Stories below the fold

Migrant Rights has a story on how women are duped into virtual slavery by fake recruiters. and then sent to another country where their families and the embassy doesn't know where they are (so their rights can't be protected).
It’s easy for agents to illegally arrange tourist visas to the UAE for Indian women. Once in the UAE, the agents shelter the women while procuring a job for them in another Gulf country, before their UAE visa expires. The women aren’t stopped from entering other GCC countries as long as they have a job visa. In this process, embassy procedures are circumvented. Women enter another country without the knowledge of their home country embassy, and outside the terms of the MoUs signed between origin and destination countries. 

 The woman in the story is from India, but we have similar problems with recruiters here.

There are quite a few illegal workers in the middle east, but the problem is actually world wide. Poverty means you would rather work for 200 dollars a month (even though your recruiter guaranteed 400 dollars as in the case above) because at home you wouldn't make that much.

In the USA, often illegal migrants work as maids and similarly can be underpaid and overworked...
no one pays workermans' comp, social security, health insurance either. Getting immigration under control is one way to stop this.

of course, even legal maids might not be paid benefits: I remember my mom, who did sewing for a rich lady, helped the lady''s maid from the Dominican Republic to sign up and pay for her own social security .

Of course, we don't pay our own cook a good salary: nor have we paid her social security: this wasn't common when we moved here...instead, Lolo paid the tuition for her youngest son to go to college, and figured he would support his mom in her old age. Alas, he just died of a heart attack...Sigh. But I have started to pay the Social security for our maid, a single parent with only one child.


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Library of Congress lecture on post traumatic stress syndrome in Veterans.



Library of Congress has a lecture on King Tut



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