Life Interrupted

Front matter

Denise Brennan

Life Interrupted

TRAFFICKING into FORCED LABOR in the UNITED STATES

CHAPTER 5. Laboring after Forced Labor / 163 CLOSING COMMENTS / 185

APPENDIX. Ideas and Resources for Action / 193 NOTES/199 REFERENCES / 243 INDEX| 275

Acknowledgments

How can I meaningfully thank so many who have been remarkably generous throughout the years of this project —for their time, insights, wisdom, personal stories, trust, and friendship? These words seem all the more inadequate since I cannot thank by name those who have courageously shared their stories. I am deeply grateful for the trust they put in me and for their commitment to helping others in similar situations of exploitation.

There were two pivotal launch points of this project: when Ann Jordan invited me to join an antitrafficking working group around the time the TVPA was being drafted and when I met Florrie Burke, through Ann. Both women have vouched for me and reached into their Rolodexes to introduce me to the antitrafficking community. I never would have met the extraordinary individuals I have had the privilege of getting to know without their help. Thank you, Ann and Florrie.

The Kalmanovitiz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor has been an intellectual and activist home for me at Georgetown, where faculty, staff, and students have taught me on many levels about the struggle to ensure dignified and fair work for all workers. Katie Corrigan, Jennifer Luff, and Joe McCartin have been outstanding supporters whose deep and wide knowledge has been an apprenticeship in all things labor. The Americas Initiative at Georgetown has been another home for me over the years, where colleagues read part of the book when I first started the research, and then again as I finished writing it. Thanks in particular to Caetlin Benson-Allott, Katie Benton-Cohen, Brian Hochman, Michael Kazin, Eric Langer, Adam Lifshey, Chandra Manning, Bryan McCann, Samantha Pinto, and John Tutino for their detailed suggestions. The Washington, D.C. Labor History Group offered me a place at their learned table, where Cindy Hahamovitch and Jennifer Luff have built a lively exchange. I am lucky to continue to learn as part of a supportive community of faculty and students in the Department of Anthropology at Georgetown. Thanks to Georgetown colleagues who made specific suggestions for the book: Fida Adely, Rochelle Davis, Gerry Mara, Joanne Rappaport, Mark Sicoli, and Susan Terrio.

In the final stages of the book, experts on trafficking — practitioners and scholars—threw themselves into the manuscript and provided sharp comments on a tight deadline. Martina Vandenberg crafted some of the fiercest edits I have ever been gifted. Janie Chuang and Ann Jordan read every last word of the book and talked me through their insights page by page. Elizabeth Bernstein also shared her wisdom on every chapter pushing me in new and necessary directions. Carole Vance, Darby Hickey, and Penny Saunders likewise saw things I did not. Florrie Burke and Ileana Fohr carefully commented on my take on the social service world’s practices and challenges. I am deeply indebted to all these talented colleagues who, committed to justice on these issues, generously and enthusiastically devoted a great deal of their time to this project.

My thinking on this book began to take shape at the School of Advanced x / Acknowledgments

Research in Santa Fe. Thanks to James Brooks for hosting a whip-smart group of scholars whom Carole Vance so wisely assembled. The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars offered a place to think and to write. Many thanks to Sara Friedman, Pardis Mahdavi, Sonya Michel, and Flip Strum for their colleagueship. Three meetings of a roundtable on trafficking that brought together legal scholars and ethnographers have provided tremendous food for thought. Working closely with Janie Chuang and Janet Halley on organizing two of these roundtables (at American University’s Washington College of Law and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study) and on the launch of a website — http://traffickingroundtable.org/— has been a true joy. Over the years I also have learned from the questions posed and answered by a fiercely intelligent group of antitrafficking, migrants’ rights, and sex workers’ rights scholars and activists: Elizabeth Bernstein, Sealing Cheng, Nicole Constable, Kerwin Kaye, Ali Miller, Penny Saunders, Svati Shah, and Carole Vance.

