 | | | | | |  | | | Migrant workers have few rights | |
| | |  | | | The reality is there is precious little left at the end of the week to send home and little to live on.
Professor Peter Kwong lives and works in New York. He has studied his local immigrant Chinese community at first hand.
"They are getting very low wages so they have to save everything they have to pay off their debts. They live in dormitories, six, seven, eight, nine people in one room, eating the most simple meals, working 12 or 14 hours a day, seven days week throughout the year."
The going rate for being smuggled into America from China is US$50,000 or more. "This very large illegal immigrant community provides a space for organised crime to survive. In other words, not only involving human smuggling, but also enforcement - making sure people pay their debts."
"The tendency now is to borrow, either in the US or in mainland China at very high interest rates. US$50,000 can take four or five years to pay off, but with the very high interest rates it takes much longer."
In families, both parents work very long hours and the children are often sent back to China to be brought up by their grandparents. "We are talking about very traumatic family circumstances in many of these illegal families," Professor Kwong said.
Separated families, debts, violence are now the hallmarks of many communities.
But though there is much concern about human smuggling and trafficking, Peter Kwong believes there is an ambivalent attitude within Government and business, certainly in the United States.
"The American economy is very much dependent on labour from illegal workers. Without them there is no agriculture, no garment industry or domestic service. So from the economic side, from the business community there is no incentive for the Government to restrict illegal immigration," he said.
"Employers like them because [they are] cheap, not just in wages, but in benefit costs and they are unprotected by labour laws. So they are very vulnerable. The employers simply exploit them."
| | < previous |  | |
|
^^ Back to top
