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A message dated November 7th, 2003, from John Mikeska to Susan Rektorik
Henley at srektorik@hotmail.com,
states the following:
"Your messages posted this morning as Part I
and Part II were not approved for the list. You articles on the perils of
immigration stray far from the topic of 'Czech Heritage'. As the post
contain much of your personal opinion, suggest you might want them posted
to your personal website as an open editorial piece.
Sir John, Earl of Berkshire
What good is information if not shared with others?
List moderator with Steve Alvarez and Richard Garza"
The content of Parts One and Two are as follows (along with the
conclusion).
The Perils of Modern Immigration
by Susan Rektorik Henley
Part One in an article on current day immigration perils with focus on
the Czech lands and former USSR:
America is a nation of immigrants. No matter how deep the roots,
everyone’s ancestors came from some place else. From my viewing point, some
folks tend to forget that their family once traveled into the unknown and,
by the grace of God…and help of others, was able to establish a good and
profitable life. As the Czechs and Czech-Moravians of Texas have now pretty
well assimilated, it can be easy to distance ourselves from modern
immigration issues. This article is a step intended to get at least a few
more of us thinking about what is currently going on in the realm of folks
caught in places and circumstances that lead them into, at the minimum,
unfortunate situations; but, also, all too often into realms of degradation
and darkness. Perhaps, this article will also be the start of a search for a
way that we can be part of a solution.
In researching this issue, I have read about how immigrants and other
unfortunate individuals from all parts of the world get caught up in what
amounts to modern-day slavery. While what I will share in this article will
focus on the Czech Republic and the United States, I want to point out two
tenants of mine: First, all the people of this earth are God’s people; and,
second, Pan-Slavism, accepting that all Slavs share kindred spirits and
should stand united makes sense to me. So while the article focuses on the
CR, it also focuses on areas of the former USSR.
First, let us consider the Wal-Mart contract labor situation. The
following information is excerpted from an article by Steven Greenhouse,
dated November 05, 2003, in the on-line version of The New York Times:
“Last February, Pavel responded to an intriguing Web site that
boasted of cleaning jobs in the United States paying four times what he
was earning as a restaurant manager in the Czech Republic. He flew from
Prague to New York on a tourist visa and took a bus to Lynchburg, Va.,
where a subcontractor delivered him to a giant Wal-Mart.
Pavel immediately began on the midnight shift and said he soon
learned that he would never receive a night off. He said he worked every
night for the next eight months. In this way, Pavel, who refused to give
his last name, became one pawn among hundreds employed by subcontractors
that clean Wal-Mart stores across the nation, paying many workers off
the books.
Pavel's unhappy stay in the United States ended with a shock when
federal agents raided 60 Wal-Marts on Oct. 23 and arrested him and 250
other janitors as being illegal immigrants. Yesterday, the company
acknowledged that it had received a target letter from federal
prosecutors accusing it of violating immigration laws and saying that
Wal-Mart faced a grand jury investigation…”
“…‘We Czechs are willing to sacrifice and work hard, but we
definitely weren't earning enough money," said Pavel, 33, in a telephone
interview from the Czech Embassy before he was deported last Friday. He
said he received $380 in cash for his 56-hour workweeks. That came to
$6.79 an hour, and he did not receive time-and-a-half for overtime.’”
More information on the Wal-Mart situation comes from an article written
by Edward Hegstrom which was printed in the October 25th, 2003,
issue of The Houston Chronicle:
“Many of the workers in other parts of the country were Eastern
European immigrants, officials said…
…Cleaning companies contracted by Wal-Mart have faced trouble in the
past. In 2000, a Lithuanian national named Algimantas Kondratavicious
was charged with smuggling immigrants into the United States to work for
his Indiana business cleaning Wal-Mart stores, according to press
accounts and press reports.
The same year, federal officials in Virginia broke up a business that
they say brought more than 100 Eastern Europeans in to work for a
company that cleaned Wal-Mart and Target stores. The company owner,
Czech native Lubomir Chocolak, was sentenced to 27 months in prison,
according to court records.
