Jia Tolentino's parents are ("""alleged""") human traffickers!!!!

Why are people more angry about her comments about shoplifting????

How the fuck is the big controversy about Jia Tolentino the shit about her and fucking Whole Foods? Has everyone forgotten about how her family was accused of human trafficking? Are people not running that shit back at all?

Ok so Hilde has suggested to me that at least someone is indeed running that shit back. But are they writing a blog post???

I still think it’s worth wading into this one, because I had actually been planning to write something about the Tolentino “““alleged””” human trafficking for years, not only because the allegations are fucking insane, but also because the means through which Tolentino managed to evade the situation were also insane. So we’re doing this casual blog style, because I’ve gotta type this up before I’m supposed to leave to see my friends in like an hour or two.

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Trying to read literally any take about the latest Tolentino controversy makes my eyes start to involuntarily shut. She apparently said something about how she shoplifts from Whole Foods and how “that’s praxisssss” or sth. idk. People started talking about how she’s privileged because she’s a rich woman who is shoplifting from Whole Foods and that’s… idk I mean Winona Ryder was rich and shoplifted and she was cool as fuck for it in my book. But idk. I was an avid shoplifter for years (DON’T CANCEL ME!!!!! I WILL COME TO YOUR FUCKING HOUSE AND KILL YOUR WHOLE FUCKING FAMILY!!!!!!!!) although I wouldn’t call it meaningfully “anti-capitalist” or whatever Tolentino said it was. It all sort of sounds to me like… I don’t want to use the phrase “nothing burger”… a nebulous hotdog.

But then my eyes run over excerpts like:

There are so many perfectly legal things I do regularly that I find mildly immoral. Like getting iced coffee in a plastic cup. I find that to be a profoundly selfish, immoral, collectively destructive action

And I just think SHUT THE FUCK UP HOLY FUCK SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP and frankly if you have ever gone on air and said “getting ice coffee for yourself in a plastic cup is a profoundly selfish, immoral, collectively destructive action” then I’m sorry but you deserve it when people come to burn your house down. But also the fact that Jia Tolentino has this childish all-or-nothing categorization scheme where your plastic cup is actually a pawn in a Manichean war over your immortal soul makes a lot of sense, because it allows her to excuse much worse behaviour. Hey! Everyone drinks out of a plastic bottle or cup now and then! That is a PROFOUNDLY SELFISH, IMMORAL, AND COLLECTIVELY DESTRUCTIVE ACTION! And therefore everyone is morally reprehensible, ergo it’s fine when I… oh I don’t know… do horrible sell-out SponCon for AirBnb,¹ a company that is directly and actively making it harder for people with less money than Tolentino to afford to live.

I’d rather kill myself.

It even makes it easier to, for instance, excuse the fact that your parents are human traffickers. Hey remember that one??? from earlier?????

In 2004, Jia’s parents got caught doing something very naughty:

Federal authorities say they have uncovered a scheme to lure Filipino teachers to the United States with false promises of jobs in Texas school districts, charging five people with conspiracy to commit alien smuggling and fraud.

Two former West Texas public school administrators and an elementary school principal also face charges that they sponsored work visas for dozens of the teachers in exchange for free trips to Asia.

The Friday indictment accuses Florita and Noel Tolentino and their company Omni Consortium of persuading the Filipinos to pay them $10,000 each, promising there were well-paying teaching jobs waiting for them in the United States.

The teachers also were told they would receive permanent residency status and could bring their families with them, prosecutors said.

Omni took money from 273 Filipino teachers since 2002, but fewer than 100 ever received positions with school districts, Assistant U.S. Attorney Brandy Gardes told the El Paso Times for a Saturday story.

The immigrant teachers were housed in groups of 10 to 15 in unfurnished properties, and most had to sleep on the floor or on mattresses, according to court documents. The Tolentinos told the teachers they would be deported if they complained about not having jobs or tried to seek employment on their own.

[emphasis my own]

But Jia, when it became clear that this might come up as a um… blemish, perhaps, on her family story, wrote a sob piece about how this was all a misunderstanding, and how her family had been unfairly targeted.

The company’s open, earnest, lawful work [CITATION NEEDED] helping fellow Filipinos move to America for good jobs [CITATION NEEDED] in teaching had been swiftly reframed as hideous criminal activity [CITATION AVAILABLE].

[CITATIONS BY ME]

Wow, that’s crazy. Maybe someone should have explained all that to the woman who filed this application where she says the Tolentinos human trafficked her. Yeah, sure, the appeal was dismissed and it was found that she couldn’t meet the legal definition of someone who was “human trafficked.” But the decision issued doesn’t let the Tolentino’s “off the hook”:

The record clearly shows that agents of Omni have engaged in wrongdoing, including immigration-related violations and fraud. The AAO further acknowledges that agents of Omni used coercion against the applicant to discourage her from leaving their control and to limit her independence.

Sure, it didn’t meet the specific legal qualifications for the crime of human trafficking as so defined in the United States in a legal sense. But what we do know—that the Tolentinos lied to these vulnerable people about work opportunities, brought them to America, and then used coercive lies to keep them in their control—does fit most people’s understanding of what “human trafficking” is in a moral sense. This is a distinction that many people have trouble with: legal definitions are not fungible with common sense, ethical understandings, nor are they meant to be, they are meant to be practical for the purposes of administering a justice system. What the Tolentinos did was human trafficking as most people would understand it.

