01-21-2012, 12:48 AM
(01-20-2012, 10:43 PM)kandrathe Wrote: I liked the words of one of the anti-slavery prosecutors... Which is a larger crime, the 16 year old selling dope, or the selling of a 16 year old?
I believe one of them shouldn't be a crime at all.
Quote:We tolerate it because it lets us get cheap stuff. The availability of illegal jobs makes human trafficing and exploitation inevitable.
Where it is discovered, it is prosecuted. But, of course, it stays hidden, because it is twinned with harshly enforced migration laws. Workers will put up with a lot of abuse, if the alternative is deportation to Guatemala.
We get cheap tomatoes just fine without quasi-slavery, give or take a few pennies the pound. I don't think it's the consumer pushing this, nor can the consumer be reasonably expected to solve the problem. Even the producers face perverse incentives - if even one of their competitors exploits their labourers, they gain an unfair advantage in a razor-thin margin business. This is about the system of migration laws - that's the only place real lasting change can be effected.
-Jester