Abuse of undocumented workers is dark side of ‘buy local’ campaign

Last year I accompanied Terrina Wong of the Pacific Gateway Center to Pier 38 to check on the status of a young man from Kiribati who had sustained an eye injury from a large fishhook while on a locally registered fishing boat.

We parked and walked a short distance by the brightly lit restaurants where people were enjoying fancy meals of fresh fish, over to another world, where poor men in tattered clothes were confined to dirty fishing vessels.

It was truly surreal.

Through a translator, we spoke to this man, who had been suffering from severe headaches and blurry vision since the accident. He said that the boat captain had given him medication that was not helping. I asked to see the medication and he pulled out a bottle of Visine.

This man had never been taken to a doctor as promised, and would have faced sanctions from the captain and immigration violations if he had sought treatment on his own. This 19-year-old was alone, thousands of miles from his family without the means to fly home.

Hawaii was more like hell to him than any semblance of paradise. I wondered what the patrons at Nico’s would have thought if they could witness the lives of the men who caught their dinners.

Around that same time another fisherman, this one from Vietnam, escaped from a vessel in Honolulu Harbor. He had worked on a South Korean fishing boat where he and other foreign workers had been horribly physically and mentally abused.

One night on the open ocean, he was forced to transfer from one boat to another. He had no idea where he was going or what his fate would be. After 10 days at sea the boat docked in Honolulu.

Fearing for his life, he ran ashore and disappeared into Chinatown. He found out he was in Hawaii and someone took him to Pacific Gateway Center for help.

I tried to get him interviewed by federal law enforcement agencies but no one was interested. He remains living among us, undocumented and scared, away from his wife and young daughter.

Unfortunately it is not only much of our local seafood industry that is built on the backs of exploited immigrant labor, but the agriculture industry as well. Malia Zimmerman, formerly of the Hawaii Reporter, provided the only real media coverage of this issue while she worked in Honolulu.

After seeing what I have seen, now when I shop at local farmers markets, I am more likely to think “Die Locally” instead of “Buy Locally,” seeing the faces of the trafficked workers who have been killed and sickened from pesticide exposure.

Community workers and local nonprofit agencies have known about these dark industries for years. Attempts to bring cases to law enforcement have met with little success. Everybody passes the buck, which makes it easy for human trafficking and other human rights abuses to grow and fester.

I am deeply grateful to The Associated Press reporters for shining a light on the human rights abuses of foreign fishermen right under our noses, and to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser for running the story (“Floating prisons,” Sept. 8).

Now that this important piece of investigative journalism has been published, we as a community are all put on notice.

What remains to be seen is what, if anything, will be done.

Clare Hanusz is a Honolulu attorney who has provided immigration legal services to victims of human trafficking and labor exploitation.