It was not immediately clear if those earlier cases were related to
Thursday’s raids. Chocholak’s attorney, Larry W. Shelton, said in a
phone interview that nothing came up in his client’s trial implicating
Wal-Mart officials…
…In general, workplace raids have become increasingly uncommon in
recent years, according to local and national experts. Federal
immigration officials have repeatedly admitted that they lack the
resources to round up even a fraction of the estimated 7 million illegal
immigrants now living in the United States. Immigration officials
outside the border areas have focused on capturing illegal immigrants
who are also criminals…”
For years and years now the Internal Revenue Service has tried to handle
the contract labor situation. It is a well-know fact that the withholding of
taxes, payment of social security contributions, unemployment benefits,
etc., can be avoided by styling a business as one that "subcontracts." A
great number of these businesses, if reviewed, would not pass even the basic
threshold test as to being "sub-contractors." Almost always there is an
employer-employee relationship and, generally, one in which the worker
reports to the same place of duty each day. Stopping the practice has not
been accomplishable. Too many American see this way of doing business as
acceptable and a way to get around "intrusion by government." Subcontracting
businesses are often also part of the gigantic but invisible cash and barter
economy of the United States. When businesses choose to operate beyond
the legal standards, how can one expect them to treat the people who work
for them in a fair and honest manner? In Texas, many of the workers caught
in this mess are from Mexico and South America. The acceptance by the
American public of businesses that operate this way is a bottom-line cause
of their proliferation. The government cannot fix a problem if the citizens
do not stand united behind that effort. As we all come from immigrant stock,
shouldn’t we remember that there was a time during which our ancestors could
have been taken advantage of (as they did not know the system and needed
jobs)? The difference the passage of time makes is that we are now in the
position to help others.
End of Part One.
Part Two: The Bartered Bride
Part One addressed the subcontractor/Wal-Mart situation.
In the situation covered in Part One, Pavel, the person who was taken
into custody as part of “Operation Rollback,” was an immigrant from the
Czech Republic (CR) who had made a person effort to come to the United
States via a tourist vista in response to an internet advertisement
promising a job with a higher rate of compensation than he could earn in the
CR. I suppose the argument could be that he generated the problem himself by
not thoroughly investigating the employing company and the job in the United
States (US). At the same time, I know that not all those who want visa to
the US can get them. Sometimes folks are driven to take chances in the hope
of a brighter future. Is this not what our ancestors did?
The little revolutions of 1848 led to the principle of free immigration
for the citizens of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. Soon after this,
immigrants from the highlands of what was then Bohemia and Moravia started
leaving their homelands and immigrating to Texas. Wave upon wave of
immigrants would come until the very brink of World War One (WWI) when our
ports were closed. We would not enjoy the lives we live and the freedoms we
enjoy here in Texas if our brave and daring ancestors had not left
everything behind and traveled into the unknown. Given this, surely we can
spare a little compassion for others who dare to leave their homeland in the
hope of a better way of life in the US?
The methods and means by which Pavel, who worked for a subcontractor as a
janitor for Wal-Mart, came are familiar to most of us. But, for the
desperate; or perhaps, the naïve, there are other avenues. For many of us,
the concept of “Mail-Order Brides” belongs in a by-gone era of western
expansionism, gold mining, John Wayne movies. To learn it isn’t so all one
has to do is to access a search engine such as “Google” and type in “mail
order bride.” Add, “Russian” or “Czech” if you want to limit the results a
little. I stopped scanning the search results after 50 pages, I was
nauseous.--and, this was even without reviewing the content of most of the
sites.
