Slavery seems to be in the news lately, in that it’s the excuse for the desecration of Confederate memorials, and black rage. But it’s not the historical American slavery that I want to talk about—it’s immigrant slavery. Not immigrants being held in slave-like conditions by American whites (no doubt Southern whites with straw hats like Strother Martin in Cool Hand Luke) but immigrants who are practicing the long-banned custom of slavery in the United States.

The Atlantic published a memoir called My Family’s Slave by the late Alex Tizon, in its June 2017 issue. Tizon was a member of a family of Filipino immigrants who owned a slave, not in the Philippines, but in the United States. Steve Sailer blogged on it here: Affluent Immigrants Culturally-Enriching Modern USA with Their Diverse Customs, Such as Slave-Owning and Eudocia Tomas Pulido: 56 Years A Slave To A Filipino Family In America .

These items remind us that for all you hear so much about the slavery that was abolished by the 13th Amendment (ratified January 31, 1865, i.e. 152 years ago) slavery is not an American custom. It’s certainly not part of the British tradition, and antebellum Americans imported slaves from Africa because Africans were the only race offering their own people for sale.

In 2007 I wrote that

while the Atlantic Slave Trade and the horrors of the Middle Passage are what every American learns about in school, it wasn’t the only slave trade, and they weren’t the only horrors. Long before Columbus discovered America, Africans were selling other Africans to Arab slave traders in the North of Africa, and marching them north through deserts where many of them died. Perhaps the Beninese could apologize for that? In the meantime, while whites are apologizing all over the place for their distant ancestors’ role in African slavery, (Clinton apologized, George W. Bush apologized, the next President will probably apologize) slavery still goes on in Africa, including Benin. [Child Slave Trade in Africa Highlighted by Arrests New York Times, August 10, 1997] The African Slave Trade, White Guilt, And The Other Guilty Party, August 21, 2007

Sailer asked the end of his blog “By the way, what % of slaveowners in modern America are immigrants?”

Here’s a roundup (from at least 15 years of VDARE.com coverage) of examples of slavery committed by immigrants, with some remarks on its non-coverage by the press:

Kevin Nanji and Louisa Satia, a Cameroonian immigrant husband and wife with children in Silver Spring, Md….ages 40 and 36, respectively, were convicted in federal court in December 2001 on enslaving a teenaged girl from Cameroon over a three-year period... Joseph and Evelyn Djoumessi, a Detroit-area couple also from Cameroon, had forcibly kept a teenaged girl from that country as an unpaid maid and nanny.[ More]

An Albanian Gypsy woman sold her 15-year-old daughter to another Gypsy immigrant—who raped her—for $3,000. The family were refugees sponsored by the local Lutheran church. [More]

A case echoing the Tizon case above:

Immigration and Slavery By James Fulford on October 20, 2004

A Filipino-American couple are in court after officials found out that they had been harboring an illegal immigrant in their home—for twenty years—and not paying her any money. (Money was sent to her family.)

Jefferson and Elnora Calimlim were sentenced in 2009 and deported in 2012. [More]

“[A] bad week for Muslims keeping slaves in America. A Saudi PHD student, Homaidan Al-Turki, living in Aurora, Colorado, was found guilty of all counts yesterday of keeping a woman in bondage. Not only did she have to do windows, she also had to obey the sexual demands of her (married) master. Though the original charges were reduced, Al-Turki could be sentenced to life in prison in August [ Saudi man convicted of sex abuse, Denver Post, July 1, 2006]” “In Los Angeles, the trial process is just beginning for some accused Egyptian slavers: Pair Admit Enslaving Girl, 12. [By Sara Lin, June 30, 2005]The article contains an unusual admission of cultural depravity from the diversity-loving Los Angeles Times. The case shed light on a common though illegal practice in Egypt in which children from poor families are sent to work for the well-to-do. The servants, known as Khadamah, usually range in age from 9 to 18 and often are forced to sleep in kitchens.” [[ ]]

The story of Mahender Murlidhar Sabhnani, 51 and Varsha Mahender Sabhnani, 45, who are accused of having kept two Indonesian women as slaves, torturing them on regular basis, is being covered in the mainstream media without the use of the word “immigrant“ to describe either the alleged perpetrators or even the victims.

Many, many MSM headlines calling them a “NY Couple,” a “Rich Couple, “a “Millionaire Couple” and a “Long Island Couple”, none calling them an “Indian Couple”—except in the Indian press. [More]

Modern Day Slavery By James Fulford on September 21, 2007

A 2007 book called Nobodies by John Bowe:

“Based on thorough and often dangerous research, exclusive interviews, and eyewitness accounts, Nobodies takes you inside three illegal workplaces where employees are virtually or literally enslaved. In the fields of Immokalee, Florida, underpaid (and often unpaid) illegal immigrants pick the produce all of us consume, connected by a chain of subcontractors and divisions to such companies as PepsiCo and Tropicana. At the top of the chain are stockholders and politicians; at the bottom is a father of six, one of whose children suffers from leukemia, who entered America only to become the unpaid employee of a labor contractor nicknamed “El Diablo” for his cruelty.”

