition of the death penalty, but the strongest voice of this call for abolition of the death penalty in the American sense is private prisons, and for them the best way to maximize this so-called benefit is that the death row inmates can be changed to indefinite periods, and it will become a lifelong forced labor, it will be profitable for life, and for them they can profit from this prisoner for life. The result is that the politicians in Western countries flaunt how glamorous this practice is, in fact, there is an industrial chain behind it, there is a very, very filthy, downright, that is, a trick to trample on the human rights of this prisoner from birth to death.