In “Will We Tolerate Concentration Camps and Slave Labor?”, Steven Beschloss warns that America may be on the verge of something monstrous: mass deportations, labor camps, and forced work that echoes the worst shadows of our history. But the real horror is simpler: these camps already exist. They never went away. And they’re not some accidental glitch of the system — they are the system.

The truth is that the U.S. economy has always needed an underclass it could threaten, cage, or bind in debt. The plantation did not vanish in 1865; it changed its paperwork. The overseer’s whip became the convict lease, the sharecropper’s debt ledger, the prison time sheet, the coyote’s contract. Each new generation simply renamed what it could not live without.

Today’s migrant laborer does not wear shackles — he carries a coyote’s debt and a cartel’s threat. She picks strawberries under the eye of a labor broker who knows she will never report wage theft, because ICE is more terrifying than any labor law. And when these families are caught, the children are separated not because cruelty is new, but because the state never keeps kids in cages with parents. This is not a glitch — it is the design.

America’s “labor shortage” is the overseer’s confession. Half our farmworkers are undocumented. Most owe thousands for smuggling fees. They do work Americans can’t or won’t do at that wage. Remove them, and the fields rot. Legalize them, and the price of produce skyrockets. You don’t want to see the cage because the real cost of opening it is higher than you’re ready to pay.

Beschloss calls for CEOs to pledge not to buy forced labor. But every grocery aisle already is. The real pledge would be to pay a wage that makes the debt chain break — to pay more for fruit, meat, roofs, and roads. We could do it. But we do not. And so the invisible camps persist: the fields, the processing plants, the basement kitchens, the prison workshops. Slavery by any other name.

The “decent Americans” Beschloss invokes want to protest the visible camp — the fence, the cage, the children on the floor. But they do not protest the debt, the fear, the cartel’s hold, or the loophole in the 13th Amendment that lets prisoners work for pennies. The chain has never broken. It just runs deeper underground every time we promise we’ve outgrown it.

The next time you hear that the deportations will cause a “labor crisis,” remember what that means: a plantation owner admitting he cannot run his fields without bondage. We can break it. We can pay the real price. But you have to say it out loud: cheap food, cheap labor, cheap freedom — these things cost someone else everything.

The question is not “Will we tolerate the camps?” The real question is: What will you do when they’re gone? Will you pay the price you owe? Or will you rebuild them, behind new fences, with new names, and pretend again they are someone else’s problem?

All your camps are belong to U.S.
They always have been.