Guavanaut posted:

Marx traditionally thought that sex workers were unlikely to ever achieve class consciousness and would be useless for the socialist cause

feedmegin posted:

[
As for the US immigration stuff, I notice you have a tendency to avoid answering some of the things I, a former US immigrant, and other US-oriented people in this thread, say. Like, you know, how you are not in fact coining it in the US if you're getting mad tax back from the US government.

TheHoodedClaw posted:

Jez_bollah Corblimey_Hista

The Saurus posted:

I never said I was "coining" it. Just that I was way better off than I was in Britain, ie able to afford to live in my own place instead of my childhood bedroom due to Tory housing policy.

You also need to notice the fact that my wife gets a lot of gifts from friends and acquintances which is untaxed. I thought that would have been pretty obvious, it's not like JFairfax has been quiet about it the past few pages.

The Saurus posted:

I never said I was "coining" it. Just that I was way better off than I was in Britain, ie able to afford to live in my own place instead of my childhood bedroom due to Tory housing policy.

The Saurus posted:

You also need to notice the fact that my wife gets a lot of gifts from friends and acquintances which is untaxed. I thought that would have been pretty obvious, it's not like JFairfax has been quiet about it the past few pages.

feedmegin posted:

...so you are better off than you were in the UK because you're mooching off your wife's friends and acquaintances.

Ok, yes, that is totally an example of how the US is objectively better than the UK as a place to live.

CoolCab posted:

No I think he's backdoor bragging about his wife not paying taxes on her illicit prostitution money.

CommieGIR posted:

big scary monsters posted:

Even apart from the confusing typo those $/£ prices don't seem to match up at all, which makes it rather misleading. I don't think the dollar has been that close in value to the pound at any time since 1986.

CommieGIR posted:

Um, depending on how much you get in 'gifts', you might actually owe taxes in the US.

And if your wife is actually receiving prostitution money (I'm not going to go into whether this is true or not, but for the sake of the discussion) holy gently caress the IRS does not like undeclared income. Hope you are not depositing it anywhere.

Oh, and regardless if your wife is making that money, if you try to use that money to purchase a home ever, the IRS is going to have some questions about where it came from.

Extreme0 posted:

The ironic thing here is that The Saurus is not getting raped by a muslim but by the Law and State of a Christian white man nation.

Oberleutnant posted:

Save us.

CommieGIR posted:

Just the tip.

The even better irony is him saying he volunteered at a Catholic Church soup kitchen while completely ignoring the US Catholic Church's long history of child sexual abused that they refused to fully investigate.

The Saurus posted:

gently caress. I can't believe they tricked me into helping feed those hungry people by hiding this from me >(

The Saurus posted:

gently caress. I can't believe they tricked me into helping feed those hungry people by hiding this from me >(

CommieGIR posted:

Hey, if you are going to go out and demonize an entire religion because of a select few scumbags and their vocal ways, why is the Catholic Church immune?

CommieGIR posted:

Hey, if you are going to go out and demonize an entire religion because of a select few scumbags and their vocal ways, why is the Catholic Church immune?

Also: The Catholic Church, famous for advancing women's rights. I mean, that is what you were complaining about with Islam, right?

big scary monsters posted:

What is everyone's favourite anime?

The Saurus posted:

I like Death Note and Samurai Champloo

what's yours?

serious gaylord posted:

Has anyone got a link to stdh.txt?

The Saurus posted:

Seems like you didn't read any of my posts discussing immigration to the united states and conditions here. You should though, they're much more interesting than the ones about refugees. Maybe I should do an A/T one of these days.

Tax credits don't count as benefits in the same way things like medicare and social security do, so they aren't required to be repaid by green card holders. Especially since I'm filing taxes joint married and my wife is a citizen, by far the largest part of the refundable tax credits I receive is due to her status as a full-time student.

Renfield posted:

http://forums.somethingawful.com/query.php?action=posthistory&userid=106462

big scary monsters posted:

What is everyone's favourite anime?

big scary monsters posted:

Jedit posted:

Weird. They're pretty much the definition of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". They also seize the means of reproduction.

big scary monsters posted:

What is everyone's favourite anime?

JFairfax posted:

lol imagine having a goon whore for a wife, loving hell

Barry Foster posted:

Have the last four hundred odd posts overnight just been arguing with The Saurus?

loving hell.

quote:

The British government is exposing thousands of women brought to the UK by wealthy Gulf families to conditions of slavery, trafficking and abuse, according to a review of domestic worker visas.

Domestic workers transported to the UK are legally tied to their employer and are unable to change jobs while in the country. The Home Office has faced a barrage of criticism that this “tied” visa, introduced in 2012, leaves workers unable to escape abusive employers, effectively trapping them in domestic slavery.

An independent review of the visa, commissioned by the Home Office and authored by barrister James Ewins, strongly endorses this assessment. The review found “no evidence that a tie to a single employer does anything other than increase the risk of abuse and therefore increases actual abuse”.

