In America, We’re Trafficking Nurses and Teachers Now

If it sounds sketchy, that’s because it probably is.

A school district in Florida just hired 140 teachers from South America through a contracting agency. The board says it’s the only way they’re going to deal with their teacher shortage this fall.

Of course, there was this response:

I can’t understand the Indian customer service people, how are school kids going to understand these people?

Ah, typical…

They’re not the only ones.

Preschools and daycare centers are hiring Afghan, Somali, and Syrian refugees, citing the difficulty of finding childcare workers. After a trial period, the refugees will “qualify” for full-time jobs.

Until then, they’re interns.

This trend is happening all over the country. Schools and hospitals are dealing with shortages by importing workers from other countries. The problem isn’t the workers. They do a great job. The problem is the employers, and how they treat their imported labor, by luring them to the U.S. with promises of a better future, then often abusing them.

There’s a little fine print to all of these stories about labor shortages. Every single one of them has one thing in common: The jobs don’t pay enough, and they don’t get enough respect, despite the very obvious fact that our entire society depends on them.

Yeah, sketchy.

America engages in human trafficking.

It’s true.

Recruiting agencies have a history of working with hospitals and nursing homes to lure nurses from abroad with promises of higher pay and better conditions. They did it to Filipino nurses for decades, forcing them to work long hours in unsafe conditions. In some cases, the hours they worked didn’t count toward certifications or program completions. If they complained, the companies threatened to revoke their visas.

In short, they became indentured servants.

They won a lawsuit in 2019.

Filipino nurses took the brunt of Covid deaths during the early pandemic, because they were the ones on the front lines.

Even before then, they filled staffing gaps during the 1980s AIDS/HIV epidemic, when other nurses were either quitting or refusing to treat patients because they were scared. America has been importing healthcare workers from The Philippines for a century, relying on them most during times of public health crisis, like now.

Most Americans think their government would never support human trafficking, but we do it all the time. A lot of our economy actually depends on having a silent, expendable workforce.

Ironically, we call them “essential.”

We don’t treat them that way.

For example, immigrants make up more than 70 percent of agriculture workers. Most of them are undocumented, which means their employers can treat them however they want. They don’t have to pay them fair wages, or provide health and benefits. They can expose them to pesticides and chemicals. They can make them work all day in the hot sun, under triple-digit temperatures. Again, during the pandemic, many of them were designated as essential workers, even given special letters. “It’s like suddenly they realized we are here contributing,” says one of them.

There’s only one way to describe how we treat these workers. It’s human trafficking, transporting and/or coercing people in order to benefit from their work or service. It’s not just about sex.

It’s about cheap labor.

We do this a lot.

It’s going to get worse.

In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a worker shortage.

There’s a few reasons for that.

Americans in general are sick of their low pay and lack of respect. A lot of them don’t want to go back to the office or factory. They’re either still worried about Covid (with good reason), or they don’t want to give up remote work to waste their time in traffic, or by pretending to participate in this sadistic thing their boss calls “office culture.”

More than half of teachers are planning to quit “sooner than planned,” which is a nice way of saying as soon as they can find a better job. After all, there were more than 200 shootings at schools last year.

Add that to the endless stress. Teaching has become the most heavily politicized profession in the country. We’ve got angry, entitled parents complaining about masks, and in some cases even beating up teachers and principals. We’ve got states banning books, even civil rights history. In Florida, LGBT teachers are being advised to scrape rainbows off their doors and remove any photos of their partners, because it might get them in trouble. Meanwhile, privileged liberals are telling us we’re cowards if we quit, because we can’t take it anymore.

On top of that, we have a new contagious disease called monkeypox, and the government is just crossing their fingers.

Nobody is our friend.

If it’s that bad for teachers, you can imagine what it’s like for all the other healthcare and essential workers out there. Nobody wants to do these jobs anymore. They don’t pay enough.

They’re dangerous.

Americans can’t stand the workers they depend on.

So, here’s the situation:

This country has exhausted their own supply of cheap labor. Even companies like Amazon are saying they’re going to have trouble finding workers. They could deplete their workforce by 2024.

Whether we’re talking about farms or hotels, the American economy has survived only because it could manage to find a large pool of disposable workers, people they could exploit and underpay, in order to maintain its millionaire-billionaire class.

When we couldn’t find workers to support our endless growth, we colonized other countries (like The Philippines) or outsourced as many of those jobs as possible. The super rich made these decisions, and the government signed off on them with trade agreements.

That’s the cost of our low-low prices.

We get cheap goods, but we pay for it on the back end with suppressed wages and dead end jobs with no benefits.

There’s other consequences.

The racism and hatred millions of Americans feel comes directly from this broken system. It’s really something to see them get angry at their Filipino nurse or their Afghan school teacher for existing, when it’s their own leaders who decided to hire them, because they didn’t want to pay anyone a fair wage or give them safe working conditions.

They’d rather find someone else to exploit.

That’s how the system works.

Working-class Americans get angry at immigrants coming to take their jobs, when they should be getting angry at their bosses and the rich jerks who run their companies. They’re the ones who decide it’s cheaper and easier to engage in human trafficking.

It’s their fault.

This system won’t last much longer.

We’ve reached the breaking point.

One or two industries or professions can fill their staffing shortages by finding other labor pools to exploit. They’ll do it because American politicians won’t pass a living wage, or even gun laws. They won’t upgrade their ventilation or encourage masks to protect their workers.

So, we’re losing them.

What’s left of the American economy and food supply chain runs off human trafficking. We can’t sustain it.

It’s breaking down.

This will become apparent to anyone with a pulse over the next few weeks, as everything from restaurants and grocery stores to banks and airlines shut down again, as everyone gets infected with yet another variant of a virus that the ones in charge prefer to ignore.

Human trafficking is profitable in the short run.

In the long run, it’s a disaster.