Slave Labor In Iraq

It's bad enough that so many Iraqi's are unemployed and poor since our invasion. But then to have the audacity to bring in poor and destitute migrant workers from other countries specifically to exploit and mistreat them is unconscionable. Is there any part of this war occupation that is right?

As waves of Iraqis flee their conflicted country, other desperate civilians are going in.

Migrant workers from some of the world's poorest countries are being lured by the prospect of inflated salaries in construction or security companies. Some enter despite explicit bans in their own governments; others think they are going to work in safe countries.

But instead of the conventional jobs that were promised, traffickers are hustling them into hardship conditions with little pay and no mobility, according to groups that work with migrants and small numbers of migrants themselves who have managed to ask for help. Some of them are being sent home to such places as Sri Lanka, Ethiopia and the Philippines.

It is the latest twist in a migration pattern that is creating extreme circumstances for vulnerable people who go abroad in quest of work.

In two months, the International Organization of Migration, an intergovernmental agency based in Geneva, said it has repatriated a total of 30 Sri Lankan carpenters brought from the Dubai airport to Iraq. Another 20 have come forward since then to ask for help.

"The Sri Lankans are the first concrete caseload we have been dealing with," said Vincent Houver, responsible for the agency's evacuation of third world nationals from Iraq. They are "the first visible and concrete sign that there is cause for concern."

Another group - five to six Ethiopian maids who had expected to work in Jordan - had been taken into Iraq against their will, Houver said. Some are being kept in Erbil, in the Kurdish north of Iraq, and the others in Baghdad, he said, and they are being prevented from leaving.

We aren't now and never have been out to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people and now we are importing people to treat even worse.

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