Posted on 04/10/2008 10:08:04 AM PDT by Lusis
Here's an arresting allegation: More slaves are now imported (though the current word for this is trafficked) into the United States annually than were imported in an average year during the American colonial era.
That is one of the talking points used lately by the author of an arresting new book on global slavery, "A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery," by E. Benjamin Skinner.
In fact, of course, at the height of the legal slave trade in the 19th century, many more African slaves were "trafficked" to the United States than are arriving now, but globally there may be more people in slavery than ever. Still, it comes as a shock to read Skinner's accounts of the people - the U.S. State Department estimates 600,000 to 800,000 brought across international borders each year - forced to work around the world under threat of violence for no pay.
In the United States, the best estimates indicate that 40,000 to 50,000 people are held in slavery at any given time, with about 17,000 people brought into the country and forced to work for nothing every year. The largest single category of them are forced to work as prostitutes, but a majority are domestic servants or some other form of forced labor.
(Excerpt) Read more at iht.com ...
50,000 slaves in the U.S. but 1 case of bird flu or poop in the lettuce and all media hell breaks loose.
Slave domestic servants ? Huh ? I’m not saying it isn’t possible, but that it makes little sense.
“Make those beds or else!” ... ?
After 1808 it was illegal to bring new slaves to the United States.
The height of the Atlantic slave trade to the US occurred before the 19th century.
Many of the Arab diplomats keep domestic slaves. Occasionally it makes the news when one escapes and gets noticed by the law.
I don’t deny it is happening, but I have a hard time believing it is anywhere on that kind of scale.
Then there’s “600,000” per year, but “50,000” at any one time? Can anybody make sense of that for me?
Hah! Great post.
I hope you are kidding. Otherwise look it up. Starvation, beatings and threats of deportation or violence against family abroad. Multiculturalism....
Oh, I mis-read. The 600K was *worldwide*.
Nevermind.
No, more like “wash those cars for tips only” slavery.
The term isused a bit loosely, forced labor perhaps, but slavery?
Me? I don’t know, I don’t own any, my family has never owned any - ever.....
The first is the global estimate of the number of slaves moved across international borders each year while the second figure is the estimated number of slaves in the USA alone, so they're not looking at the same thing.
It’s probably because the people running the news are the ones using and owning the slaves.
That was a Barney Miller episode.
Democracy is the road to socialism. Karl Marx
Democracy is indispensable to socialism. The goal of socialism is communism. V.I. Lenin
The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.- Karl Marx
If the 50,000 figure is true, I would bet that most of the slaves are illegal immigrants that are being forced to work off the debts to their coyotes. Then there are those who are imported for the purpose of prostitution by various criminal organizations. That’s probably most of them right there.
It’s ironic that was during the Jefferson administration.
Slavery as most Americans know it, abhorrent as it is/was, is just the tip of an iceberg that has enslaved just as many Asians and whites, but that does not help Democrats blame us for everything ( U.S. ) to get their voting base.
Indeed. Of course, the end of the trade was scheduled 20 years in advance by the Philadelphia convention. And Jefferson himself did not have any objection to ending the international slave trade.
The end of the international slave trade was actually a very lucrative policy for Virginia slaveholders.
Virginia was becoming less slave-intensive and frontier planters had a big appetite for more slave labor - the end of the international trade amde these frontiersmen a captive market (forgive the pun) with only one vendor.
Jefferson spoke out quite stridently against slavery. I’ll stop short of calling him hypocritical, but he was never willing nor able to get his personal finances sufficiently in order to allow him to free his own slaves.
He actually died in serious debt, as I recall.
Yet many people seem to believe that he was a better economic guru than Hamilton.
If you read the garbled mess three or four times, you’ll find that the larger number is “globally” crossing international borders (including but not exclusssively the U.S. borders) and the smaller number the totality of slves/forced laborers in the U.S. at any time.
Obviously written by a journalist.
Even though Jefferson owned slaves, he probably treated them fairly well. Not like some of the big cotton plantations that would of treated their slaves like sub human. I believe if Jefferson spoke out about slavery it was probably the abuses of slavery that he spoke out against, not to say he never outrightly condemn the practice.
In 1781 he had this to say on the subject of slavery:
There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learnto imitate it; for man is an imitative animal... Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a context. But it is impossible to be temperate and to pursue this subject through the various considerations of policy, of morals, of history natural and civil. We must be contented to hope they will force their way into every one's mind. I think a change already perceptible, since the origin of the present revolution. The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust, his condition mollifying, the way I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation, and that this is disposed, in the order of events, to be with the consent of the masters, rather than by their extirpation.
I don't doubt that Jefferson was benevolent toward his slaves; he was adverse to direct confrontation. Toward the end of his life, Jefferson freed seven of his slaves, all members of the Hemings family (but not Sally Hemings).
I'm not one to know, but I'm curious do you know how many slaves Jefferson might of own.
From what I’ve read, about 200.
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