| Slavery in America never really went away. |
| When Columbus began settling the Bahamas in the early 1500's, one of the first acts of the settlers in that region was to enslave the native population for the purpose of farming sugar cane. News of this practice reached what is now Florida. When Ponce De Leon arrived, the native people killed him in what is now west Florida in an attempt to avoid becoming slaves themselves. It was a futile effort Soon Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and English colonies in what is now the Carolinas realized the need for cheap labor to work on the sugar and tobacco plantations that supported the regions. Europeans engaged themselves as "indentured servants" in order to make their way to the new world. Under this arrangement, they would work for free for a pre-arranged period of time in order to repay the entity that arranged for their passage to America. When the number of indentured servants from Europe failed to satisfy the need for cheap labor, Africans began to be imported under similar arrangements. Soon, this pact morphed into blatant slavery. These African slaves were forced to work under difficult conditions and live in substandard housing. This practice continued until slavery was abolished in America with the end of the Civil War in 1865. The need for cheap labor didn't disappear with the availability of African slaves. During the remainder of the 1800's and the beginning of the 1900's the country was flooded with an influx of immigrants from eastern Europe and Ireland. Although not technically slaves, these immigrants lived in substandard housing and worked for below subsistence wages. Often they worked in towns where the main employer also owned the housing and the stores from which they bought their necessities. Salaries were fixed so that they could not meet their expenses. This forced them to borrow money from company owned stores in order to survive. Soon they were in debt to the people who owned the factories where they worked, which forced them to work in perpetuity trying to pay the debt that only increased with time. While not technically slavery, the effect was much the same. (An old spiritual from the time included these words: "St. Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go. I owe my soul to the company store") These circumstances continued until the onset of the Great Depression in 1929. More recently, the need for cheap labor has returned. Once again, the solution has been immigration. This time, the immigrants have come from the south...mostly from Mexico, with a significant contingent from Central and South America. Most of these immigrants arrive here illegally. This illegal status denies them the rights that American citizens take for granted. While they differ from slaves in the sense that they can move from one employer to another, they are for the most part trapped in a menial labor market. These jobs provide subsistence wages which limit them to housing that, while it is superior to the slave quarters of the old south, is often substandard and typically government subsidized. While it is possible for individual immigrants to climb the economic ladder and attain some measure of financial independence, each upwardly mobile immigrant is replaced with another new immigrant that can be exploited. The result is a permanent class that bears a remarkable resemblance to the slaves of pre Civil War America. |
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