The following information is excerpted from U. S. Citizenship and
Immigration Services report (I could not find a date on the report) to
Congress on “Mail-Order Bride” Businesses:
“This report is in response to the Congressional request under
Section 652 of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant
Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA) that the Attorney General, in
consultation with the Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization
Service (INS) and the Director of the Violence Against Women Office at
the Department of Justice, conduct a study of mail-order marriages…
…In the course of the study it became evident that a vast array of
information already exists on the subjects of mail-order marriage,
domestic violence, and marriage fraud, including: academic research;
national, European and international conference papers; documents and
multi-media data produced by non-governmental organizations specializing
in trafficking issues; data from agencies providing services to victims
of domestic violence; and data from local, state and Federal law
enforcement agencies. This attention to mail-order marriages reflects
growing concern regarding the global recruitment and transportation of
women in a variety of exploitative ways. The information on trafficking
suggests that mail-order brides may become victims of international
trafficking in women and girls. The global magnitude and impact of this
traffic in women are already well documented.
While not all mail-order brides would be considered trafficked,
public policy is shifting to reflect the need to protect people from the
exploitation and violence that results from all forms of trafficking….
…With this in mind, but on a smaller scale, the Service's study
sought to review applications for immigration benefits filed with INS
for evidence of any correlation between the marriages resulting from
mail-order businesses and either domestic violence or marriage fraud.
Concerns about a link between the immigration law and domestic violence
were reflected in the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) of 1994. This
important milestone created a framework of protection and assistance for
victims of domestic violence and recognized the unique barriers that
immigrant women and children face when they are victims of family
violence…
…This report focuses specifically on a potentially vulnerable subset
of the U.S. population--immigrant women who marry U.S. citizens or
lawful permanent residents as a result of meeting through an
international matchmaking organization (IMO). Mail-order marriage is not
a new phenomenon--it is an inseparable part of North American history
and the settlement of the United States. As immigrants moved to this
country and established permanent homes, relatives in their country of
birth arranged marriages with local women--often performing proxy
marriages. Even today, within many cultures and religions, traditions
exist in which the formal practice of introducing, chaperoning, and
fostering these arrangements is customary. In a modern context the use
of such methods to find a partner has less favorable connotations.
Objection to the "wife-import" business has developed slowly, in part
because little is known about the businesses or the individuals
involved.
Concern over this issue reflects the lack of power the foreign-born
woman has compared to either the U.S. citizen or lawful permanent
resident in these arrangements and the lack of regulations governing the
way in which the international matchmaking organizations conduct their
business. The phenomenon is not unique to the United States. Western
Europe, Canada, and Australia are witnessing similar patterns with
regard to the use of these agencies and the domestic violence that can
result. Polarized views exist of the relationships and marriages that
result from the use of IMOs…
The other end of the spectrum challenges the inequities of these
transactions and identifies the mail-order bride phenomenon as an
international industry that often trafficks women from developing
countries to industrialized Western countries. Unlike dating services or
personal ads, the mail-order bride transaction is "one where the
consumer-husband holds all the cards." In using these services, the male
customer has access to and chooses from a pool of women about whom
personal details and information are provided, while the women are told
virtually nothing about the male customer--or only what he chooses to
reveal about himself. Each woman is aware that the male customer is
seeking that one special woman and is eager to satisfy his expectations.
Her own objectives may range from something as simple as seeking a
loving partner to something more specific such as finding a partner who
will facilitate her legal immigration to the United States.
Browsing through the IMO catalogs and web-sites reveals that many of
these businesses are doing much more than just providing a name and
address referral service. In fact, some of the web-sites are
sophisticated concoctions providing both video and audio representations
of the recruits. Other services-for-a-fee are available and include
organized social gatherings, travel arrangements, and assistance with
immigration paperwork (which may fall under the unauthorized practice of
law provisions). A recent documentary produced by the Global Survival
Network (GSN) reveals how mail-order bride businesses are used as fronts
to recruit and traffick Russian women to Germany, Japan, and the United
States for the sex industry. Specifically, GSN reports that traffickers
have become interested in sending women to the United States because
fiancée visas are easily obtained.
The Global Survival Network quotes an estimate that 200 mail-order
bride companies arrange between 2,000 and 5,000 marriages in the United
States each year (see below for the estimate developed for this report).
