One of the hot issues that separates one party from the other in the United States in this year’s election is immigration. One party emphasizes border security and stands on deporting immigrants who are residing in the country illegally. The other party wants to create a path for illegal immigrants to have legal status in the country.
However the problem of immigration is resolved, there will always be an immigrant who ends up in inhuman situation. This is true anywhere in the world where people who in the hope of escaping from violence, poverty and other inhumanity in their country of birth immigrates to another, only to be forced into greater suffering in the country into which they immigrated. Such is the what I described in a poem I wrote several years ago while residing in Thailand. Human trafficing, whether men are forced to be factory workers or women are compelled to be sex workers, is the worst kind of immigration!
The Migrant
Her mother
Sold her to a “kind” recruiter,
Who promised
she will work as a hairdresser.
She ends up
at a brothel, a sex worker.
She refused;
No one listened to her objection.
Instead she
was battered into submission.
And threatened –
More protests and she’d be bludgeoned.
A migrant –
Stranger in a foreign land;
She’s forlorn.
She’s to follow the boss’s command
And fulfill
what her customers would demand.
There’s no one
to help and come to her rescue.
All daylong
she serves men, young and old, old and new.
When alone,
She sits in a room without a view.
She’s hungry.
Each day she eats only kaotom.*
She’s made sick
by men who refuse to wear a condom.
She longs for
affection and for freedom.
Is there hope
for her and for countless others;
Innocent
children sold to heartless slavers;
Redemption
so remote, suffering forever?
It’s karma,
they tell her, due to her past deeds.
Such nonsense!
This is human cruelty and greed.
No! Never
what the Almighty has decreed!
O where’s God?
On her knees she asks day and night,
Begging God
To liberate her and others with God’s might –
The children
and women who dwell in the night . . . .
*Kaotom – boiled rice (in Thai).
-- Salvador T. Martinez
8 July 2003
Chiang Mai
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