A stretch of Roosevelt Avenue running through AOC’s Queens district is ironically nicknamed “the Market of Sweethearts,” due to the chaotic bazaar of prostitution there. Many workers are illegal aliens from Central America.
It is impossible to provide a definitive number of undocumented immigrant sex workers in the United States due to the clandestine nature of this activity. Nevertheless, Polaris, an anti-trafficking organization, analyzed information on sex-trafficked women to find some 52 percent were illegals. Another study found 72 percent of sex workers were immigrants. That’s uptown, AOC territory. In Midtown, Korean illegal immigration (since there is no visa for prostitution, it is in a way 100 percent illegal aliens, i.e., “unlawful presence”) runs the show. Downtown, it is the Chinese. Elsewhere, borough by borough, different nationalities do the nasty work. New York speaks 700 different languages, just not to each other.
According to the New York Times, prostitution has exploded into a “$3 billion-a-year industry” relying on tens of thousands of foreign women ensnared in a form of modern indentured servitude. “The frequently middle-aged women who work in parlors with names like Orchids of Asia and Rainbow Spa,” continues the Times, “are often struggling to pay off high debts to family members, loan sharks, labor traffickers and lawyers who help them file phony asylum claims. In some cases, their passports are taken and their illegal immigration status keeps them further in the shadows.” A federal law enforcement official said the most common method for smuggling women from Asian countries was either a fraudulent tourist visa or a fraudulent work visa. Many came as students, then overstayed to work in the sex industry. What woman, given other legitimate, livable opportunities, would choose to work as a prostitute?
For a while I worked in a number of New York’s pizza restaurants. Almost to the man all the kitchen work was done by likely illegals, somehow primarily from Ecuador. With my nascent Spanish it wasn’t easy to get to know them, until I hit on some key phrases. It was too sensitive in most cases to ask if the guy was illegal (after all, I was an older, white man just like the owner, who pretended not to know) but I eventually learned that asking how long it was for the guy between visits to his family back home was a good way to get at the idea. Many had been working six days a week for years. I was paid minimum wage plus alongside tips; they got less and worked longer and harder. That’s why, while eating your pizza waiting in line to visit Ellis Island, the slice was only $1.99.
Ellis Island celebrates the historical version of America’s immigration fantasy—Uncle from the Old Country arriving with $5 to grab the American Dream. In fact, the great wave of 19th-century immigration, first from Ireland, and then from Italy and Eastern Europe, was driven from poverty at home (same as today) but was drawn by the massive need for cheap, disposable labor in the United States. Instead of staffing pizza joints and massage parlors, Irish immigrants (technically not “illegal” since the U.S. had no real immigration law at that time) left New York City to dig the Erie Canal by hand for pitiful wages. Many Irish also ended up in New Orleans, where a number of the city’s levees and canals were built by laborers who labored under grueling conditions. This came at a cost. Tens of thousands of Irish workers (nobody kept track) lost their lives due to horrific working conditions, malaria, and dangerous flooding.
That era of exploitation on the eastern and southern coasts mimics that of the great Midwestern and Western agricultural states. Decades after men like Cesar Chavez thought they broke the back of Big Ag, which was using Mexican and other labor to make huge profits, little has changed. I just got an email from Amazon/Whole Foods saying some of the prices on my weekly standard delivery order are going up due to “increasing labor costs.” In the agriculture sector, 76 percent percent of the exploited persons are immigrants, and nearly half of all victims are from Mexico.
And that touches the third rail of importing cheap labor to the United States, the actual slave trade, which preceded mass immigration. Call it racist to bypass the forced nature of this “immigration,” but the parameters are terribly similar. Both involve people being denied basic rights and protections, both situations involve exploitation—long hours, little or no pay, unsafe conditions, and both enslaved people and illegal alien workers are in vulnerable positions, often unable to leave or seek help safely (such as trafficked aliens). It is certainly not the same, but the cheap, exploitable labor that drives prostitution and farm work in modern America has the same basis as the cheap, exploitable labor which drove the antebellum global agrarian economy.
Subscribe Today
Get daily emails in your inbox
The pool of vulnerable labor is by necessity large, with some 18.6 million million illegal aliens currently in the U.S. Yet demanding even more immigration, and playing cops and robbers with ICE, is a key platform for the Democratic party today. So what are they fighting for?
They are for the same base of exploitable labor that has been a part of the United States from near the Founding, only this time dressed up with the sanction of modern liberal morality. The farm workers the Democrats celebrate as hard-working men of the soil are just people imported for their vulnerability. Those 19th-century immigrants were sacrificing all for a better future by laboring in some of the worst sweatshops of the century (my maternal grandfather was an unschooled child laborer in a candy factory.) It looks good for many family stories to focus on those black and white relatives who came over (and that certainly is the myth behind the Ellis Island version of things), but in reality it hides the same dark tale still being written today.
Despite her pretty words about freedom, AOC supports the sexual exploitation of women and girls. Gavin Newsom supports the use of Mexicans in his “sanctuary” state as long as they do back-breaking field work. Zohran Mamdani will be ensuring his New York is maintained with inexpensive restaurant food and plenty of prostitutes. Forget the sob stories about hard-working dads plucked out of the meatpacking plants (undocumented workers make up up to 50 percent percent of the meatpacking workforce; meatpacking companies recently paid out $8 million for child labor violations) by the ICE “Gestapo,” and focus on what is underlying all those workers being drawn here in the first place. Illegal labor is the engine of a shadow economy and always has been—now fully supported by Democrats.