Roughly 17,000 overseas domestic worker visas were issued by UK authorities last year. The large majority of visas for domestic staff came from the Gulf states. Half of all visa applications were from families from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

A series of interviews with domestic workers who suffered abuse in the UK highlighted a widespread fear that reporting abuse would result in deportation or arrest.

Renera*, a Philippine domestic worker who was left without food by her employer and prevented from sleeping, is fighting to stay in the UK after she was positively identified as a victim of trafficking. “When I called the Filipino embassy and told them my employer was abusing me, they said that under the tied visa I had to return to Saudi Arabia with him,” she said.

The women interviewed had neither been informed of their rights under UK law nor seen their contract at the visa application stage, as required under the terms of the visa. Many said they had been pressed to sign the visa form without understanding what they were doing.

Renera said: “On the way to the UK [visa application office] in Saudi, my employer told me, ‘If anyone asks, you will earn £350 a week in London’. I had to sign papers so that he could have a travel visa for me, but he wouldn’t let me read them properly. The papers were in Arabic and nobody at the office asked me if I wanted to go to the UK with him.”

Campaigners said the review made it impossible for the government to deny that visa restrictions imposed on domestic workers create conditions under which abuse can flourish.

“Since this visa came into force in 2012 the government has received widespread condemnation of the conditions it is imposing on thousands of vulnerable women travelling with foreign employers into the UK, often with little choice, who are given no protection or agency when they are here,” said Kate Roberts, head of policy at Kalayaan, a domestic worker rights group.

Roberts added that domestic workers are often treated like an “extra piece of hand luggage” by their employers.

Campaigners have argued that the existing arrangements are “bringing kafala to the UK”, a reference to the sponsorship system in place across many Gulf countries that ties migrant workers to employers and prevents them from leaving their job or returning home without permission. Human rights groups have catalogued the high levels of abuse faced by domestic workers across the region. According to the International Trade Union Confederation, 2.4 million domestic workers are facing conditions of slavery in the Gulf.

The government says restrictions on domestic staff leaving their employers are designed to prevent workers switching jobs to stay in the UK.

The review recommended that workers be allowed to change employers and stay in the UK for up to two and a half years before returning home. It also urged the government to start collecting data on the number of women reporting abusive working conditions after entering the UK on the overseas domestic workers visa.

The Home Office is yet to respond to the review’s recommendations, but a spokesman said: “This government is committed to stopping modern slavery in all its forms. We are working to ensure we provide all victims of modern slavery and trafficking with the protection and support they need through the national referral mechanism (NRM), [a government process set up to identify victims of trafficking]. Anyone who reports being brought to the UK against their will for the purpose of work shall have their case considered under the NRM.”

The Labour MP Fiona Mactaggart, who has worked closely on the issue of domestic workers, claimed the government deliberately published the review just before Christmas to avoid parliamentary scrutiny: “They shoved the review out with a dump of reports, suggesting they don’t want to address the findings.”

Mactaggart added that reluctance to confront Saudi human rights abuses was part of a broader failure. “Last week, a junior minister was put up to defend British feebleness in the face of Saudi executions. It seems clear that the government doesn’t want to confront the Saudi authorities or Saudi practices where they are an affront to human rights. They are obsessed with bringing down immigration numbers, and that obsession trumps concerns for human rights.”

Campaigners say domestic workers who leave abusive employers are often pressed to leave the UK as soon as they are identified as a victims of trafficking. This makes many vulnerable women reluctant to engage with authoritie, pushing them into illegal work in order to keep sending money home to their families

The standard recovery period for trafficking victims is 45 days. Domestic workers may stay for six months if they can support themselves without access to public funds or support.

Phoebe Dimacali, president of the Filipino Domestic Workers Association, says women denied the opportunity to continue working in the UK risk being trafficked back to the Gulf.

“Life in the Philippines is really hard, so even if we know that life in the Gulf is really risky, we take that risk and hope we won’t be one of those victims,” she said. “We know that if we go home to the Philippines, returning to the Gulf is the only option.”

Dimacali said many women are too scared to enter the NRM because of the immigration repercussions.

“Recently, a woman was recognised as a victim of trafficking but was told to leave the UK within a few weeks,” she said. “Word gets round to the other women and it makes them afraid to approach the Home Office.”

dispatch_async posted:

On the subject of immigrants being exploited by the capitalist class:

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/jan/11/uk-increasing-abuse-foreign-maids-tied-visas


We're letting wealthy Saudis keep slaves in the UK. Is this what people thought they were voting for when they voted Lib Dem in 2010?

Phoon posted:

Is that really the logo for haringey council? Wtf were they thinking??

XMNN posted:

Well, of course you can't say anything mean to the Saudis, they'd just end up buying their planes and bombs from the Americans or someone else and where would that leave us, hmm?