The Lure of a Better Life: Human Trafficking in the Bay Area

Holy Family Sister Caritas Foster

“You are a useless house girl.”

The sentence echoed daily in Sarah’s ears. Her employer, a Kenyan woman, had brought Sarah (not her real name) from Nairobi to the San Francisco Bay Area to take care of the woman’s toddler and her house. Sarah, in her 20s, had believed life would be better in the United States. There was no food in her village. She worked cleaning houses in Nairobi to support her small daughter and her parents. When her employer asked her to come with her to the United States, Sarah felt a leap of hope.

“I was convinced life would be good. When we landed at the San Francisco airport, everything looked so beautiful,” she told an audience of Burlingame Mercy sisters in 2005.

The cruel reality was that Sarah had been labor trafficked by the Kenyan employer, brought here to work as a household slave, imprisoned by threats of harm to her family back home if she didn’t obey. Her employer took her passport and told her that her pay of $50 per month would accumulate toward paying her ticket home. She was not to go out alone or to speak to anyone.

Sarah’s story is one of a pattern which many believe is the largest international criminal operation after drugs. Because victims like Sarah are so well hidden, statistics of human trafficking are difficult to verify. The U.S. State Department estimates that each year more than 600,000 men, women, and children are brought across international borders for both forced labor and sexual exploitation mainly from Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America, and more than 14,000 are trafficked into the United States.

“We in the San Francisco Bay Area are one of the largest receiving areas with our borders and coasts,” said Sister of the Holy Family Caritas Foster, who has dedicated her ministry for four years to educating the public on trafficking. “The fallacy is that anyone illegal comes in through our southern borders,” she said. “Transnationals come into our state at our airports and docks. The lure of a better life is powerful.”

Sister Caritas is tireless in telling the powerful story of people often hidden in plain sight, working in restaurants, nursing homes and even private homes. She has spoken to Rotary clubs, Soroptimist groups and parishes, describing the power that traffickers hold over the workers they have brought to the area. They take away the workers’ documents and threaten them with deportation. Isolated by their lack of English and often prohibited from ever leaving their work site, many victims have no idea where they are. [More]

SOURCE

Catholic San Francisco