The 13th Amendment Has Been Abolished

Time to go off topic. It's time to talk about the modern day American slave trade. Slavery in New York City is alive and well. Take a look around - you don't realize it, but many of the people that you share the sidewalks with in the morning are slaves right out of the 19th century.

Farmers in Fujian Province in southern China, for example, are willing to pay "recruiters" as much as $80,000 to be smuggled into the United States. The ultimate destination is most often New York City (specifically Chinatown, Flushing, and southern Brooklyn) with its large Chinese population. The smuggling organizations are complex operations that recruit directly in the Chinese villages, follow the immigrant through the whole emigration process, provide forged immigration documents, and provide for the initial cache of food and shelter.

Once here, the immigrant is trapped within the insular Chinese immigrant community, has little knowledge of English and American ways, and is saddled with debt that is virtually impossible to pay. The slave master then assigns the immigrant to horrific working condition in dangerous sweatshops, or relegates them to 80 hour work weeks in a variety of menial positions. Many of the immigrants are assigned to work within the drug trade. Young girls are oftentimes forced into mandatory prostitution. Those who break down and eventually want to return to China are threatened with extortion, bodily injury, and even death.