Said labor contractor is usually an immigrant himself. See the next item. [More]

Cesar and Geovanni Navarrete are charged with keeping illegals in slavery in Immokalee, Florida, locking them up and forcing them to pick tomatoes. The Department of Justice press release makes it clear that the perpetrators, as well as the victims are both aliens and illegal…

Headlines included Florida Family Charged With Enslaving Immigrant Farm Workers and Florida family charged with immigrant slavery which, since both trafficker and victims were illegal, could just as well have been Immigrant Family Charged With Enslaving Florida Farm Workers and Immigrant family charged with Florida slavery [More]

This is the sentencing of Mahender and Varsha Sabhnani, above, for doing things like this

“Samirah, an immigrant from Indonesia, said she was forced to walk naked from the servants’ room to the kitchen and to eat 100 chili peppers, followed by six spoons of chili powder mixed with salt water. She said she vomited after eating the peppers and was told to eat the vomit.”

Of course, it’s victim Samira who appeared as an immigrant in these stories—the Sabhnanis were a “Long Island Couple” who had enslaved two Indonesians, although, as I pointed out, since they lived in the same house, we could just as easily say “An Indian millionaire was convicted of enslaving two Long Island women,” couldn’t we? [More]

A Mexican illegal alien in Greenfield, California, arranged to sell his 14-year-old daughter to a neighbor for cash and beer. Was he not aware that slavery is illegal in America? And when Macelino de Jesus Martinez did not receive payment, he went to the police to complain. [Father Accused Of Selling Daughter For Beer, KSBW, Jan 12, 2009]

The amount of cash and beer was fairly substantial:

“$16,000, 100 cases of Corona, 50 cases of Modelo beer, several cases of meat, two cases of wine, 50 cases of Gatorade and 50 cases of soft drinks, authorities said.”

Martinez, right, and the buyer didn’t know this was illegal—they said it was just an arranged marriage, such as is common in their native Oaxaca. [More]

The “Man” (Justice Department headline) was “Amador Cortes-Meza, 36, of Mexico” (right) convicted of multiple charges of “sex trafficking and human smuggling offenses related to a scheme to force women and juveniles into prostitution.” the “California Woman” (same) was Fang Ping Ding, who was was sentenced to 37 months in prison for “confiscating the passport, visa and other documents of a woman from the People’s Republic of China in order to maintain control over the victim and force her to work as an unpaid, live-in domestic servant.” Ding, described by AP as a “Fremont Woman” was, of course, also a “woman from the People’s Republic of China.” [More]

The story said

A wealthy New York woman is facing criminal charges after being accused of keeping an illegal immigrant as an indentured servant and forcing her to live in a closet for nearly six years. Documents posted on the Smoking Gun allege that Annie George, 39, and her now-deceased husband, Mathai Kolath George, hired an illegal immigrant from the Indian state of Kerala. The immigrant, identified only as “V.M.,”

Of course the “wealthy New York woman” was an Indian immigrant herself. She was acquitted on the slavery charges, but got five years for harboring an illegal immigrant. Five years probation. [More]

Steve Smith wrote to ask if, in the Annie George case above, the fact that her deceased husband was in the illegal-immigrant ridden hospitality industry, his other employees might be investigated. (He owned something called Kolath Hospitality Group.) [Plane, Bollywood actor’s brother pulled from N.Y. river, USA Today, June 9, 2009]

Smith wrote:

“Out of curiosity I Googled the alleged perp’s name and found he’s gotten rich owning and managing lots of hotels. You’d think an employer getting busted for servant slavery and harboring an illegal alien would trigger at least a cursory investigation of the perp’s other employees.”

Yes, but the Obama Administration in particular was not interested in workplace enforcement. [More]

Oceanside, California husband Marcial Garcia Hernandez and wife Inez Martinez Garcia, were found to have kept a twelve year old Mexican immigrant girl (their niece) in unpaid servitude and used her for sex. Allan Wall wrote

Buried in this article’s very last paragraph, you find: “The Oceanside couple emigrated from Mexico and are legal permanent residents of the United States.” The “Oceanside Couple” are immigrants from Mexico (and, after many years, still not American citizens). So why don’t the MSM headlines say: “Mexican Immigrant Couple Held 12-Year Old Girl as Sex Slave”? Because it doesn’t fit the script.[More]