Multiple of these would-be teachers testified against the Tolentinos in a court of law—they certainly fucking believed the Tolentinos had wronged them!!! Again: these people each paid the Tolentinos $10,000 USD, for which most of them had to take on loans, and therefore debts, were given fraudulent visas for jobs that did not yet exist (and in some cases never would), and then when they arrived were kept in poor, cramped conditions and threatened not to leave.

People jumped to Jia and her family’s defense, which was fucking nuts. A lot of it was under the auspices of “listening to WOC” or whatever other stupid bullshit. Some even had the nerve to frame the Tolentinos as somehow BENEVOLENT in this arrangement. They were just helping out poor Filipinos and solving the US nursing/teacher shortages at the same time!

Yet again, the actual victims of the Tolentinos get completely sidelined. They’re made to be completely fucking invisible! “HELPING IMMIGRANTS”??? YOU MEAN THE ONES WHO FUCKING TESTIFIED AGAINST THEM?????????

The idea that this was all some big misunderstanding falls even flatter when you consider that this exact same situation then happened with another company alleged to be doing all the same shit. You can read this brief of a lawsuit filed by similarly exploited prospective Filipino teachers in neighbouring Louisiana that describes a version of the same grift the Tolentinos were up to. This wasn’t an honest mistake! This was a scam that multiple organizations were in on!

The economy the Tolentinos were involved in is a part of a wider net of migrant worker exploitation:

Researchers estimate that anywhere from 14,000 to 20,000 teachers, imported on temporary guest worker visas, teach in American public schools nationwide. Such hiring practices are often framed as cultural exchange programs, but as Timothy Noah of the New Republic points out — in this case about Maryland’s Prince George County — ​“When 10 percent of a school district’s teachers are foreign migrants, that isn’t cultural exchange. It’s sweatshop labor — and a depressing indicator of how low a priority public education has become.”

This whole line you see in a lot of the narratives about how people like the Tolentinos were just trying to “help the system” by acquiring “much needed” teachers and nurses is also a crock of fucking shit that covers up another terrible truth:

School districts frequently justify hiring lower-paid immigrants by pointing to teacher shortages in chronically underfunded rural and urban school districts. And it’s true: In poorer areas, classrooms are often overcrowded and understaffed. But this dearth of instructors did not come out of nowhere. Rather, it is an inevitable result of the austerity measures pushed through on a federal, state, and local level after the panic of the 2007 financial crisis.

As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes, between 2008 and 2011, school districts nationwide slashed 278,000 jobs. This bleeding has not stopped: According to the Center on Education Policy, almost 84 percent of school districts in the 2011-2012 school year expected budget shortfalls, and 60 percent planned to cut staff to make up deficits.

Thus, we see a familiar pattern of neoliberal ​“restructuring” in American school systems: Cut public institutions to the bone, leave them to fail without adequate resources, then claim the mantle of ​“reform” while rebuilding the institutions with an eye towards privatization.

In many cities, newly laid-off instructors are left to languish while their former employers employ underpaid replacements to fill the gaps. For example, the Baltimore City Public Schools district has imported more than 600 Filipino teachers; meanwhile, 100 certified local teachers make up the ​“surplus” workforce, serving as substitutes and co-teachers when they can.

BUT ANYWAYS, WHOLE FOODS!!! OR SOMETHING!!!!!!

Will the Jia Tolentino fans get mad at me for this one? Do they even exist? Like, last time she got that big wave of defenders it seemed to mostly be “WOC” “fans” rather than Jia fans to me. idk! I never finished Trick Mirror because it wasn’t very interesting. Out of the single-concept collections of essays about examining the nature of their author’s self-delusions by an Asian-American woman to come out in 2019, it still somehow managed to come second.

The plain fact is that Western Twitter libs identify more strongly with Tolentino because Tolentino is someone who belongs to the same class of PMCs as they do—it’s simply class solidarity. Their interests and experiences line up, and so it’s easier to identify with Tolentino instead of the faceless poor Filipino, who probably doesn’t speak “perfect” English—and so then of course one projects, as they often do onto people who don’t speak the same language as them or speaks theirs imperfectly, that these people have no interiorities. Ignored also is that the poverty of the poor Filipino is itself a result of deliberate American policies which have kept the country under the boot of US interests since the turn of the twentieth century (after long suffering under the Spanish instead, and with an intermission under the Japanese). Now these Filipinos, in their enforced misery, can be put to “good use” by Filipino collaborators like the Tolentinos who can make a killing off of this miserable lot ($10,000 MINIMUM PER PERSON) in order to fill underpaid positions in austerity-gutted American institutions. But at least we’re “listening to voices,” right? Or at least the ones who, both literally and figuratively, speak our own language…

1. As an aside, I think we just generally let sponcon slide too much these days. Very much, I think, tied to “anti-snob” and “poptimist” ideological developments. I think Ross Barkan got it straight on this as an over-correction of certain societal perceptions:

Where we differ of course is that I do, in fact, think heading to a major label or publisher is a sin.