Modern-day slaves

For up to 16 hours daily, they worked at posh country clubs across South Florida, then returned to deceptively quiet houses in Boca Raton where they were captives -- and in the most dreadful cases, fed rotten chicken and vegetables, forced to drink muriatic acid and repeatedly denied medical help.

The 39 servers, lured to the United States by the cliché of a decent dollar and a promising next chapter, instead became imported modern-day slaves two continents away from their homeland. Their story repeats in plain sight most every day in South Florida: barely paid -- or unpaid -- people forced to toil in fields, work as domestics in hotels and restaurants or in the sex industry, an outsized regional problem authorities are emphasizing in January, Human Trafficking Awareness Month.

``This is organized crime where humans are used as products. We are talking about selling a person over and over and making large sums of money,'' says Carmen Pino, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Homeland Security Investigations Assistant Special Agent in Charge. ``What people need to realize is that human trafficking is happening here, it's a big problem. It could be happening in the restaurant where you eat, at your nail salon, in your neighborhood. It's not just something that happens in foreign countries.''

While difficult to pluck the numbers from a landscape of silence and fear, federal, state and local authorities know South Florida is among the nation's three top capitals of human trafficking, a $36 billion industry defined as the recruitment and harboring of a person for labor or services through force, fraud or coercion.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/01/23/2030710/modern-day-slaves-story-repeats.html

In other words, those of us asking for a crack down on illegal immigration and an effort to secure our borders are actually the ones fighting modern day slavers.