If the consular official did not want to abide by US laws, she should not have accepted the posting here, and she should not have lied to the servant and to US authorities about how much she would be paying this servant. She was not arrested because she paid a low wage, she was arrested because she broke the law. Whether the wage paid to the servant is normal for Indian servants working in India is completely irrelevant.
I don’t know much about being arrested and strip-searched. If being strip-searched happens to everyone who is arrested, then she has nothing to complain about. Since she does not have diplomatic immunity for non-official functions, and since she broke the law, she should not be surprised at being arrested. Perhaps the consul’s legal adviser should pay her a visit in jail and explain to her all the ways in which she has been wrong.
Roddy
A diplomat or consular official doesn’t just show up at the border and present Jeeves for admission. There’s an application process to bring a domestic servant, an application process this individual must have gone through. Would the subject of how you’re going to pay your servant come up in that process? Indeed it would. Would the subject of US wage laws, and their applicability to said servant, come up? Yup, that too.
*As part of the application process, an interview at the embassy or consulate is required. Proof that the applicant will receive a fair wage, sufficient to financially support himself, comparable to that being offered in the area of employment in the U.S. is required.
…
The contract must state the hourly wage to be paid to the domestic employee. The rate must be the greater of the minimum wage under U.S. Federal and state law, or the prevailing wage for all working hours. Information on the prevailing wage statistics by occupation and metropolitan area is available on the Department of Labor’s Online Wage Library & Data Center website.
The contract must state that wages will be paid to the domestic employee either weekly or biweekly. As of March 2011, the Department determined that no deductions are allowed for lodging, medical care, medical insurance, or travel. As of April 2012, deductions taken for meals are also no longer allowed. *
Yeah, aceplace57 is woefully misinformed, if not totally uninformed, about the history of US-India interactions. India is very well-thought of by Americans, but our relations with them have been a rollercoaster ride for the past 70 years or so.
Also, India does have ancient cultures and history, it does not have much in the way of ancient laws. In fact, India, much like China, was not in any sense a unified country until Europeans found the place and colonialised the shit outta the place. Prior to the Raj, India was simply a large place with many small kingdoms.
And yeah, this lady broke US laws while in the US, so she should be subject to our justice system, just like anyone else in this country that is caught breaking the law.
That is not true. The Brits had a terrible time trying to impose their laws on the Indians. It wound up coming down to the fact that the Indians already had a common-law like system in place. They sent a scholar over to study Indian law so they could figure out how to integrate the two systems. In the process he discovered that their ancient language in which Indian laws were written, sanskrit, was clearly related not just to the Romance languages, but to the Germanic languages. The language family that all three of these groups belong to is called “Indo-European” meaning Indian-European (although Iranian is also related). So while I know nothing about India, I know enough about language to say that they did indeed have an ancient legal tradition.
I wasn’t aware of problems between the US and India. I grew up when Indira Gandhi was in power and was very upset by her assassination. I’ve read some about the old caste system and am aware of the class inequalities they struggle with today. It’s a complicated country.
I may have reacted too strongly to this story. It struck a chord within me. I emphasized with the lady who had just dropped her kid off at school. She probably thought she had immunity and didn’t. I need to distance myself from stories like this.
There’s not much I can do about how the disadvantaged are treated in India. It’s kind of hard to tell 1.2 billion people they are doing it wrong. The consular official brought her servant with her from India. She committed a crime by falsifying that visa work document. I’m not sure she realized how serious a crime that is in the US. But, she found out pretty quick when she was strip searched.
No, what I wrote is correct and true and does not contradict what you wrote. India’s laws today are mostly directly descended from British law, as is their justice system in general. It has evolved somewhat since 1947 (of course), but that is the basis of India law, not the laws of the Mughal or Gupta Empire or some other, older period in India’s history.
Really, when a person is booked into jail what do you think the cops should do? Just put you in a cell and hope you don’t have a knife or a gun?? I was arrested once for jaywalking (long story) and was strip-searched before being shut in a cell. That part didn’t seem particularly out of line to me; it was a woman doing the searching and I bet it was in this case too. (Being taken to jail for jaywalking on the other hand…)
AFAIK family issues (e.g. marriage, divorce, inheritance, etc.) are government by religious law (Hindu, Muslim, Christian, etc.) instead of being derived from English common law like the rest of the legal system. This would not extend to matters like employment or immigration law.
Exactly… so what is your issue with the arrest and search. Ignorance of the law is no excuse. I’m pretty sure most of the slave owners of the old US south were just doing what was normal in their culture… doesn’t make it right.
Preet Bharara has an excellent reputation as a federal prosecutor, and the police in New York are no strangers to dealing with diplomats. In an investigation like this, you can be assured that they’ve done everything by the book.
The most shocking thing to me about this story is that the headlines and the outrage all seem to surround the strip search of the diplomat, rather than the fact that she was keeping a servant in near-slavery conditions. This is not the first time that this has been an issue with diplomats in the U.S. The story here is that a woman felt that it was perfectly O.K. to lie and claim she was paying her servant minimum wage, and then pay her so little that she was essentially being held in bondage. The fact that the diplomat was treated like any other criminal arrested in New York is minor, and wouldn’t even have been reported if she wasn’t from the consular office. I will be following this story to see what other information comes out about the conditions in which the servant was being kept. That’s the real news here.
Too late to edit, but here’s a recent story about diplomatic slavery. Of course we don’t know the full details of this particular instance, but this is where the outrage should be directed.
Another older article that specifically mentions the type of visa fraud involving employment contracts that allegedly occurred in the current case.
What is the “over zealous ness” exactly, truthSeeker2? Is submitting false statements to the government not a crime? What exactly are we to apologize for? And why is “america bashing” so cool? I wonder what truth you are seeking?
The consular official brought her servant with her from India. She committed a crime by falsifying that visa work document. I’m not sure she realized how serious a crime that is in the US. But, she found out pretty quick when she was strip searched.