Slavery of today

I started reading this magazine Foreign Affairs (I know you're thinking what a dork). However, I have bought the last two issues and I have found it quite enjoyable. One of the articles was regarding slavery. The amount of people that are slaves has been estimated between 600,000-800,000 people that are slaves from country to country, intra-country slavery is harder to determine and has a wide range of 8-27 million. Apparently, the biggest culprit is India.

Most slaves are promised a wonderful job in another country. The "dealer" offers them a loan at a very high interest rate and when "employeee" arrives at the host country, what do you know, the job does not exist anymore. But now he/she must pay back the loan to the "dealer" and the "dealer offers them a job, but a very low wage rate so they will more than likely never pay off the loan.

It is much, much cheaper to transport a slave nowadays compared to the times of the Atlantic slave trade. Therefore, it is a very profitable business. Most costs run around $3,000 and they are usually sold for about $12,000.

Approximately 80% of slaves are women and of those women, 50% are under the age of 18. More than likely they will be sex slaves in underdeveloped countries in Asia and the Middle East. The US government cannot focus on this because they are to busy asking these countries to help them fight terrorism. Since most Americans are oblivious that this even as prevalent, no congressman is asked to do so.

So, what can you do? Well, for one thing, you can write your congressperson and tell them that you are very concerned about this issue and ask him/her what they have done to halt slave trade and let them know to push the issues. Another thing is to boycott goods/services from Tier 2 countries (governments who efforts to comply with antislavery laws is weak) - Algeria, Argentina, Armenia, Bahrain, Bolivia, Brazil, Cambodia, the Central African Republic, China, Cyprus, Dijibouti, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, India, Indonesia, Israel, Jamaica, Kenya, Kuwait, Libya, Macau, Malaysia, Mauritania, Mexico, Oman, Peru, Qatar, Russia, South Africa, Taiwan, Togo, and the United Arab Emirates.