Many of these are U.S.-based companies with Russia-based operators
offering a wide range of services, depending on the amount of money the
customer is willing to spend. As an example, one marriage agency which
specializes in Russian women charges customers a $1,850 membership fee
which buys the right to view photos and videos of 400 women. GSN found
that at least 8 U.S.-based mail-order bride companies operate in Moscow
alone. The usual format is that the company publishes a catalog listing
hundreds of women of various ages and includes a physical description
and a brief statement of background. These are available either through
printed material or via the Internet. For an additional payment,
customers may select video presentations of the women described in the
catalog. The company may then organize a package tour for a group of
customers to travel to Russia to meet a wide selection of women and
girls. (An additional result of the lack of regulation is that the
companies frequently advertise minors to the clients.) As many as 2,000
women may show up for the "mixer" party for a group of only a dozen men.
The company seizes the opportunity to photograph the women for the
catalog and videotapes the evening's activities for use on late night
cable infomercials.
The male customers, according to the IMOs, are generally financially
secure, yet they frequently seek relationships with women from
impoverished countries where women are often denied equal education and
employment opportunities. The fact that the male customer is a U.S.
citizen or lawful permanent resident makes him more attractive to a
foreign-born bride, who may come from a society in which women are
pressured to take steps that are not beneficial to them as individuals
(e.g. to become a prostitute, overseas domestic worker, or mail-order
bride) in order to support family members. As a citizen or LPR, the male
customer holds both real and imagined power to allow a bride to enter
the United States lawfully and to threaten deportation once she is in
the United States.
In between these two positions are other explanations for this
phenomenon, but any attempt to regulate the industry must start by
recognizing that women's immigration experiences are part of a complex
global story.
Since 1992, marketing of women from the newly independent
states of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and the number of
international matchmaking businesses have grown dramatically.
In response, a more organized form of protest has emerged, with leading
women's organizations speaking out aggressively against what they have
termed "trafficking in women." This has in turn generated enormous media
interest and reporting on the mail-order bride industry. Local and
national newspapers are filled with examples of the deadly ramifications
of domestic violence and immigration. In March 1995, a woman was shot to
death in a Seattle courthouse lobby. She was 25 years old and 7 months
pregnant; she had immigrated to the United States from the Philippines
as a mail-order bride and was seeking a divorce from her abusive spouse.
The assailant was her husband. She had only lived with him for 10 days
before she moved out due to his violence and abuse. He was seeking to
have the marriage annulled and to recover the more than $10,000 he
claimed to have spent to bring her to the United States. In addition to
killing his wife, he also killed the two women accompanying her.
This type of gruesome incident may happen again somewhere in the
United States. The pervasiveness of domestic violence in our society has
already been documented, and with the burgeoning number of unregulated
international matchmaking organizations and clients using their
services, the potential for abuse in mail-order marriages is
considerable.
This report focuses specifically on a potentially vulnerable subset
of the U.S. population--immigrant women who marry U.S. citizens or
lawful permanent residents as a result of meeting through an
international matchmaking organization (IMO). Mail-order marriage is not
a new phenomenon--it is an inseparable part of North American history
and the settlement of the United States. As immigrants moved to this
country and established permanent homes, relatives in their country of
birth arranged marriages with local women--often performing proxy
marriages. Even today, within many cultures and religions, traditions
exist in which the formal practice of introducing, chaperoning, and
fostering these arrangements is customary. In a modern context the use
of such methods to find a partner has less favorable connotations.
Objection to the "wife-import" business has developed slowly, in part
because little is known about the businesses or the individuals
involved.
Concern over this issue reflects the lack of power the foreign-born
woman has compared to either the U.S. citizen or lawful permanent
resident in these arrangements and the lack of regulations governing the
way in which the international matchmaking organizations conduct their
business. The phenomenon is not unique to the United States. Western
Europe, Canada, and Australia are witnessing similar patterns with
regard to the use of these agencies and the domestic violence that can
result. Polarized views exist of the relationships and marriages that
result from the use of IMOs."
End of Part Two--Next More on the Trafficking of Women from Central and
Eastern Europe (including the CR).
