Slave Next Door (8 page)

unusual, and they all raise the question of why slaveholders are consis-

tently given prison sentences far shorter than the time they held their

victims in slavery.

T H E N A N N Y N E X T D O O R

If it were just a matter of running down the criminals and locking them

up, solving the problem of domestic slavery would be somewhat less of

a challenge. Sadly, the roots of domestic slavery grow right out of our

law books, allowing “employers” to easily bring slaves into the United

States for exploitation. And while a person’s economic vulnerability

often contributes to her chances of becoming a slave, ironically, the

type of visa she is given by the U.S. government helps set the stage for

enslavement.

Three types of visas for workers from overseas lead to many cases of

domestic slavery. The A-3 visa is for household employees of diplomats.

The G-5 visa is given for domestic workers attached to the households

of employees of international agencies such as the United Nations, the

World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The B-1 visa

serves a larger group, since it covers the domestic workers who

“belong” to businesspeople, foreign nationals, and American citizens

with permanent residency abroad. All of these visas cover such house-

hold workers as housekeepers, nannies, cooks, drivers, and gardeners.

These servants are linked to named individuals and are clearly in a sit-

uation of control and dependence, yet once they have passed through

border control they are lost to view. No records are kept of the where-

abouts of B-1 workers, and while an address is listed on the A-3 and G-5

application forms, there is normally no follow-up. Nearly four thousand

of these visas are handed out each year; the largest proportion—about a

thousand—are G-5s, for the servants of UN, World Bank, and IMF

employees. To add further spice to this recipe for enslavement, a worker

with an A-3 visa lives in legal limbo. Since her employer has diplomatic

immunity, he can’t be charged with criminal or civil violations. The

State Department can investigate and request that immunity be waived,

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but in every case where this has happened the diplomat has been

whisked out of the country and the domestic worker has been dumped

or deported.

A case that unfolded on Long Island, New York, points to the risks

faced by domestic workers brought in on B-1 visas. Early on the morn-

ing of May 13, 2007, a woman was found wandering outside a dough-

nut shop on Long Island wearing only pants and a towel. This woman,

an Indonesian, was agitated and muttering, saying that she had been

injured and wanted to return to her own country. Apparently, while

taking out the trash, the woman had escaped the night before from the

home—usually described as a “mansion”—of Mahender and Varsha

Sabhnani, American citizens originally from India. After questioning

the woman, police went to the Sabhnani home, where they discovered

another Indonesian woman in distressed circumstances. Shortly after,

the Sabhnanis were arrested.

In this case, the police played a vital role in the rescue of both women.

Police have to deal with disturbed people regularly, and there’s a good

chance that the woman at the doughnut shop might have been institu-

tionalized, jailed, or taken straight back to the couple that had enslaved

her. Instead, she was freed—because of a police officer’s homemade

video. The story bears telling.

A few years ago, John Birbiglia, a local police detective, was called in

by his boss and told, “You’re in charge of human trafficking,” even

though his boss didn’t know of any cases and the detective had no aware-

ness of the problem. Consequently, Birbiglia attended a series of train-

ing programs given by Long Island’s newly created Anti–Human

Trafficking Task Force, and—electrified by what he had learned—

decided to share it with his fellow officers. Frustrated while waiting for

government training videos, he made his own—a rough, short tape that

described what a trafficking case might look like—and showed it at roll

call to the officers with whom he worked. Eventually his superior

noticed the time and resources he was putting into the training and

thought Birbiglia might be wasting time on it, since there weren’t any

trafficking cases in their bailiwick anyway.

But just a few days later, one of the policemen who had seen

Birbiglia’s video received a call from the doughnut shop, reporting that

a distraught, scantily clad Indonesian woman was attracting attention.

Had he not been given a modicum of training in human trafficking, the

officer might well have responded by arresting the woman or returning

her to her abusers. Instead, recognizing a possible trafficking case, he

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called Birbiglia, who had made and shown him the tape, and the woman

was rescued. As the result of a little training, two women were freed.

Ideally, this is the way it is supposed to happen.11

After investigation, it was determined that the two women, identified

as Samirah and Enung, had been legally brought into the United States

by the Sabhnanis in 2002 on B-1 visas. Once Samirah and Enung were

inside their home, the Sabhnanis confiscated their passports and locked

them in. Both were made to sleep on mats in the kitchen and given so

little to eat that they were forced to steal food and hide it from the

Sabhnanis. The Indonesian women described punishments ranging

from being forced to eat large numbers of chili peppers, to being sliced

behind the ears with a knife, to having scalding water thrown over them.

