Maids for sale on the Lebanese market

BY ELISE BARTHET, SCIENCES PO, SPECIAL TO THE MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

We stopped the car at an anonymous-looking building just outside Beirut that nearly disappeared behind an enormous yellow billboard. A blue drawing covers half the space of the ad. It pictures an Asian woman in an apron shyly proffering a tray of tea. Her look is submissive, the message eloquent. Even to customers who cannot read Arabic.

Inside, the manager of the company, the Manco Group, is all business, seated in front of an empty desk. A brisk offer of coffee to the visitors, then, she plunges into a sales pitch. "From my experience, Ethiopian is the best," she says. "Sri Lankans run away after two days and Filipinas are too expensive."

The harshness of the declaration sounds strange to an outsider's ears, but we try not to look surprised. After all, in Lebanon, buying a maid is as common as buying a car. And just like cars, maids are imported.

Business is booming in Lebanon for companies that recruit foreign women to work as maids, housekeepers and nannies. In this country, ruined by 30 years of civil war and a never-ending political crisis, running an agency has become a safe and easy way to make money.

In five years, the number of such employment agencies has nearly doubled from 250 to 418. This tiny Middle Eastern nation of only four million people has an estimated 120,000 maids, most of them from Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Africa. According to The Daily Star, a Lebanese newspaper, one out of every 16 individuals in Lebanon is a foreign maid.

These women are part of a massive global industry that moves manpower from poor developing countries around the world to richer, or in some cases, marginally less poor nations, where they care for children and clean houses.

Workers are exported and imported by means of a sophisticated network of job agencies across the world. Each Lebanese agency has its counterpart in the country of origin of the migrants. One furnishes the maid; the other, the employer. But the business is largely unregulated, notwithstanding that the products being marketed are human beings.  (More)

Going out of your way to help your friends: Aireale Rodgers and the New American Initiative

BY FLORENT BLANC
Excerpted interview with Aireale Rodgers Volunteer at the New Americans Initiative of the Illinois Council of Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR) Feb. 9, 2007

Q: How did you get involved in the New American Initiative?

Aireale Rodgers: I started in high school about three years ago. I'm from Chicago from the southeast side, but I went to high school on the southwest side. A lot of the people who attended this high school were first generation Americans. Their parents are from Mexico. Just hearing their stories, I felt the need to do something. Since I'm African-American, it would seem that immigration would be so far down on the list of my priorities. But since it was such a big priority for my friends, I felt like I needed to do something to help my friends more than just help immigrants. It touched me in a different way. Before I entered college, I was doing an internship with the Southwest Organizing Project (SWOP), that works on the Southwest side of Chicago for immigrants rights. We registered people, who had just gotten sworn in as citizens, to vote. Once I got to Northwestern University, as part of its Freshman Urban Program, we went to a youth hostel in downtown Chicago, and then went around to different parts of the city to volunteer in different community organizations. I loved it.

Q: Since you have been involved in immigrant rights before the movement surfaced publicly in December 2005, could you give us your perspective on what happened and what is going on?


Aireale Rodgers: The New American Initiative had been going on for a while but when the immigration reform proposal came up in Congress, we decided that now was the time to do something bigger. For us, this congressional election [of 2006] was the biggest thing. We knew that in order for the government to take us seriously, we had to get out the vote. We had to show that we are no longer playing games.
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