Part Three--From Willing Participant to Victim
There are documented success stories where mail-order brides and their
new spouse are happy and the relationship works well. There are also stories
of “brides” who swindle their potential spouse and spouses who abuse and
mistreat the “brides.” So it will always be, I suspect, as long as humans
are involved. However, as pointed out in the report cited above, the very
nature of these “mail-order bride” arrangements creates an environment ripe
for abuse. And, even in the case of “mail order brides,” not all the women
who participate do so of their own free will. Trafficking in women and
slavery still darken our world.
“We think of slavery as something that is over and done with, and our
images of it tend to be grounded in the 19th Century: black field
hands in chains. ‘In those days slavery thrived on a shortage of person
power.’” These statements come from an article titled, “21st
Century Slaves” written by Andrew Cockburn and published in the September
2003 issue of National Geographic magazine. Twenty-eight pages of the issue
are devoted to information on and photographs pertaining to slavery around
the world. This article provides a graphic overview of what still goes on.
The stories that come out of India, the Orient, and South America are
ghastly and alarming. But, in order to stay more or less on track, I want to
excerpt from the article as it pertains a young woman from the former Soviet
Republic of Moldova:
“One such child is a nearsighted, chain smoking blonde named
Victoria, at 20 a veteran of the international slave trade. For three
years of her life she was among an estimated 27 million men, women, and
children in the world who are enslaved--physically confined or
restrained and forced to work, or controlled through violence, or in
some other way treated as property.
Victoria’s odyssey began when she was 17, fresh out of school in
Chisinau, the decayed capital of the former Soviet republic of Moldova.
‘There was no work, no money,’ she explained simply. So when a
friend--’at least I thought he was my friend’--suggested that he could
help her get a job in a factory in Turkey, she jumped at the idea and
took up his offer to drive her there, through Romania. “But, when I
realized we had driven west, to the border with Serbia, I new something
was wrong.’
It was too late. At the border she was handed over to a group of Serb
men, who produced a new passport saying she was 18. They led her on foot
into Serbia and raped her, telling her they would kill her if she
resisted. They then sent her under guard to Bosnia, the Balkan republic
being rebuilt under a torrent of international aid after its years of
genocidal civil war.
Victoria was now a piece of property and, as such, was bought and
sold by different brothel owners ten times over the next two years for
an average price of $1,500. Finally, four months pregnant and fearful of
a forced abortion, she escaped. I found her hiding in the Bosnian city
of Mostar, sheltered by a group of Bosnian women.
In a soft monotone she recited the names of clubs and bars in various
towns where she had to dance semi-naked look cheerful, and have sex with
any customer who wanted her for the price of a few cigarettes. ‘The
clubs were all awful, although the Artemdia, in Banja Luka, was the
worst--all the customers were cops.’
Victoria was a debt slave. Payment for her services went straight to
her owner of the moment to cover her ‘debt’--the amount he had paid to
buy her from her previous owner. She was held in servitude unless or
until the money she owed to whomever controlled her had been recovered,
at which point she would be sold again and would begin to work off the
purchase price paid by her new owner. Although slavery in its
traditional form survives in many parts of the world, debt slavery of
this kind, with variations, is the most common form of servitude today…”
According to a “Radio Free Europe” article by Alexandria Poolos,
“Every year hundreds of thousands of women from Central and Eastern
Europe and the former Soviet Union are lured to the west with promises
of employment and a better life. Instead, many are sold into slavery and
prostitution as victims of human trafficking rings…to supply the sex
businesses around the world.”
The same article also provides the following information:
“It is almost impossible to know how many women are sold each year
into human trafficking rings for sexual exploitation. But international
agencies and government bodies estimate that over one billion women and
girls each year are sold into prostitution and sex-industry rings in
China, the United States, Western Europe, and the Middle East. Hundreds
of thousands of these, experts say, come from Central and Eastern Europe
and the former Soviet Union…
…Women living in the poorer countries of Central and Eastern Europe
are often lured into trafficking rings by newspaper advertisements
offering lucrative opportunities abroad working as waitresses or
nannies.