They were in slavery for five years. At the Sabhnanis’ trial in December

2007, Assistant U.S. attorney Mark Lesko said that Samirah and Enung

were subjected to “punishment that escalated into a cruel form of tor-

ture.” Enung testified that Samirah’s nude body once was covered in

plastic wrapping tape on orders from Varsha Sabhnani, who then

instructed Enung to rip it off. “When I pulled it off, she was scream-

ing,” the housekeeper said through an interpreter before breaking down

in tears on the witness stand.12 Just before Christmas 2007, the

Sabhnanis were convicted on all charges in a twelve-count federal indict-

ment that included forced labor, conspiracy, involuntary servitude, and

harboring aliens—convicted of enslaving two women brought into the

country legally on B-1 visas. In June 2008, Varsha was sentenced to

eleven years in prison, fined $25,000, and ordered to forfeit the family

home, worth around $2 million.13 Her husband, Mahender—who didn’t

actually participate in the brutality but who, according to the prosecu-

tors, “allowed the conduct to take place and benefited from the work of

the women”—was given a sentence of three and a half years and fined

$12,500.14

This is worth a recap: about four thousand foreign workers are

brought in each year with no contract requirements. To get the visa, the

employer just has to state that he will provide “reasonable living and

working conditions.” Whatever paperwork is filed to get the visa can be

disregarded as soon as the worker walks out of the airport; no one is

checking. If a domestic worker ends up abused and enslaved, there are

several possible outcomes, most of them bad. If she has an A-3 visa, her

diplomat “employer” can’t be arrested or prosecuted. If she has a B-1

visa, no one knows where she is anyway, so her best chance is to try to

escape; but if she does, she is officially defined as “out of status” and

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will be deported if found. With a G-5 visa, escape can also mean depor-

tation, and while her employer doesn’t have immunity, he can simply

leave the country if it looks as if he might be caught. Our visa system,

far from being used to the advantage of the household workers, stacks

the deck against them from the beginning. The ugliness of this situation

is exacerbated by the fact that the U.S. government already
has
a system

in place that can fix most of these problems.

A TA L E O F T W O N A N N I E S

If you are a poor Filipina, Indonesian, or West African woman who des-

perately needs a job to support your family back home, then you are

likely to end up in the unmonitored and dangerous world of the domes-

tic worker in America. On the other hand, if you are a middle-class

French, English, or Belgian girl interested in “educational and cultural

exchange,” you can come to the United States as an “au pair” and do

the same type of nanny job some enslaved domestics were promised, but

with a system of protections in place.

Unlike the ignored servants receiving B-1 visas, these young women,

educated, middle class, and European, will be granted a J-1 visa, which

is a ticket to safe and protected household work. With a J-1 visa each au

pair or nanny is flown to New York for an orientation session and is

introduced to a group of other nannies who will be located in the same

geographical area. In this way, the women can form a network of friend-

ships and have contacts from their own country whom they can call if

they want to. After joining their host family, the nanny attends another

orientation program to learn about educational opportunities, commu-

nity resources, and contacts for a local support network. The nanny and

her employers are required to discuss their situation with a counselor

every month to report any problems and resolve disputes. The law stip-

ulates that the host family has to pay the au pair a weekly stipend of at

least the minimum wage, topped up with another $500 for academic

expenses. Rules state that the au pair is not allowed to work more than

forty-five hours a week and must have a private bedroom. Another rule

requires a $500 fee to be paid by employers to cover inspection and

enforcement costs. There is also a review of the suitability of the employ-

ers and their families and a requirement that “all adults living in the host

family must pass a background investigation, including employment and

personal character references.” No limit is imposed on the number of J-1

visas that can be granted each year. For the U.S. government to operate

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these two systems in parallel is at best puzzling and at worst callous and

exploitative.

Several nonprofit groups are currently seeking the same benefits for

other household workers that the government offers European au pairs.

They fight uphill battles against bureaucracy, and, if they are lucky, they

will be allocated federal funds—which are always too meager to meet

the medical, psychological, housing, food and clothing, and legal needs

of ex-slaves. One of the most highly respected of these NGOs is the

Break the Chain Campaign in Washington, D.C., the salvation of many

enslaved A-3 and G-5 visa holders. The campaign was set up in late

1997, when Sarah Anderson and Martha Honey of the Institute of

Policy Studies organized a meeting to consider the plight of domestic

workers living in the Washington, D.C., area. Honey had carried out an

investigation resulting in a feature article in a Washington newspaper. In

it she listed and exposed abuses of domestic workers dating back to the

1970s. She discovered that many domestic workers, nannies, and maids,

mostly from overseas, were being mistreated, sometimes enslaved. At

the meeting, a number of organizations that had been informally help-

ing these domestic workers came together for the first time. These

churches, social service agencies, and law offices, as well as concerned

citizens, had operated a pathway to rescue and help reminiscent of the

Underground Railroad. The groups decided to form a coalition that

would campaign for the rights of abused domestic workers.

Today, the Break the Chain Campaign locates, rescues, and supports

abused and enslaved household workers. Often the only way to get any

compensation for these workers is to bring suit against their “employ-

ers,” since the campaign has found that law enforcement often takes no

action. Lawyers acting on behalf of the Break the Chain Campaign carry

out these lawsuits pro bono, but compensation is generally not available

for freed domestics.

The current system is strikingly iniquitous. If the same laws that ben-

efit the advantaged children of middle-class foreign families were

applied equally to those who need them most—the disadvantaged poor,

seeking their chance for improvement—the number of household slav-

ery cases would drop significantly. As it is, our government has no idea

of the number of victims enslaved as domestics in America, and—with

no oversight program in place—they seem to have no pressing desire to