Modern work schemes echo slavery’s playbook

Watching how America treats immigrants these days, I honestly feel like we’re sliding right back into the old playbooks of slavery and feudalism - and I wish I were exaggerating. When Trump can go on record saying he’d let farmers decide who gets deported, what is that besides a dressed-up version of “slave auctions,” just with more polite language? Now it’s “you can adopt this undocumented farm worker to pick your crops and maybe let them breathe free air if you feel generous” - bidding starts at $1000, right? This isn’t even a metaphor; it’s almost word-for-word what’s floating around in policy talks. Meanwhile, we’re literally paying other countries to take people we don’t want, which is somehow even more pathetic than selling humans - we’re just outsourcing the cruelty, not even making a profit. All of this comes from the same political crowd that can’t shut up about “freedom” and “family values,” but has no problem ripping families apart, locking kids in cages, and letting all sorts of abuses slide - like it’s 1850 again. Where I grew up, there’s a museum exhibit about a woman who survived years of being raped by her so-called “owner” and had to hide in an attic for twelve years just to escape. The law protected him, not her, because she was property, not a person. It’s almost surreal to see history repackaged as “work programs” and “law and order,” but the outcomes are the same: families destroyed, people treated like livestock, cruelty passed off as mercy. So when I see modern politicians and their fans try to spin this as some sort of benevolence, or talk about immigrants “learning valuable skills” and being “better off” in detention camps or picking crops, I can’t help but hear the echoes of all those justifications for slavery that were always about “helping” the people they were oppressing. The language changes, but the logic and the suffering don’t. I hate how right this all feels.