Monday, March 12, 2007

From the Southern Poverty Law Center

You may have read in today's New York Times that we are issuing a major report about the systematic exploitation of immigrants who come to the United States legally as temporary "guestworkers."

Called Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States, our report chronicles the way guestworkers are routinely cheated out of wages; forced to mortgage their futures to obtain low-wage, temporary jobs; virtually enslaved by employers who seize their documents; forced to live in squalid conditions; and denied medical benefits for injuries.

This is not what America's all about — and we must put an end to it.

With your help, we've been pressuring the Bush administration to stop the abuses, and we've forced major corporations to pay back wages to cheated workers and reform their practices. But there is still much work to be done.

Congress now has the opportunity to right this terrible wrong. As lawmakers debate immigration reform in the coming weeks, the danger is that they will expand the shameful guestworker system. We're working to ensure that it is either eliminated or radically overhauled to make it a fair program with strong, vigorously enforced worker protections.

Your support has been crucial to our efforts to inform the country of this moral outrage. The abuse of temporary foreign workers in America today is one of the major civil rights issues of our time. For too long, we've reaped the economic benefits of their labor but have ignored the incredible degree of abuse and exploitation they endure.

With your help, we will keep up our efforts. Please take a moment to read the executive summary of our new report, and when you're through, please forward this email to someone. We're counting on you to help us bring awareness of the problem to those in your community.

As a nation, we must address the many problems in our broken immigration system, but we cannot condone a program that systematically abuses and enslaves poor workers from other countries who are lured here by false promises.

On behalf of all those we serve, thank you for your important support of our work for justice.

Sincerely,

Morris Dees

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