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Old 08-12-2010, 10:38 AM   #1
Frdsdx26

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Oct 2005
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Default Florida's modern day slavery
Bill McCollum, Atorney General of Florida, now running for Governor, wants to institute an Arizona-like immigration law in the state. Yes, we have immigrants in Florida, lots of them. Many of them are brought in on work visas from Mexico, Ecuador, Haiti and other countries to work in the state's agriculture industry, picking tomatos, for example. In fact, about 90% of the tomatoes that end up in fast food restaurants and grocery stores on the eastern seaboard come from Florida.

There's a problem, though. To keep profits high for Publix and others, and to keep prices low for consumers, many of these immigrants have been subjected to sub-poverty wages, sub-human living conditions and yes, outright slavery. When I say slavery, I mean just that -- keeping human beings against their will, beating them, chaining them in produce box trucks, and deducting money from their wages for hosing off in the fields or using a bathroom.

Nowhere has the problem been more severe than around Immokalee, near Lake Okeechobee. There is now a travleing museum making its way across the country, Florida Modern-Day Slavery Museum, sponsored by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. I urge you to check it out. See what's really happening in the agricultural industry in this country.

ModernDaySlavery

Immokalee_Workers
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Old 08-12-2010, 12:04 PM   #2
Geetiill

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You have to be kidding me...

Actually, no you don't. It's like a comment I made to a fb friend a day ago: Isn't it funny how the people carrying posters of Obama as Hitler are the same ones seemingly inching closer towards an American Kristalnacht when it comes to mosques? What happened to "those who don't follow history are doomed to repeat it?" The sad thing is in this case though, they all seem to know history, and still are all too happy to ignore it!

The Fkorida notion I think has an extra level of scary to it: Is it me, or can anyone else picture a violent flareup from immigrants against Cubans? "Hey, you let them in no problem, why not us?!"
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Old 08-12-2010, 06:53 PM   #3
Argurnenoni

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This isn't anything new, Dave. I remember reading a book years ago called Angel City, by Patrick Smith. It was a fictionalized account of migrant labor camps in Florida circa 1970. This is an account of what drove Mr. Smith to write the book:

In the mid-1970s, after reading a newspaper article about the plight of migrant workers in south Florida, he found an issue that would absorb his spare time for several years. The newspaper told about a migrant crew chief who had enslaved his workers for more than two years, who whouldn't pay them or let them out of the camp, and who beat them regularly. The police finally arrested the crew chief and took him to court, but had to release him when none of the workers, all of whom were scared of him, would testify against him.
http://www.patricksmithonline.com/riverishome.html

Today, forty years later, not much has changed. This is the true face of the migrant farm worker in the U.S., a true "immigration problem." The abuse is not just in Florida, but throughout the country. Men, women and children face harsh conditions every day in order to harvest the food we all eat.
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