Another common method,…, is using marriage agencies to attract young,
single women looking to leave their home country…nearly all the
mail-order bride services in the former Soviet Union are under the
control of organized crime networks.
But, the most common form of recruitment is enlisting the aid of a
friend or acquaintance who can easily gain the woman’s trust. So called
‘second wave’ recruiting occurs when a trafficked woman returns home to
draft other women…
Whatever the recruitment method, the outcome is similar for most
women once they reach their destination country. Their passports are
taken away and they are told they must work as prostitutes in order to
pay off their travel and visa debts…many are sold and resold [as was
Victoria] by one brothel owner to another, and are subject to rape and
physical abuse if they attempt to resist…”
According to an article by the Coalition Against Trafficking in
Women, the number of victims from the Czech Republic and Poland is high,
increasing from 7 to 40 between 1993 and 1994.
La Strada is a Czech non-profit organization registered as a public
benefit organization. La Strada focuses on prevention of traffic in women,
support of victims of traffic in women, influencing legislation and
disseminating information on the issue. La Strada regards traffic in women
as a crucial human rights issue and thus, as a violation of women‘s rights.
La Strada CR, o.p.s., is part of an international program La Strada -
prevention of traffic in women, that also operates in the Netherlands,
Poland, Bulgaria and Ukraine.
La Strada began its work in the Czech Republic in 1995 as a project of
the ProFem foundation (Central European consultation center for women‘s
projects) and was registered as an independent organization in 1998.
The general work of La Strada CR, o.p.s., is funded by grants from the
Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Justice, European Union,
Novib, Global Fund for Women, the Hella Foundation and the Women´s World Day
of Prayer (the German Committee).
La Strada organizes informational events for girls and young women around
the Czech Republic aiming to strengthen their self-confidence and to inform
them about risks connected with work abroad and with work in prostitution.
La Strada trains professionals (e.g. employees of district councils,
family advice centers, shelter houses, streetwork organizations, NGOs,
police etc.) who work with risk groups so that they can further spread
information on prevention of traffic in women. La Strada also trains female
students of social sciences so that they can volunteer in La Strada´s
prevention work. Through mass media La Strada informs broad public about the
phenomena of traffic in women.
La Strada participated in a mutual prevention project together with the
International Organization for Migration (IOM) aimed at a mass information
campaign across the republic. (TV spots, mass media advertisement, posters,
"Bumerang" postcards, information leaflets distributed in restaurants and
Czech Railways trains etc.)
A hot line, which provides information about the issue of traffic in
women, advice regarding traveling or working abroad, operates Tuesday -
Thursday from 10 am through 5 pm at ++420 (0)2 22 71 71 71
La Strada attempts to influence both Czech and international legislation
in order to strengthen and ensure protection of the rights of women working
in prostitution as well as those who have become victims of traffic in
women.
Through petitions, public hearings in the Czech Senate and Parliament,
round table discussions of experts, organization of and participations at
conferences in the Czech Republic and abroad, La Strada attempts to create a
political platform to deal with the problematics of traffic in women.
La Strada has also been creating an archive of legal and political
documents related to the topic of traffic in women and forced prostitution.
These materials will be available to legislatures, students and journalists.
La Strada has presented lectures and presentations about the issue of
traffic in women as a violation of human rights in CEE for major state
international organizations (UN, Europol, OSCE, EC, Interpol etc.).
With the help of both Czech and foreign media, La Strada has increased
the awareness of traffic in women in all of its social and political
aspects.
La Strada has actively participated in a number of national as well as
international NGO networks including the Koordinacní kruh prevence násilí na
ženách (Coordinating circle for
prevention of violence against women), EUNATW, GAATW etc.
Conclusion:
One of the remaining questions is what will the Czechs and
Czech-Moravians of Texas do in regard to these issues. As a large,
well-situated group within the United States, we are in a prime position to
help those who find themselves in a perilous situation. Since the Czech
Heritage Society of Texas has deemed this topic too far from what it deems
as “Czech heritage,” who will take a leadership stand?
Susan Rektorik Henley
A Dissident Made, Not Born.
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