The Girls Next Door (Illegal Alien Slavery)

The New York Times ^ | January 25, 2004 | PETER LANDESMAN

[sarcasm]

ping

[Triple Word Score]

Just two days earlier, her parents heard from Suri (they call her by her nickname) for the first time since she disappeared. ''She's in Queens, New York,'' the mother told me breathlessly. ''She said she was being kept in a house watched by Colombians. She said they take her by car every day to work in a brothel. I was crying on the phone, 'When are you coming back, when are you coming back?' '' The mother looked at me helplessly; the father stared blankly into the distance. Then the mother sobered. ''My daughter said: 'I'm too far away. I don't know when I'm coming back.''' Before she hung up, Suri told her mother: ''Don't cry. I'll escape soon. And don't talk to anyone.''

You know, this undermines the credibility of the whole piece for me.

[Triple Word Score]

Should amend that--I don't doubt at all that it goes on...I just think the NYT is publishing a mostly-made-up article about it.

[sarcasm]

ping

[Cicero]

My take on this is that it's probably partly true, and not especially surprising. The difference between a prostitute and a sex slave is not always very great. Pimps have often brutalized their girls and taken most of their money. It's traditional.

In New York City, before they went out of fashion, you would often see "pimpmobiles"--long white Cadillacs with lots of chrome, slowly cruising around the city. Those guys bought their expensive cars by beating the girls who worked for them and taking most of their money.

When you hear feminists talk about legalizing prostitution and unionizing it, you have to wonder. The people who control the sex business, like the people who control the drug business, are not nice.

[mgist]

Excuse me, I'm going to go puke now.

[mgist]

By the way, leave it to the NYT to portray Americans as a bunch of deviant perverts. Please note the the world reads NYT and walks away thinking, Those Americans are all a bunch of sexual deviants hurting the rest of the world . . . yada, yada, yada. But I'm glad somebody is talking about the ugliness of the sexual industry.

[Centurion2000]

My God.

[FITZ]

http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2002/senoritaextraviada/update.html

There are many murdered and raped women and girls whose bodies were found in and around Ciudad Juarez, hundreds of girls and women missing whose bodies have never been found.

[Incorrigible]

The neighborhood is a leafy, middle-class Anytown.

Right off the bat, The New York Times lies!

Plainfield, NJ is not middle-class anytown!

In the 50's and 60's there was a large amount of industry in the south west part of the city.  This industry attracted African Americans from the south.  Things were going OK according to my relatives that lived there but there was a bifurcation in the city as to the haves and the have-nots.  When Newark had it's riots in 1967, Plainfield did too.  The slow trickle of white-flight from Plainfield turned into torrent.

As industry left New Jersey in the 70's and 80's, Plainfield became a broken down shell of its former self.  The big houses near the downtown area were still there but turned into flats and flop houses.  Businesses were boarded up.  The nice section of Plainfield, called Sleepy Hollow, caters to blacks and whites wealthy enough to pay property taxes and send their kids to private schools.  For that they get good police protection.  The area is also attracting many gays who are interested in restoring the large Victorian homes to their former glory.  But I digress since the reporter was NOT in this area.

The biggest change Plainfield has had recently occurred after Hurricane Floyd in 1996.  Floyd flooded Bound Brook, NJ under 17 feet of water.  This is significant since the lower part of Bound Brook was inhabited mostly by Central American immigrants, many illegal.  (When I lived nearby, I worked with a charity organization there.)  After Floyd, many of those people left and found the cheap rents in Plainfield attractive.

Now, I'm not for illegal immigration either but businesses started to open up, houses downtown and in the south west part of town were getting repaired and lived in.  The culture of the town is changing and getting more lively.  The influx of the Latin Americans and Mexicans has been a big boost to the City of Plainfield.  The mayor and administrators are as corrupt as ever but at least there's some building activity around the train station that was recently fixed up.

Anyway, the NY Times knows this history, or at least should.  It's no surprise to find sex slaves and sleazy Mexican pimps in Plainfield.  And the reason is because Plainfield is not "Anytown"!

[JOAT]

Nauseating

[sarcasm]

The culture of the town is changing and getting more lively.

If you consider prostitution and child slavery an asset.

[Dark Wing]

This will make you sick.

[Triple Word Score]

I don't doubt at all that this goes on. I just doubt that the NYT has done honest journalism about it.

[FITZ]

It might be honest --- there is an illegal here where I live who thinks something like this might have happened to his ex-wife --- only she would be somewhere in Mexico City, not the USA. She met some man and she left town with him, leaving her two daughters behind, one day the man called and spoke to one of the daughters --- who lives with the illegal's parents, telling her he needed her help to find the mother. The 16 year old girl is desperate to know where her mother is --- she hasn't seen or heard from her in months. The next day the mother calls from some phone in Mexico City telling the girl not to believe the man, not to go with him. The mother has not been heard from since. The father's family believes the man was trying to lure the daughter --- and when women and girls disappear in Mexico they are often never found. There seems to be no way to find them.

[Triple Word Score]

How frightening...and our law enforcement is kept out of it. They only get to clean up the very worst of the messes, when someone is actually killed and dumped somewhere.

[gubamyster]

ping