I have been fortunate to test ideas and benefit from thought-provoking feedback while giving lectures at the following institutions: American University’s Washington College of Law, Butler University, Brown University, Cornell Law School, City College Center for Worker Education, George Washington University, Harvard University, Muhlenberg College, Pomona College, University of California (Irvine), University of California (Los Angeles), University of California (Santa Barbara), University of New England, University of Pennsylvania Law School, University of Pittsburgh, University of Virginia, and Yale University. I also am grateful to the organizers of the Freedom Network for inviting me to participate and to share my research at their annual conferences over the years.

University life is wonderfully collaborative, and I have been lucky to work closely with many talented and dedicated students. Beth Hallowell helped me jumpstart this project as we put What’s Love Got to Do with It? to bed. Jessica Angulo-Duarte, Lindsay Du Bois, Jessica Forrest, Ashwini Jaisingh, Keely Schneider (who spent a summer doing research full time), and, most recently, Katie Farias and Whitney Pratt have been committed — and creative—research assistants at Georgetown. Kara Coughlin, Alex Fries, and Jia Zhao provided detailed research assistance at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Alex, a California native, also helped me navigate Los Angeles and nearby communities while doing field research. James Benton provided careful cite checking.

Writer friends have offered both comradeship and writing advice.

Acknowledgments / xi

Maureen Corrigan and Barbara Feinman-Todd are always an inspiration. The immensely talented Marybeth McMahon read every word with her skilled editor’s pen and a friend’s unflagging support. A careful and patient reader, my husband, Doug Reed, has read through this book in its various forms many times. My brother Paul Brennan and dear friend Cindy Gordon offered their takes on the book as well.

I am grateful for the generous financial support from the following foundations: The American Association of University Women, The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. And, my home institution, Georgetown University, has supported the research and writing with Summer Academic Grants, a senior Faculty Fellowship, and a Center for Democracy and the Third Sector Faculty Fellowship.

It has been a pleasure working with Valerie Millholland and Gisela Fosado at Duke University Press. Valerie took a chance on my dissertation many years ago, for which I am deeply grateful. Gisela has shared many terrific insights and suggestions and has been enthusiastically dedicated to this book project. Nicole Constable and an anonymous reviewer read the book with great care and skill. Their astute comments helped shape the book into its present form. Thanks.

While researching and writing this book, my amazingly loving and inquisitive kids, Emily and James, grew. Also during this time my father, Arthur Brennan, who first introduced me to the labor movement by suggesting I write on the aFt-cio for a social studies assignment, passed away. My mother, Mary Brennan, although changed by cognitive loss, remains a loving supporter of anything I take on. It is they and my grandparents who taught me about the varied struggles that “working people” face, the unpredictable vagaries of economic security, and the constancy of a family’s love.

Spending time with the extraordinary individuals I have been so lucky to meet has changed me. It brought me into the kitchens and living rooms of individuals who model a kind of grace, kindness, and patience — and toughness, focus, and determination — that continues to impress and inspire. I truly cannot understand what they have endured. Since I met them during a time of transition between acute insecurity and firmer footing, I try here to do justice to how they made it through. And how they, courageous, steadfast, and hopeful, look ahead.

xii / Acknowledgments

Introduction

Maria loves to sing. Her karaoke machine sits in the middle of her basement apartment in Queens. She fires it up when she has friends over, and they cook and sing. She also sings her favorite songs when she is home alone. She has sung songs into my voice mail on my cell phone. It’s no surprise, then, that she describes her heartache for her son in the Philippines with the words to a song about being five hundred miles away. She left him in the care of her sister over twenty years ago, when she first traveled overseas for work. The United States is the third foreign country she has worked in. She never thought she would be gone this long. On the eve of preparing to finally see her son she turns to singing: “I don’t know what I will say when I see him. What can I say? Hello, how are you, you are my son. I don’t know what I will do. That’s my situation. He is over five hundred miles away. So when I come home, I open my Magic Microphone and read the lyrics and sing and forget for a while.”