Brenda wrote

In Orange County, a Saudi woman who lists her occupation as “princess” has been arrested for keeping a slave. Was Meshael Alayban (pictured) unaware of legal prohibitions against human ownership in the United States? When her countryman Homaidan al-Turki ended up in a Colorado prison for similar behavior, it was quite the news item in The Kingdom. The state Attorney General was summoned to Riyadh and made to spell out why America expects super-precious Saudis to obey infidel law.[More]

Michelle Malkin on the same case:

Meet Meshael Alayban of Saudi Arabia, wife of Abdulrahman bin Nasser bin Abdulaziz al-Saud. She apparently thought we Americans would look the other way at human trafficking and abuse of domestic workers—you know, the way they do in her misogyny-infested home country. The wealthy Meshael Alayban thought wrong. Last week, Orange County, Calif., prosecutors charged Alayban (who lists her occupation as “princess” on her tourist visa) with felony human trafficking. Enslavement. A Kenyan maid escaped from Alayban's compound earlier this month after allegedly being held against her will. She told police Alayban confiscated her passport, refused to abide by an employment contract and forbade the worker from returning to her home country—where she has an ailing 7-year-old daughter. When law enforcement officials entered Alayban's mansion, they found four other domestic workers from the Philippines who also have indicated a desire to be freed from Saudi bondage.

Update: Human trafficking case against Saudi princess dropped, By Jason Hanna, CNN, September 23, 2013, [More]

Welcome to Wealthy Middle Eastern Thug Privilege By Michelle Malkin on September 29, 2015

Allegedly, some women were imprisoned on an estate and forced to have sex—pictured right, a

well-connected Saudi prince arrested on Wednesday after allegedly sexually assaulting a woman at his $40 million Beverly Hills rental mansion. Witnesses reported seeing a bloodied woman screaming for help as she scrambled over an 8-foot wall surrounding the property. LAPD officers charged 28-year-old Majed Abdulaziz al-Saud with sodomy, battery and false imprisonment. Celebrate diversity! (No word, by the way, on whether or how this accused brute is related to Saudi princess Buniah al-Saud, who pleaded no contest in 2002 to charges of beating her Indonesian maid in Florida. She was fined a measly $1,000 and let loose.)

Update: Saudi prince no longer facing felony charges in Los Angeles sex case, By Michael Martinez and Cheri Mossburg, CNN, October 21, 2015, which was why I said “allegedly”.

In both these Saudi cases, they may be innocent—Dominique Strauss-Kahn was—but they do have enough money for very good lawyers, as well as to pay off claimants. [More]

Linda Thom forwarded this:

I visited Thailand some years ago where massage and prostitution are every where. I was immediately suspicious when I saw this article: Sacramento County targets illicit massage parlors with prostitution ties, By Brad Branan, (Email him) SacBee.com, November 22, 2014. Yep, prostitution and human trafficking. I had to read way along in the article (paragraph 13) to finally get to the core of the problem.

Even when it got to that point, it just said “trafficking”, not Asians.

Contrast is with the report (from Opening Doors, Inc, a local anti-trafficking group) the SacBee story was based on:

Asian Massage Parlors tend to be the most visible massage parlor operations. According to a Polaris Project publication on Asian Massage Parlors (AMPs), AMPs “operate as commercial-front brothels claiming to offer legitimate services such as massage, acupuncture, and other therapeutic, health, and spa services. AMPs are distinguishable from other legitimate massage businesses in that they provide commercial sex to customers, though massage and other non-sexual services may be available as well.” Polaris Project states that, “AMPs conceal the commercial sex operation by registering and attempting to behave like legitimate businesses. ” [Sacramento Against Sex Slavery Report, Opening Doors, June 27, 2013 (PDF)]

That one paragraph uses “Asian” six times, counting abbreviations. The Sacramento Bee report? Not once.

The girls pictured at right are not trafficking victims, by the way, but employees of what may (for legal reasons) be a legitimate Asian Massage Parlors business. The photo caption we used on this letter said “The young women pictured above may be qualified, trained, and licensed massage therapists. But they don’t look like qualified, trained, and licensed massage therapists.” [More]

This is a story about Mexican sex trafficking in the Shenandoah Valley, not based in Thailand, but in Mexico. The gentlemen at right may be legitimate businessmen—but they don’t look like legitimate businessmen.[More]

Nicholas Stix on Ann Coulter’s book, which includes this story:

There’s the Indian, Lakireddy Bali Reddy who used the H-1B visa to import the best and the brightest—12 and 13-year-old girls from India, whom he turned into sex slaves, raping them countless times, killing one via negligent homicide (carbon monoxide poisoning), and almost killing a second girl, who barely survived. He should have gotten life, right? At first, all he got was “a fine for the carbon monoxide leak.” The police and the MSM buried the whole incident. The only reason the public ever learned about the case, and Reddy was tried in court, was that a high school journalism class exposed the whole sordid business. Reddy got a maximum possible prison sentence of…eight years.

