Free Slave Next Door by Kevin Bales, Ron. Soodalter

European au pairs.
    They fight uphill battles against bureaucracy, and, if they are lucky, they
    will be allocated federal funds—which are always too meager to meet
    the medical, psychological, housing, food and clothing, and legal needs
    of ex-slaves. One of the most highly respected of these NGOs is the
    Break the Chain Campaign in Washington, D.C., the salvation of many
    enslaved A-3 and G-5 visa holders. The campaign was set up in late
    1997, when Sarah Anderson and Martha Honey of the Institute of
    Policy Studies organized a meeting to consider the plight of domestic
    workers living in the Washington, D.C., area. Honey had carried out an
    investigation resulting in a feature article in a Washington newspaper. In
    it she listed and exposed abuses of domestic workers dating back to the
    1970s. She discovered that many domestic workers, nannies, and maids,
    mostly from overseas, were being mistreated, sometimes enslaved. At
    the meeting, a number of organizations that had been informally help-
    ing these domestic workers came together for the first time. These
    churches, social service agencies, and law offices, as well as concerned
    citizens, had operated a pathway to rescue and help reminiscent of the
    Underground Railroad. The groups decided to form a coalition that
    would campaign for the rights of abused domestic workers.
    Today, the Break the Chain Campaign locates, rescues, and supports
    abused and enslaved household workers. Often the only way to get any
    compensation for these workers is to bring suit against their “employ-
    ers,” since the campaign has found that law enforcement often takes no
    action. Lawyers acting on behalf of the Break the Chain Campaign carry
    out these lawsuits pro bono, but compensation is generally not available
    for freed domestics.
    The current system is strikingly iniquitous. If the same laws that ben-
    efit the advantaged children of middle-class foreign families were
    applied equally to those who need them most—the disadvantaged poor,
    seeking their chance for improvement—the number of household slav-
    ery cases would drop significantly. As it is, our government has no idea
    of the number of victims enslaved as domestics in America, and—with
    no oversight program in place—they seem to have no pressing desire to
    find out. With a system of assigning visas that works against the recipi-
    ents, no programs to monitor them once they are here, and a catch-22
    of negative options should they attempt to escape, the plight of the
    Bales_Ch02 2/23/09 11:04 AM Page 38
    3 8 / S L AV E S I N T H E L A N D O F T H E F R E E
    household slave cannot improve. The situation cannot change without a
    serious redirection of the government’s priorities away from the
    “employer” and toward the oversight and protection of the domestic
    worker. The fact that the State Department keeps no record of B-1
    domestic workers would be simply bizarre if it were not so dangerous.
    Today it is not even possible to know how many of these workers are in
    the country. Is it surprising that this backdoor into the America work-
    force is regularly exploited by criminals?
    The importation of domestic workers on special visas by foreign diplo-
    mats and employees of the World Bank, United Nations, and IMF also
    needs radical changes. It is estimated that some thirty thousand workers
    have come to the United States on these visas over the past ten years, but
    no one knows how much abuse occurs at the hands of diplomats, since no
    government agency tracks cases. In 2007 the State Department issued one
    thousand visas for personal servants of diplomats.15 Some diplomats
    brought in two or even three servants. While the diplomat has to show a
    contract for the worker in order to get the special visa, no one ever checks
    to see if the terms of these contracts are kept. Carol Pier of Human Rights
    Watch explained, “The special visa program allowing international agen-
    cies and embassies to sponsor the workers