Maria also expressed through song her love—and grief—for Felicia, her best friend in the United States. Meeting through a Filipina domestic workers’ organization in New York, they became fast friends. As one another’s surrogate family in this country, they looked out for each other. When Felicia had an accident and broke both her knees, Maria stopped by every day after work to check on her, to help her bathe, and to cook. It was Maria, not Felicia’s husband, who nursed her back to health. Felicia loved Maria immensely, explaining over plates of barbecued meats and glasses of creamy halo-halo shakes, “Maria is my best friend. She took care of me when I could not do much. She is a real friend.” Maria was also there for

Figure I.1. Karaoke machine in Maria’s living room.

Photograph by author.

Felicia when she learned that her beloved friend was dying of cancer and had only weeks to live. Maria nursed her as she had before, and it was she who was by Felicia’s side in the hospital as she died. “I kissed her and held her hand and told her, ‘I will always be with you.” In those last days in the hospital, Maria tried to comfort her friend by singing. “I sang a lot of songs. I sang and sang and she would smile.”

MITT

Carmen pointed to the Long Island Rail Road tracks underneath the small bridge we were walking on. She brought me there because of the view: “It reminds me of a Chilean song about a young boy about to go on a big adventure. It makes me feel melancholic: happy, but also a bit sad.” We were walking near the house she shared with her boyfriend in Queens, where she had been hiding after being physically attacked by a coworker at a housekeeping job in a midtown hotel. “Sometimes I feel like people are staring at me. Like they are going to eat me.” I did not think that she would agree to go out for dessert and coffee, but without skipping a beat she said, “Sure, but let’s go to Manhattan!” Back in her house, as she zipped from her bedroom to put on eyeliner, eye shadow, and red lipstick, she talked about a new start. She had been interviewing for jobs, and she pointed to her review books for the GED. As she brushed her long thick black hair, she vowed that she was going

Figure I.2. Train tracks near Carmen’s house. Photograph by author.

to cut it. “I want a new look. I want to feel like I did when I wore a wig as Cleopatra last year for Halloween. I want a fresh start.”

MITT

Flo carried a large white envelope to the afternoon potluck at a domestic workers’ organization in the Washington, D.C., area. The theme of the day was “poetry.” During the workshop she helped fellow participants who were not as fluent as she with the English language. Following the dramatic tone set bya social worker leading the workshop, Flo acted out the poem she and another participant had written about the sun. The other women cheered when she was done. But she had more to share. Out of the white envelope she pulled an orange spiral notebook. She had written a poem the night before in anticipation of this day. This poem, about enjoying life and realizing how lucky she is, was an even bigger hit.

MITT

Eva was carrying a book in English on dreams. She regularly goes to the library in her Bronx neighborhood to get books in English for herself and her son and explains that she looks up words she doesn’t know in an online dictionary. Since she is in school to be a nursing assistant, she makes a routine for them both to study: “After school, it is rest, snack, play, homework. We don’t watch television. There is no time. Last night I was up to 1:30 in the morning researching white blood cells.” Since her own schooling was cut short when she was a young girl in Mexico, she wants her son to be able to focus on school while he is young. “My son picked a flower for me. He told me, ‘One day I'll buy you one when I work.’ I told him not to worry about work and to only think about school. I told him, “You have years of studying ahead of you. Listen to your teachers.”

IlIll

I open this book about trafficking into forced labor with these snapshots of Maria’s, Carmen’s, Flo’s, and Eva's lives precisely because these stories have no clear connection to their time in forced labor. Rather they recount ordinary moments of composing lives in the United States. Like all newcomers, they have had to take risks, step into new relationships, and try on new experiences. The United States was uncharted territory for them; three of the women had no prior ties to the country through family or friends.’ Building a new life in a new country is difficult in the best of circumstances. What if one’s introduction to the United States is through forced labor? How individuals who were trafficked into forced labor set up their households, care for their children (whether in the United States or at a distance), find decent work, take classes, make friends, fall in love, and spend their free time is the focus of this book. While the media often has highlighted the spectacular aspects of trafficking, supplying a voyeuristic catalogue of abuse and dramatic stories of escape or rescue, this book picks up where these sensationalistic accounts leave off. Life after forced labor is a series of private daily struggles and successes, usually not the stuff of public press conferences and headline-grabbing news. This book dwells on the ordinary tasks and chores of resettlement in the United States, what I call everyday lifework. It recounts the ways formerly trafficked persons spend their days and nights, far from the media spotlight, quietly reclaiming their lives and making the United States their home.

