Are illegal immigrants the "new slaves" in America?

Some treat them like slaves, and to squeeze the most work out of them for the least wages, subject them to slave-like working conditions. Which to me is a far greater moral violation than the illegal immigrant who came here to try to support his family.

Yes, those who hire people who are not elegible to work in the US are in violation of the law.
This being the case, the employer is not required to pay minimum wage, payroll taxes, benefits, etc. This is why employers hire them. They don’t necessarily work harder, they work cheaper and they are easy for an employer to ‘push around’ since they can be threatened with deportation. It’s not a matter of Americans being too lazy to work- I have done all three of the jobs you cite. Most of the Americans I know have worked in manual labor at some point, but the smart ones get out of it if they can, because you can’t live on the wage you make when you have to compete with illegal immigrants who will work for $2 an hour.
The lot of these immigrants is very often a hard one, and I feel for them. Stlll, I don’t think that they are the “new slaves” in America- their condition is more like that of serfdom, except without noblesse oblige.
The “new slaves” in America are prisoners. 1% of American adults are in prison, and many of these are treated exactly like slaves: held under lock and key, deprived of privacy, punished arbitrarily and harshly, and forced to work- sometimes for free. cf. the current prison riots in Georgia.
At least the immigrants get something for their labor. Even when prisoners get paid for work it’s often less than $1 per hour, and sometimes they have to pay for “room and board” out of that.
The number and condition of prisoners in the United States is a disgusting shame. So much for the “land of the free”.

People hiring illegal immigrants are doing so illegally so they are not paying taxes for them. They are not adhering to minimum wage laws.

I would not call them slaves, because they are not in captivity.

It is an interesting question and while I had not thought of it in those terms before, there is without a doubt a similarity.

The most important difference is of course the fact that the illegal can leave anytime they want.

I know people who hire illegal immigrants and it is because they cannot find locals who do the work regardless of pay rate. As you said, Americans do not seem to want to pick apples or do farm work. So orchard owners have to do something to get the crops in. And I am sure if there were no fruits available for consumers, there would be a great outcry about that.

If prisoners were indeed the new slaves then there would be a lot more of them out doing menial labor instead of lounging in their room under lock and key while I work to support, feed and house them. But that is another question.

@rooeytoo

A bit of light reading.

It’s easy enough to use the Internet to do a small amount of research before proclaiming an unfounded argument based on a logical fallacy.

There’s no way to ensure that illegal immigrants are paid fairly, because they have no one to regulate their work conditions. So no, they don’t pay taxes and they don’t have Social Security numbers because, as far as the government knows, they don’t live in the US.

Edit – after having read @augustlan‘s response, I realize I’m mistaken. Huh.

Having worked in the landscape field for many, many years, I have some insight about this. The vast majority of the immigrants I have known (both legal and illegal) have a Social Security card/number. How they obtain them, I don’t know, but they do have them. Therefore, the employers that hire them do pay them at least minimum wage (in my experience, more than minimum wage), and do withhold taxes from their pay. Since they often don’t file tax returns, they don’t get tax refunds on any overage, either.

@koanhead – sounds like a good thing to me, maybe they could pick the apples!

Equating Illegal Immigrants with slavery distastefully lessens the atrocity that was slavery. Illegal Immigrants come here willfully and intentionally. Slaves were kidnapped from their homes and transported here against their will. Immigrants get paid (albeit largely illegally), and can spend their wages however they wish. Slaves were given only the bare necessities to maintain their lives so they could continue to perform labor. Immigrants are free to find any job that will hire them. Slaves were quite literally owned by their “employer”, and would only be able to find a better “job” if they were sold to another slave owner.

Here’s a link and another link that bear out what @augustlan says. In order to get work, many, many illegal immigrants have false social security numbers, but that means they also pay taxes (just like you and me) but, unlike us, they don’t get to file a return. In other words, they subsidize us with their labor and are not getting “full pay,” just like slaves would.

Immigrants use very little public health care, too, and cannot legally obtain social security, so we don’t take care of them when they’re sick and old. Slaves, however, were often seen as an investment, and were given some sort of rudimentary health care, even though I doubt old slaves were seen as having much value still.

Now that “don’t ask,don’t tell” looks like it will be repealed, partially removing gay folks from the list of whipping-boys of the Right, the failure of the DREAM act would seem to push illegals front and center as a cause for “everything that’s wrong in the country” that the Right likes to trot out in poor economic times (to shift the blame from Right-favored causes of poor economic times such as deregulation, income disparity due to a less-progressive taxation policy, and education “reform”). In other words, the Right simultaneously blames illegals for all the ills, yet simultaneously needs them to pump up the economy with their cheap labor and other contributions. This reminds me a lot of the position of black folks in the South, both before and after emancipation.

