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Around the town of Immokalee
Human trafficking: The destination

People travel the world looking for work. They get into debt in order to cross borders and continents in the hope of earning better money in a new country.

In Florida, around the town of Immokalee, workers from Guatemala, Mexico and Haiti pick tomatoes and oranges, working for contractors who sell the produce on to the big fast food and retail companies.Having paid to cross the border, they then pay again to get a ride to Florida where the work is. Before they get to work they are already in debt.

Once they arrive they live in appalling conditions. Laura Germino, who works for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a local grass roots union, told BBC World Service of a local labour camp, with its rows of trailers, people living 12 to 14 in a trailer.
"They really have nothing in them, no furniture, just a few burners and minimal bath facilities. They are so hot inside they are like a cauldron."It's a harsh life. "You pick all day long, as much as you can for 40 cents a bucket, which is the same price as they paid in 1978," Germino said. Wages are so low in Florida you have to pick two tonnes of tomatoes to earn US$50.

"And then you get home and have to wait in line for the burners, wait in line to eat, wait in line for a shower, and then you sleep in this hot tin box."For the trailer, the hot tin box, the workers will pay between then a rent as high as US$1,200 a month, the sort of money that would get you a decent apartment in a better area. But they have no choice about where they live - they have to be near the contractors' buses, and that means the trailer camp.

"These are sweatshops in the fields," Laura Germino said. "You don't have to move your factory to a third world country. The people come here to you."
The reality is there is precious little left at the end of the week to send home and little to live on.Professor Peter Kwong lives and works in New York. He has studied his local immigrant Chinese community at first hand."They are getting very low wages so they have to save everything they have to pay off their debts. They live in dormitories, six, seven, eight, nine people in one room, eating the most simple meals, working 12 or 14 hours a day, seven days week throughout the year."

The going rate for being smuggled into America from China is US$50,000 or more. "This very large illegal immigrant community provides a space for organised crime to survive. In other words, not only involving human smuggling, but also enforcement - making sure people pay their debts.""The tendency now is to borrow, either in the US or in mainland China at very high interest rates. US$50,000 can take four or five years to pay off, but with the very high interest rates it takes much longer."

In families, both parents work very long hours and the children are often sent back to China to be brought up by their grandparents. "We are talking about very traumatic family circumstances in many of these illegal families," Professor Kwong said.Separated families, debts, violence are now the hallmarks of many communities.But though there is much concern about human smuggling and trafficking, Peter Kwong believes there is an ambivalent attitude within Government and business, certainly in the United States.

"The American economy is very much dependent on labour from illegal workers. Without them there is no agriculture, no garment industry or domestic service. So from the economic side, from the business community there is no incentive for the Government to restrict illegal immigration," he said."Employers like them because [they are] cheap, not just in wages, but in benefit costs and they are unprotected by labour laws. So they are very vulnerable. The employers simply exploit them."
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