The book operates on two levels: it examines the lived experience of migrating internationally for work, and it analyzes the effects of immigration policies —which may not have an ostensible connection to trafficking— on efforts to prevent trafficking into forced labor and assist trafficked persons. Both the focus on migrants’ lives and the policy analysis grow out of years of anthropological fieldwork, along with migrants’ and workers’ rights advocacy. In this book, I introduce readers to real people, not mythologized versions of “trafficked persons,” and call attention to the relationship between anti-immigrant policies and the pervasive exploitation of migrant workers. Individuals designated “trafficked” are just one part—a small part—of a much larger story of everyday exploitation of migrant laborers in the United States. Trafficking into forced labor is on the extreme end of a continuum of abuse of migrant workers.” A range of exploitation thrives without legal protections for all workers regardless of their immigration status. When workers fear reporting exploitation, employers can exploit with impunity. Widespread migrant labor abuse —including trafficking—is the result of robust demand for low-wage workers, the absence of federal immigration reform, ineffective labor laws, and migrants’ fears of detection, detention, and deportation.

Although this is a book about individuals who suffered exploitation that was severe enough to qualify as trafficking, their experiences and insights are set within this larger political backdrop of everyday exploitation of migrant workers. My main analytical frame highlights migrant workers’ vulnerability to abuse — both workers who are undocumented and those who have temporary work visas.’ There is a huge gap between the paltry number of special visas (T visas) that the U.S. government has issued to severely exploited migrants to remain in the United States—under four thousand — and the millions of migrants who work in abusive conditions that may not be abusive enough to qualify as trafficking.* This number is particularly low in light of the U.S. government’s estimate that 14,500 to 17,500 persons are in situations of severe exploitation in the United States.° While news headlines scream about “modern-day slavery” all around us and organizations fundraise on trafficked persons’ behalf, this media attention and fundraising is fantastically disproportionate to the small number of individuals assisted as well as the vast number of migrant workers left to continue working in vulnerable and dangerous situations.®

Despite the media fascination and fundraising frenzy, formerly trafficked persons are largely on their own after initial government assistance. There is a striking disconnect between the splashy media coverage about trafficking, nonprofit organizations’ emotional fundraising appeals, celebrity public service announcements, and the banality and poverty of formerly trafficked persons’ actual day-to-day lives. Usually in the United States alone without family or any other contacts, they struggle to establish economic security and a support network. Most do not know—and often never meet— anyone else with a trafficking designation. And, they are not allowed to travel outside the United States while their applications for trafficking visas (T visas) —and then for green cards—are pending. A physician who cares for patients who had been in forced labor observes that “they are not quite free” since they start new lives in the United States with no money, family, or friends and strict limits on their mobility. Chronic financial insecurity characterizes formerly trafficked persons’ lives in the United States not only in the short term but also for years into resettlement. Life after forced labor in the United States is life on the margins.

What Is Trafficking into Forced Labor?

Trafficking into forced labor is migration gone awry.’ Individuals undertake migration strategies hoping that the crossing will be safe, they will pay off their debts to those facilitating the crossing, and that they will have better economic opportunities than they currently have. But once migrants cross borders, many lose the support of their home community and the protections their citizenship may offer them. Agreed-upon travel arrangements can fall apart. Relying on someone else to hold up his or her end of a bargain is risky. Although migrants assess risk and payoff, their migration calculation often stems as well from emotion and dreams.’ The reasons some individuals get on the road elude easy mapping. Motivations for migrants’ dreams of new and better lives slip through and between researchers’ neat categorizations and theories. So do some migrants’ embrace of risk-filled travel plans. And, as many attorneys emphasize, not all of their trafficking clients’ plans were inherently risky; some had entered the United States legally with temporary work visas.