It’s a cycle we’re all too familiar with in America. A need for cheap labor means we welcome the illegals (under the table, of course), and then politically-fueled fear means we tighten up the border, making the price of goods and services go up, leading to a need for cheap immigrant labor again. And ironically, a sealed border increases the number of illegals in the country since they can’t go home at the end of the season any more. Between that and the northern Mexican drug war and organizedcrime, it’s not clear that they can even live peacefully at homeanyway. In other words, they’re sort of stuck here like refugees sometimes.

Soon the whole, you could call them slave-like in that they can’t really move up, are stuck, perform manual and domestic labor, are paid crap and have no benefits, and are everyone’s favorite political target despite being necessary to the American way of life, but I think that’s where the similarities end. The slaves came over here shackled in boats, against their will, with no hope of a better life than the one they were just stolen from. For the illegal immigrants, sadly, what they get here is a life that they are running TO, because, piss-poor as it is, it’s better than what they can get at home, and it’s even a chance to send money home to help their families (if they can afford to do that anymore). Perhaps they’re more like indentured servants that came to America for a better life, without the chance of working off the servitude for real freedom.

I would like to thank @laureth for addressing all of that so thoroughly…

…When people talk about immigrations/illegal immigrations effect on on the U.S. job market, I think that they’re ignoring the much more significant economic impact of outsourcing on the job market.

Now, when we think about the fact that, a company can move their production to a country that is not subject to the protections of U.S. law…then it is much more accurate to consider whether those working in those factories are modern slaves.

Clothing outsourcing to Saipan, for example, allowed U.S. retailers to sell clothes as “Made in the U.S.A.” because of Saipan’s status. Because it is close to many east Asian countries, corporations paid recruiters to bring labor over. These recruiters charged a fee to the workers, which (if they were even legitimate recruiters) was taken out of the high pay they were promised with ridiculous interest rates and to cover additional sundry “costs.” Essentially, it was indentured servitude.

But you know…we get cheaper jeans right?

And I have to admit I buy the cheaper jeans. Most folks must or they wouldn’t be importing them.

I have to admire the Asian igenuity and ambition. There was a segment on the news here showing that immediately after the royal wedding was announced, I believe it was in Hong Kong, they were quickly making reproductions of the engagement ring and a dress that Kate wore in the official photograph. I guess too, it has to be taken into consideration what is considered a living wage in any geographic area and what the work ethic is in that location. That changes according to the economic climate in a country and what the government is willing to dole out to those who can’t or won’t work.

Alright just wanted to add NO. They aren’t the new slaves. Slaves were forced to work, beaten, miss treated and killed for insabordanience. Not just fired or deported. Yeah they work for five bucks an hour but that is their choice. They come to better their lives for themselves and their families. Just like the rest of us. Now I agree that employers should have them on the payroll so they pay taxes as well, but only in a perfect world. I have been to a packing field where the workers got paid five bucks an hour and a dollar per flat they pack. But this was one farmer. And trust me I harvested for 15 minutes and I can honestly say “F” that stuff. More power to them, but work on your citizenship.

Then my other comment was to the guy who said PRISONERS were slaves. Good for them. With their work out equipment, college education, libraries and tv privaledges they live better than some out here struggling during these times. Plus they enjoy being out of their small cell, getting a little light and getting more opportunities to kill eachother. I think they should have 24 hour lockdowns. This is prison not jails. Federal prisons. They get treated that way because

There is a small percentage of instances that have made the news where immigrants, both legal and illegal are made to work as slaves, but this is illegal in itself, and punishable by law.

The immigrant workers who choose to work for very low pay are not treated as slaves and can come and go at will. They are not taken away from their families, they do not have their children sold away, and they cannot legally be killed at a whim of their owner.

Their working conditions are very poor, and they are not paid minimum wage, and are exempt from the usual worker protections because they are undocumented.

they get free medical attention and education perks as well as other kinds of perks in some areas. Slaves get non of that. Slaves are worked until they are completely wrung out and die. They are replaced with other newer slaves and the cycle continues. Some will even argue that undocumented immigrants have constitutional rights and can have the ACLU file lawsuits on their behalf. I think the term “slaves” is a stretch.