Editor's Сhoice
August 24, 2025
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By Peter VAN BUREN

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A stretch of Roosevelt Avenue running through AOC’s Bronx district is nicknamed “The Market of Sweethearts,” due to the chaotic bazaar of prostitution there. Most 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. However, 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, sex work 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 awhile 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 a 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) were tricked to leave New York City and dig the Erie Canal by hand for pitiful wages. The Irish were also trafficked to New Orleans, where many of the city’s levees and canals were built by laborers who worked 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. The term “Irish slaves” is sometimes used to refer to the harsh reality faced by these laborers.

That era of exploitation on the eastern and southern coasts mimics that of the great Midwest and western agricultural states. Decades after men like Cesar Chavez though 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 of the exploited persons are immigrants and nearly half of all those are from Mexico.

And that touches the third rail of importing cheap labor to the United States, the actual slave trade, which preceeded 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 is the same in the basics as the cheap, exploitable labor which drove the antebellum global agrarian economy.

The pool of vulnerable labor is by necessity large, with some 18.6 million illegal aliens currently in the U.S. And 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 in modern moral dress. 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 sweat shops 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. Eric Adams is ensuring his New York is maintained with inexpensive restaurant food and plenty of sex traders. Forget the sob stories about hard-working dads plucked out of the meat packing plants (undocumented workers make up  up to 50 percent of the meatpacking workforce; meatpacking companies recently paid out $8 million for child labor violations) by Gestapo ICE 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.

Original article:  wemeantwell.com

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.
The real cost of illegal immigration

By Peter VAN BUREN

Join us on TelegramTwitter, and VK.

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

A stretch of Roosevelt Avenue running through AOC’s Bronx district is nicknamed “The Market of Sweethearts,” due to the chaotic bazaar of prostitution there. Most 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. However, 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, sex work 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 awhile 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 a 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) were tricked to leave New York City and dig the Erie Canal by hand for pitiful wages. The Irish were also trafficked to New Orleans, where many of the city’s levees and canals were built by laborers who worked 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. The term “Irish slaves” is sometimes used to refer to the harsh reality faced by these laborers.

That era of exploitation on the eastern and southern coasts mimics that of the great Midwest and western agricultural states. Decades after men like Cesar Chavez though 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 of the exploited persons are immigrants and nearly half of all those are from Mexico.

And that touches the third rail of importing cheap labor to the United States, the actual slave trade, which preceeded 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 is the same in the basics as the cheap, exploitable labor which drove the antebellum global agrarian economy.

The pool of vulnerable labor is by necessity large, with some 18.6 million illegal aliens currently in the U.S. And 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 in modern moral dress. 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 sweat shops 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. Eric Adams is ensuring his New York is maintained with inexpensive restaurant food and plenty of sex traders. Forget the sob stories about hard-working dads plucked out of the meat packing plants (undocumented workers make up  up to 50 percent of the meatpacking workforce; meatpacking companies recently paid out $8 million for child labor violations) by Gestapo ICE 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.

Original article:  wemeantwell.com