Modern Slavery and the American Dream - By Taghogho Von Apochi

I already knew the term modern slavery before this chapter, I referenced the book and chapter. I knew that legal ownership of another human being has been outlawed, but people are still trafficked, forced to work, sexually exploited, trapped by debt, or controlled through threats and violence. What caught me off guard was how close modern slavery can sit to ordinary life. Kendall frames slavery as an extreme form of social inequality, one where people are treated as property or economic commodities rather than as people. Historically, it functioned as a closed system of stratification: your position was assigned at birth, escaping it was nearly impossible, and law, violence, and institutions all worked together to keep it that way (Kendall, 2021, p. 192). Modern slavery looks different on the surface, since legal ownership is usually absent now, but the loss of freedom underneath it is just as real. Reading through debt bondage, forced labor, trafficking, sexual exploitation, and hidden supply chains, I kept coming back to the same thought: slavery did not disappear. It just changed clothes. In Nigerian local parlance, we would say, “E just change wrapper.”

Some of what I read genuinely surprised me. The International Labour Organization, Walk Free, and the International Organization for Migration estimated that 50 million people were living in modern slavery in 2021, roughly 28 million in forced labor and 22 million in forced marriages (International Labour Organization et al., 2022). I expected that number to be high. I did not expect it to be that high. What disturbed me almost as much was how debt itself can become a prison. Someone takes a loan out of hunger, illness, migration costs, or a family emergency, then pledges labor to pay it back. If the employer controls the books, keeps adding new charges, withholds wages, or holds the worker’s documents, that debt can stretch on indefinitely. On paper, the person is a worker. In practice, they may have no safe way out.

One case that made this especially real to me as a Nigerian was the conviction of former Nigerian Deputy Senate President Ike Ekweremadu. In 2023, a British court convicted Ekweremadu, his wife, and Dr. Obinna Obeta of conspiring to bring a vulnerable young Nigerian man to the United Kingdom so that his kidney could be removed for their daughter. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the young man was promised money and an opportunity to work in the United Kingdom, but he did not meaningfully consent to donating his kidney. His passport was withheld, his movements were controlled, and the medical risks were not properly explained to him (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2023). What stayed with me was the difference in power. On one side was a wealthy and politically influential family; on the other was a young man whose financial circumstances made him vulnerable. As a father and someone with a healthcare background, I understand the desperation of wanting to save a sick child. Still, one person’s medical crisis cannot justify turning another person’s body into a solution without free and informed consent. The case showed me that modern slavery can enter medical settings and hide behind language such as opportunity, assistance, or donation.

This part of the reading landed close to home. When I started earning a salary in Nigeria, I used to visit hospitals and put part of my income toward patients who could not cover their medical bills. I would talk with social workers and try to understand each situation on its own terms rather than assume I already knew the full picture. Those visits eventually shaped my interest in sickle cell disease and played a part in building SabiWaka Clinic and SabiWaka Natural. What I took away from that time is that poverty is not only about lacking money. It is also about losing the ability to say no. A person choosing between an abusive job and a hungry child does not have the same freedom as someone with savings, connections, and options. My work in healthcare and care coordination has made me pay closer attention to this because vulnerable people rarely announce that they are being controlled. Fear, shame, immigration worries, dependence on an employer, or threats against family can all keep someone silent. Understanding those warning signs makes me less likely to jump to conclusions and more likely to notice when someone actually needs protection or a person willing to listen.

The link between modern slavery and the American Dream is not a comfortable one to sit with, but I think it is real. The American Dream gets sold as a promise that hard work leads to success and a secure life. I still believe some version of that, just not as a guarantee and not in its simplest form. Hard work does matter, but people do not all start from the same place. Some inherit money, education, legal security, or useful connections. Others start out carrying debt, discrimination, poor health, family obligations, or an immigration status that makes them easier to exploit. I have seen both sides of that line in my own life. In Nigeria, friends and colleagues pushed me to pick up skills across healthcare, genetics, research, training, and IT. I worked for those qualifications, though at times they felt like extra pieces of paper since the pay did not always reflect the effort behind them. Winning an innovation challenge at AXA Mansard for an interactive website concept I designed felt like a real milestone, but it did not erase the limits still sitting around me professionally. Moving to the United States changed how much of that earlier effort could actually be applied. I have kept working, training others, studying, and moving toward direct clinical practice since. That is part of why I still believe opportunity is real, and also why I push back against the idea that anyone who has not “made it” simply did not try hard enough.

The darker side of that dream shows up wherever one person’s comfort quietly depends on someone else’s exploitation. People want cheap clothes, affordable food, new phones, and fast delivery. Companies want lower costs and higher margins. Put those two things together and you get long supply chains where the person buying the final product never sees the miner, farmworker, factory hand, or child who made it possible. The U.S. Department of Labor’s 2024 list names 204 goods from 82 countries and areas that the department has reason to believe involve child labor or forced labor (U.S. Department of Labor, 2024). That does not mean every item in those categories was made through exploitation, but it shows how widespread the risk actually is. Someone can enjoy the visible half of the American Dream while staying completely unaware of the invisible labor propping it up.

I do not think success itself is the problem here. The problem is success without any sense of responsibility for how it was built. Working in business, healthcare, and training, I think employers owe it to the people in their organizations and supply chains to know how those people are actually treated. Fair pay, safe conditions, basic respect, and the freedom to leave a job are not favors. They are the floor, not the ceiling, of human dignity. Consumers have some role to play too, though individual shopping habits alone were never going to fix something this structural. That work falls to governments enforcing labor laws, businesses actually examining their own supply chains, and institutions protecting victims instead of punishing them for the circumstances that trapped them in the first place.

I came into this reading already aware of modern slavery, but it left me with a fuller sense of its scale, its economic logic, and how quietly it threads through everyday life. The 50 million figure stuck with me, and so did the idea that exploitation can hide behind products and services we use without a second thought. The Ekweremadu case also reminded me that exploitation can occur wherever power, desperation, and vulnerability meet, even within a medical situation that appears to begin with the desire to save a life. This matters to me personally because my time in Nigerian hospitals, healthcare, business, and care coordination has shown me how quickly poverty and vulnerability can strip away someone’s ability to choose freely. I still believe in the American Dream, just an honest version of it. People should be able to move forward through hard work, education, creativity, and persistence, but that progress should never be quietly financed by someone else’s captivity. A dream that needs another person’s nightmare to stay afloat is not a dream worth defending.

References

International Labour Organization, Walk Free, & International Organization for Migration. (2022). Global estimates of modern slavery: Forced labour and forced marriage. International Labour Organization. https://www.ilo.org/publications/major-publications/global-estimates-modern-slavery-forced-labour-and-forced-marriage

Kendall, D. (2021). Sociology in our times: The essentials (12th ed.). Cengage Learning.

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. (2023). Rex and Obinna Obeta, Ike and Beatrice Ekweremadu. SHERLOC Case Law Database. https://sherloc.unodc.org/cld/en/case-law-doc/traffickingpersonscrimetype/gbr/2023/rex_and_obinna_obeta_ike_and_beatrice_ekweremadu_.html

U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of International Labor Affairs. (2024). List of goods produced by child labor or forced labor. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/reports/child-labor/list-of-goods