Trump’s US: tough on immigration, but on trafficking of Filipinos...

When Avelino Reloj left the Philippines for a job as a hotel janitor in Missouri, United States, he felt a world of possibilities was opening up. He quit his job as a house keeper in Cebu City, borrowed 400,000 pesos (US$7,700) for the trip, and bade farewell to the clear blue water and white sand that his home country is so famous for. For Reloj, life in the Philippines had been a far cry from such idyllic postcard images – at 27, he was struggling to build a home or start a family.

“I thought America was the land of gold and silver, and the land of opportunities,” he recalls.

But soon after he arrived on US soil his American dream turned into a nightmare. Rather than Missouri, he found himself in Florida working as a room attendant in a hotel, without the salary or perks he had been promised. A human trafficker posing as an employment agent had helped Reloj find his job – the trafficker kept Reloj’s passport and threatened to deport him if he didn’t continue to work. 

So Reloj continued, out of equal parts fear of the trafficker’s threat and the debt he had already amassed. There was no way he could return home.

Month after month, and sometimes under the threat of a gun, Reloj was forced on a string of precarious jobs – in states as far afield as South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.

Reloj has since escaped – he now lives in safety in California – but his case is just one of hundreds in which Filipinos have been trafficked to the United States with bogus job offers. 

Some victims end up in dead-end jobs or with no work at all, others find themselves trapped in the households of wealthy Americans, expatriates, diplomats and the officers of international organisations.