Many capitalize on migrants’ dreams: States that rely on remittances from citizenry working abroad in lieu of supplying a social safety net; recruitment agencies charging would-be migrants exorbitant fees; corrupt police officers and border guards; and unscrupulous employers. All these actors make trafficking into forced labor possible. While one person, or several persons, ultimately may be singled out as the “trafficker” or “traffickers” at the end of this chain, these other actors and forms of corruption create the conditions under which forced labor occurs.”° This book explores what happens when individuals lose control of their border crossing, It is based on conversations I have had since 2004 with individuals whose strategies of migration to enter the United States went terribly wrong. I recount stories of individuals who ended up in forced labor in a variety of industries in cities and towns throughout the United States. Their stories of life before, during, and after forced labor provide insight into the origins and maintenance of the power relationships that undergird trafficking into forced labor. Before their experiences in forced labor begin, potential migrants may reinforce existing inequalities, particularly class hierarchies, as they sign on—and sometimes pay exorbitant fees — to travel for work. They do so with few or no assurances that recruiters, travel brokers, and employers will stick to their end of the agreement. These global workers, often from marginalized social classes, have little control over the location of work, working conditions, and pay. If they want to work in an economy outside their home country, they have to comply —even if with great reservations —to the terms of travel and work set by others.”

Terminology: Trafficking, Modern-Day Slavery, Forced Labor

As eager migrants set out to find work outside of their own countries’ borders, the word trafficking obscures what is going on; the twin pillars underpinning trafficking into forced labor in the United States are abuses surrounding migration and labor. The desire, and sometimes desperation to migrate for work and the kinds of jobs available for workers in poorly regulated or unregulated labor sectors produce a perfect storm of worker exploitation —a global regime of worker exploitation. Migrant workers the world over are central to local economies but enjoy few protections from abusive employers or are too intimidated to exercise them.” They enter new, unfamiliar labor markets in new, unfamiliar countries and may not be knowledgeable about their basic rights. Their undocumented status—or temporary work visas—ensure that they will remain quiet about these abuses. They may not have any place to turn—or fear doing so. Their employers bank on this fear and sometimes go to great lengths to cultivate it. Since there also may be an existing range of exploitative labor practices in these work sites, extreme abuse may go undetected by coworkers also experiencing exploitation.

The term modern-day slavery is also a flawed way to describe forced labor in the United States." Slavery is not the law of the land. It is not protected by a legal framework that is based on race, and no one is born into a race-based enslaved status. No human being is legally defined as property that can be bought and sold. Nor do individuals expect to be sold. Under chattel slavery, individuals of African ancestry knew that they or a family member could be sold at any moment. In this sense, although enslaved individuals lived with chronic uncertainty, they knew what was ahead: they faced a lifetime of being bought and sold. The historian Walter Johnson writes that waiting to be sold “suffused every moment of the present with the fear of an unknown future, the heart-rending pain of losing loved ones to the traders, loss and survival in the shadow of the slave market.” 1 Enslaved individuals also knew that certain destinations, such as the Deep South, meant a death sentence. Johnson quotes Lewis Clarke, who had been enslaved: “Why do slaves dread so bad to go to the South—to Mississippi or Louisiana? Because they know slaves are driven very hard there, and worked to death in a few years.” 16

In contrast, individuals in forced labor in the United States today are surprised to find themselves without control over their lives. They may not know what is ahead for them, but they know that employers may not lawfully prevent them from quitting. They know that their freedom does not have to be bought and declared through legal documents. Francisco, in his early twenties, jumped out of his abuser’s van while they were parked at a gas station in California. He ran directly to police officers he had spotted. Without documentation to work and live in the United States, he expected that running to law enforcement would mean his deportation (he ended up qualifying for a T visa), but he had never expected to be held by an employer against his will. He explains his calculus: “I did not care if they arrested me and sent me back to Mexico. I had to get away.”

Today’s traffickers in people do not have the law on their side, nor do they have the assistance of slave patrols, fugitive slave laws, and courts.” They must be discreet about their coercive extraction of uncompensated labor.’ Women who were in forced domestic labor, for example, relate that their abusers told them to stay out of sight—usually in upstairs rooms or in the basement— when their employers entertained guests. Beatrice, who had been trafficked into forced domestic labor as a teenager, suspected a young woman was in a similar situation when she met her at a party Beatrice attended. The young woman did not leave the kitchen for the duration of the party and seemed to try to make herself unnoticeable. Beatrice said, “I saw myself in her. She was afraid. She was hesitant to answer any of my questions. I told her she did not have to stay there.” Beatrice reached out to her and gave her the name of her attorney and the domestic workers’ rights organization that had helped her. She also followed up with phone calls. (The young woman eventually decided to go back home to Africa.)

