Should we partially repeal the 13th Amendment to help people?

Great Debates
1

It is my understanding that the 13th amendment also bans indentured servitude. It is my position that we need to repeal this part the 13th amendment to help people living in 3rd world countries.

Here is my reasoning:

  1. People are selfish. We may like to think that people with help other people without there being something in it for them, but this is often not the case. There are currently a lot of people in 3rd world countries that could

  2. There a lot of people in the world that raise their standard of living by coming to the US and working as an indentured servant for 7 years.

  3. We can set up protection for the indentured servants to make sure they are not abused. No more than 70 hours of work a week. No beatings. Etc.

  4. We can require that the indentured servants are given education including English proficiency so they are ready to enter the job market after the 7 years are up.

  5. We can require that if the servant is not happy he/she can return to his/her country of origin.

With this we can create a situation that is win-win. The indentured servant gets to leave his/her 3rd world country of origin and come to America. He/she will only do this he/she feels it is in his/her best interest. The master can get a personal servant that will work for only the plane ticket to America, room and board, and vaccinations.

We will also need to set up a corporation or something to spread the risk for the indentured servants that choose to return to their countries of origin.

Why would this not be a great idea?

2

SWEET MANATEE OF GALALEE!
Because the 3rd World hates us enough already, mon.

Laws are not obeyed, they are enforced.

Enforcement comes after.

So there will be raping all over the place.

BTW–have you given 30 seconds thought to the African-American reaction to your o-so-brillant scheme?

You’d have to move to Sweden, & call yourself Othar for the rest of your life, just to save your fanny!

3

Because as soon as they got here and found out they were just slaves with benefits, they would leave, sticking the “massa” with his expenses. You did say they could leave any time, didn’t you?

4

There are plenty of people in the 3rd world that would be happy to have a safe place to live and sleep and ample food to eat. Plus once they fulfill their term of duty (I said 7years but it could 5 years or something else) they would be given citizenship. They are also getting education while they work. They will be learning English and other things. If it was you would you rather live without enough food, no clean water, and violence or working for a rich American household with plenty of food and medicine?

5

Even illiterate third world wretches know it is better to die on your feet than live on your knees.

6

I’m kind of lost. Does America really have indentured servitude anymore, outside of the random non-English-speaking immigrant family that does a friend or relative from “the old country” a favor?

7

I guess that is why sweatshops can never find workers.

8

Isn’t joining the armed services basically a form of indentured servitude? And don’t we already grant citzenship to resident aliens who enlist?

9

Great. Mitt Romney’s been calling for the end of Birthright Citizenship, & now there’s you. I live in Missouri. The Thirteenth Amendment is what abolished slavery in my state, & in the USA proper for that matter, not (as is generally believed) Lincoln’s (desperate) Emancipation Proclamation. I’ll defend the Thirteenth violently if necessary.

10

Please expound on the Romney issue. I hadn’t heard that. He wants to eliminate illegals having children that become naturalized citizens because they’re born here?
While I may agree with certain forms of this argument as a means for illegal immigrants to skirt deportation, I also have a hard time reconciling blaming an innocent child having the “bad luck” to be born in the US of A.

11

The 13th Amendment in its entirety:

Exactly which part of this would you abolish?

12

No it isn’t, because joining our military is voluntary, indentured servitude often isn’t. In fact, servitude can be inherited.
It’s illegal in the USA by the Constitution.

13

Simply put, it would lead to widespread economic disruption. We already struggle with immigration as an economic and social issue, and your plan would open the floodgates. Indentured servants, like illegal immigrants now, would work jobs that might currently go to existing workers (or legal immigrants). They would reduce wages across the board. Unless severely restricted, they would potentially create major population vacuums in other countries and major surplus populations here. If restricted, there would be a huge black market as there is for immigrant labor today, but it would be even harder to track. Unpaid laborers also would create a large strain on the infrastructure (schools, hospitals, police, etc.) without contributing in taxes.

Who would feed, clothe, and house these people if they aren’t paid? We don’t currently require that wages cover a worker’s cost of living (that would be a living wage) so if the indenturer was required to pay for these things, it would either result in higher labor costs than currently or (much more likely) in severe abuses such as already occur sometimes with illegals–people crammed into unsafe living conditions, denied access to medical care, etc.

What would happen if the laborer ran away and tried to get a job? If they were fired?

It is important to recognize that stripped of the social and political baggage associated with them, there is nothing necessarily worse or better about being a slave or being a wage-earner. Slaves can have rights and be treated fairly, and paid workers can be abused and oppressed. What matters is a person’s rights, their recourses when rights are violated, and their economic and social freedom within the system. Those can be built into (or removed from) any system of economic relationships you desire.

Employment-based capitalism is very flexible and (some would argue) contains the idea of economic freedom as its very premise. That and the historical atrocities of slavery, especially in the U.S., are why we have the system we do now. It is much simpler and cheaper to regulate wages and working conditions and let the economy take care of the rest, than to have each employer responsible for the overall welfare of the worker and try to regulate that. If you want to maintain some form of protection for immigrant workers, paying them is much easier.

Of course, if you don’t care about workers’ rights, we could very easily remove minimum wage requirements and other protections for foreign workers without resorting to indentured servitude, but it would have the same problems of wreaking havoc on the economy and allowing lots of abuse. At least it wouldn’t overturn the fundamental economic system, though, and we could regulate it and collect taxes more easily.

14

I admire Two’s courage to post a series of outrageous and contraversial threads.

15

That hasn’t always been the case. From 1940 to 1973 joining the military certainly wasn’t always voluntary, but it wasn’t considered slavery. No court has ever ruled the conscription (or jury duty) is involuntary servitude; it’s a duty of citizenship. As to the OP, relegalizing [del]slavery[/del] indentured serviture is one of the dumbest ideas I’ve ever heard of.

16

I’ll tell you what’s indentured servitude. All the friggin’ tax work I have to do for our “voluntary” tax system.

17

That’s a pretty lofty standard to replicate here.

18

We already have the H-1B Visa program. It works pretty close to indentured servitude in some cases from what I have seen.

19

You have given me a lot to think about. I will respond later.

20

This is like the “what was so bad about colonialism?” threads that crop up occasionally. It’s an absolutely horrible idea that wouldn’t help anyone.