Brenda Walker mentioned that case, which happened in the 90s, here in 2002. [More]

Two Iraqi immigrants moved from Dubai to San Diego, where the husband was a construction supervisor. Of course, the Daily Beast headline called them a “San Diego couple”.

Calling these Iraqi Muslim immigrants a “San Diego couple” in this context is completely mental–why not head the column “Iraqi Muslims Enslave San Diego Woman”? In fact, the couple was born in Iraq, but lived in Dubai until “coming to America” less than three years ago–probably on H-1B visas. The victim is a poor Indonesian woman, who was removed from Dubai to America when the Dubai authorities started investigating.

Immigration policy question: why is a construction supervisor from Dubai taking an American job? A further question for ICE–how did they let an Indonesian woman from Dubai into the country to work as a domestic servant? [More]

Jesse Mossman wrote:

The headline proclaimed “Texas couple” and the story told of a black woman from Nigeria “enslaved” by a couple in Texas–forced to work 20 hours a day, physically and verbally abused, threatened with being shot, never paid, and not allowed to leave… Of course anyone who has been paying attention–for example, VDARE.com readers–knows enough to scan the article and discover, as expected, that the so-called “Texas couple” were in fact named Sandy Nsobundu and Chudy Nsobundu and are actually immigrants from Nigeria. (They’re naturalized American citizens, and thus can’t be deported. )

I replied that

The headline could just as easily have read “Nigerian Immigrants Charged With Enslaving Texas Woman” (the victim has been in Texas for two years) but it never does–no immigrant ever does anything bad in a headline, they’re always victims.[More]

Finally, a story not about slavery—but about the ban on reporting it. Libertarian Cathy Young did a story called You Can’t Whitewash The Alt-Right’s Bigotry, The Federalist, April 14, 2016.

Political Correctness is a War on Noticing, even in its modified limited Libertarian/Conservatism Inc. form, and usually takes the tack of saying people who do Notice are “obsessed” with race. That’s what Jonah Goldberg was saying 15 years ago [Ideologues Have Hijacked an Important Debate, Los Angeles Times, February 24, 2002] and that’s what Cathy Young was saying here:

VDARE, which calls itself a “news outlet for patriotic immigration reform,” is somewhat less in-your-face about its racism; but the site’s gleeful chronicling of black, Hispanic, and Muslim criminality leaves little doubt that its authors are not simply interested in objective analysis of crime demographics. While mainstream media and liberal punditry can be overly skittish if not denialist on the subject, VDARE’s racialism not only reeks of hostility and contempt toward the presumed losers in the “biodiversity” lottery but veers into outright paranoia about cover-ups of crime’s racial angle.… Another item, on a Texas couple’s arrest for enslaving and abusing their Nigerian nanny, cavils that the Associated Press report waits too long to reveal the suspects’ own Nigerian background, allowing inattentive readers to assume they were racist rednecks—even though the second paragraph mentioned the couple’s distinctly non-redneck names, Chudy and Sandra Nsobundu. [More]

There is nothing paranoid about our belief that the MSM is determined to cover up crime’s racial angle—they are completely open about it.

The AP Stylebook, as I’ve been pointing out for years, says that race should not be mentioned except in positive senses. First black bank president yes, 10, 000th black bank robber no. A suspect’s race may be mentioned as a description while he’s at large and threat to the public, but should be removed when he’s arrested.

In 2012, they rethought even that. [AP Stylebook updates entry on racial IDs in news stories, By Mallary Jean Tenore, March 14, 2012]

In the article responding to Cathy Young, I wrote that

you can see how deliberate this is by how outraged the MSM becomes when this protocol is violated, even by hint. Alex Pareene (right) did an article for Salon called Matt Drudge’s disgusting race war awareness campaign.[June 1, 2011] when Drudge merely linked to headlines about the Flash Mob phenomenon without mentioning race. [More]

The essence of this is an MSM plan to prevent “prejudice”—to avoid making minority groups look bad.

This creates what is known as a “false consciousness” and keeps the public from having the right ideas about public policy. If Americans are deliberately kept in the dark about immigrant crime, especially this kind of depraved behavior, then they won’t be able to decide if immigration is a Good Thing or not.

There are lot more stories like this we haven't heard.

At what point do we just have a general show of hands on the "I grew up with/now possess household slaves" thing? https://t.co/0aYjEXYI8X — Colby Cosh (@colbycosh) June 2, 2017

That’s why we need an immigration moratorium.

James Fulford [Email him] is a writer and editor for VDARE.com.