By Sam Francis
06/14/2004
In so far as Big Business has a bible, Forbes magazine is one of its gospels, so it’s a bit odd that in its June 7 issue Forbes offered a detailed and graphic account of how the big business of trafficking in illegal immigrants operates.
Then again, for the hot gospellers of capitalism, it’s just business — even though a bit unusual because it’s illegal. [Preying On Human Cargo, Michael Maiello and Susan Kitchens, Forbes, June 7, 2004 registration required/ not required]
Exactly how big is the traffic in human cargo — not only from Latin America (a piddling $500 million a year) but from Asia and Eastern Europe (and probably other locations) as well? The total amount that Forbes offers is the tidy sum of $7 billion for "what human smugglers around the world pull in every year."
Not all of that is for smuggling people into this country, but a good deal of it is.
The demand for illegal aliens as cheap labor for Big Business (the legal kind, more or less) is insatiable. As the story, written by Michael Maiello and Susan Kitchens, reports, most illegals who sneak in "generally lead anonymous lives, doing faceless jobs — janitorial work during the midnight-to-8 a.m. shift at, say, a Target store or a Dunkin' Donuts; making beds at a Best Western or Clarion hotel; washing dishes in a Chinese restaurant."
Like other Big Business, this one breeds off its siblings.
But unlike most Big Business today, the immigrant trafficking trade is run by little guys, though they wind up with big money themselves (assuming they avoid the law).
One Border Patrol agent who allowed a thousand Latin illegals to sneak into the country at San Ysidro port in San Diego raked in the modest sum of — $1 million per month.
Another, a lady of Asian extraction known as Sister Ping, now in the pokey in Brooklyn, is alleged to have earned an even more modest $30 million over 15 years of hard work smuggling thousands of aliens from southern China. A "coyote" (a professional smuggler who guides illegals across the border from Mexico) can earn $9,000 leading 15 people in two days.
But the little guys are not necessarily nice guys. Sister Ping had the help of a merry band of Vietnamese immigrants fetchingly known as the "Born to Kill Gang." The immigrants themselves are treated little better than the slaves bought and sold in the days of the Roman Empire.
"Newly arrived illegals are herded into what veterans call 'hell houses.' They're not allowed to leave until they pay off the snakehead [the smuggler]…. Toughs do everything they can to get paid — threatening the relatives back home and subjecting the migrants to torture and interest rates of up to 5% a month."
Other immigrants are hired out by the smugglers or their middlemen to legitimate businesses as janitors or other menial labor, with no questions asked.
The Open Borders crowd loves to gas on about how wonderful illegal immigrants have it when they come to the land of opportunity, but for most the only real opportunity is to be exploited by which ever gang gets hold of them — the Born to Kill boys or Target and Wal-Mart.
What’s going on here comes from the very heart of Big Capitalism in the opening years of the 21st century.
Capitalism depends on being able to compete, to offer its goods and services at lower prices, which means it has to reduce costs of production. Cutting the cost of labor is a comparatively easy way to do that, and throughout history the ways have been obvious enough — outright slavery as practiced in the ancient world or the big plantations of Latin America and the South or the mass immigration promoted after Southern slaveholders were dispossessed by their Northern brothers.
Whatever the exact method, it means that when Big Business is allowed to engage in unfettered competition and reduce labor costs as much as it likes, the result is the flooding of the society with a population no one really wants.
The only reason the slaves or the immigrants are there at all is for purposes of economic usefulness. They are not really part of the culture or the race or the society and they have little loyalty to any of them — which is why they are called "aliens."
But whatever loyalties the aliens might have, it’s more than what the Big Business that brought them here possesses.
The main text from the Big Business bible is, ye shall cut your costs above all else, and when the cult of Big Business is allowed to prevail, the result is not only the exploitation of the cheap labor it imports but the eventual destruction of the society and people it is allowed to dominate.
COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
[Sam Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist. A selection of his columns, America Extinguished: Mass Immigration And The Disintegration Of American Culture, is now available from Americans For Immigration Control. Click here for Sam Francis' website. Click here to orderhis monograph, Ethnopolitics: Immigration, Race, and the American Political Future and here for Glynn Custred’s review.]
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.