With exploitation of low-wage migrants pervasive in the current labor system in the United States, this country’s experience with sweatshops at the turn of the twentieth century is a more fitting historical reference than chattel slavery. Today many migrants labor in modern-day sweatshops where employers get away with paying poverty wages under lousy conditions because they know that their workers fear detection and deportation, or need their sponsorship for a temporary work visa.’? Workers’ debts to recruiters, smugglers, and family members back home also keep them working without complaint.” In some cases, such as in forestry work, which only lasts around three months and pays poverty wages, workers often leave work contracts with greater debts than before ever working.” Exploitative employers leverage workers’ fear and debt burden by threatening to turn them over to law enforcement. Not paying agreed-upon wages, or not paying wages at all, is also commonplace in these environments where threat and fear reign. Legal scholar Jennifer Gordon writes about a kind of “super exploitation” that happens to most low-wage migrant workers who, at some point, are cheated out of their wages in what she calls “everyday sweatshops.” Still, meager wages— even no wages—do not guarantee an exploited worker a “trafficking” designation.”? Routine forms of wage theft and intimidation are simply part of doing business in places where migrants labor.** Sweating labor—in agricultural fields, restaurant kitchens, factory floors, construction sites, brothels, and people’s homes— occurs every day. Contrary to sensationalistic claims that slavery is all around us, a more mundane and politically thorny reality is that exploited migrant labor undergirds parts of the U.S. economy. Certain industries, such as agriculture, rely on paying low wages as well as employing seasonal laborers. If these workers want to be rehired, they have many incentives to stay quiet about their exploitation.

The language I have chosen to use throughout the book therefore pivots on issues related to labor. No one term accommodates a wide variety of individuals and experiences in forced labor. In fact, T visa recipients may have little in common other than their U.S. government designation as “trafficked.” In order to emphasize that trafficking is about labor exploitation, I write about trafficking into forced labor. When I write of trafficking, I am specifically referring to the legal category created through the passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) in 2000 and a set of accompanying legal rights. While U.S. government documents often refer to trafficked persons as victims, social workers, trauma specialists, and medical doctors use the term survivors. Most formerly trafficked persons use vague, generalized phrases such as “my situation” or “back when I was with that woman” or “when I was with that man” to describe their time in forced labor.” The language of trafficking also has been widely criticized by social service providers. “I don’t like the term trafficking,” explains a physician based in California. “Instead, I want a term that captures that this is someone who has lost autonomy, been exploited, and abused.” Concerned as well about the much larger population of exploited migrant workers who have been left out of any form of legal relief, she emphasizes that she also “would include twenty guys sleeping in a van in a field within this definition.” Labor protections and immigration relief thus are at the heart of larger discussions about this wider circle of exploited individuals who do not qualify for any trafficking benefits but live and work in abusive conditions nonetheless.

Since a trafficking designation by the U.S. government confers benefits and rights—and obligations—I refer to individuals whom the government has determined qualify for T visas as “formerly trafficked persons” and “T visa recipients.” With the first group of T visa recipients — like Maria and Carmen—finally having received their green cards, I realize that T visa recipients is a flawed term since it captures only a particular time during the legal process leading to permanent settlement in the United States. I continue to use the term, however, since it is a critical first legal step to living and working permanently in the United States. Social workers and attorneys at organizations involved in the resettlement of formerly trafficked persons consequently focus much of their energies on securing T visas for their clients. The first group of T visa recipients —pioneers like Maria and Carmen who navigated this legal regime — waited considerably longer than applicants do today. It is primarily these first trafficking clients with whom I have spent time. Their prolonged wait first for T visas and then for green cards profoundly shaped their resettlement in the United States.