Backing into Slavery

...with Empire thrown in a little later, on more shameful terms than at present

The case of Abrego-Garcia, an uncharged U.S. federal detainee, to El Salvador, opens some interesting questions in international macroeconomics and political economy. I mean “interesting” in the sense of the old Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled but not ruled on this case. On the one hand, by a unanimous vote, it has said that Abrego-Garcia has been denied due process of law, a right that can extend to non-citizens absent some reasonable exceptions, such as the terms of extradition treaties. Extradition treaties don’t apply here, however, since Abrego-Garcia was not formally charged with a crime. He was arrested as a suspect. Nice trick, eh?

On the other hand, the Court has ruled that the lower court whose decision they were adjudicating can’t necessarily tell a president what to do in matters of foreign affairs. The president must “facilitate” Abrego-Garcia’s return to the U.S. for due process—i.e., do everything he can to help make it happen—but cannot tell him to “effectuate” it, i.e., make it happen. That falls under Article II of the Constitution, the powers of making foreign policy.

To be sure, these powers of foreign policy are somewhat limited. Formal declaration of war is at least nominally a power that the president does not have, though obviously Congress has conceded a lot of war-making authority to the president since WW II. As an extremely implausible example, what if Trump decided that Salvadoran president Bukele’s refusal to return Abrego-Garcia justified taking military action? He could theoretically wage up to 90 days of war against El Salvador (OK, let’s call it a “special military operation”) to compel the return of Abrego-Garcia before needing the approval of Congress to continue. Somehow I don’t think it would take quite that long. But I digress.

The Supreme ruling says Trump must try to help return Abrego-Garcia, but hey, if he’s a busy man with a lot on his plate, he doesn’t have to do any more than required after he consults his sense of responsibility (heh, right) about other governing priorities. Which are up to him. If he just pleasantly asks Bukele to release Abrego-Garcia, and the answer is “No, let’s talk about the other agenda items, like tariff relief and exciting developments in cryptocurrencies,” then Trump can say, “I tried to help.” If he thinks about asking, then thinks, “Why waste time when Bukele will just say no,” that’s effort. And it’s the thought that counts, right?

But why would Bukele refuse? Well, there’s a deal: $6 million a year to El Salvador to hold hundreds of these unindicted suspects. And that’s where slavery creeps back in: it’s not just cash payment for the service of housing the suspects, it’s also a potential increase in zero-wage labor for the economy of El Salvador. Which would be slavery if it’s not the adjudicated punishment for a criminal conviction. But for slavery to be an economically viable social condition, doesn’t it have to be profitable? Let’s try some back-of-the-envelope arithmetic with some ballpark numbers.

Let’s say “hundreds” detained in El Salvador is as low as 200. Let’s say U.S. federal detention costs $30,000 per detainee per year. Well, that’s $6 million right there. But detention costs in El Salvador may be 1/3rd those of the U.S., in dollar terms. $4 million profit for El Salvador per year. But there’s more. What if El Salvador, already profiting by $10,000 per detainee/year, can also get labor for free from most detainees? Why not? If it’s a prison farm, or outsourcing to plantation owners, Salvadoran minimum wage is around $200 per month, yielding perhaps $2000 per year of labor value after some ancillary expenses. So now, El Salvador could be up by an annual $12,000 per detainee, or about double the average annual income for unskilled and semi-skilled labor in El Salvador.

Are you seeing the moral hazard here?

U.S. Supreme Court justice Sotomayor has pointed out that what was done to Abrego-Garcia could also be done to U.S. citizens. Detain without charge, deport. The Supreme Court has now said that a president must “facilitate” the return of those deported in error—try to help—but if a sovereign state refuses, and a U.S. president’s sense of national-interest priorities argues against going any further than saying please, pretty please, then that’s the end of it. Under an America First presidential order, if it reduces incarceration costs in the U.S., and reduces the cost of imports from the country of detention, what’s not to like? National interest argues against all but the most token intercessions.

So there’s the slavery loophole. But they can’t be too blatant about it. More likely, it’ll be a lot of nibbling around the edges, until there’s significant U.S. administrative machinery for it. But there’s a lot of potential here, considering the One Big Database vision of DOGE and AI capacity building.

DOGE efforts, even without changing federal database content, could circumvent both inter-bureaucracy impediments and legislated privacy protections among government departments. To target something, you need visibility of some kind for the target. One Big Database gives you clear shots, for detention of suspects. Legally, anyway. But what about materially, operationally?

Well, there’s federal support for AI. Trump has talked about declaring a national state of emergency to make sure that the massive Stargate AI complex being built will get its electrical power needs met. Because, you see, AI is strategic for America First, just on terms of economic competitiveness. China is aiming for “AI sovereignty.” So is Russia. But many nations simply can’t afford it.

That same technology can, however, be used for surveillance, if fed from DOGE’s One Big Database and other federally-accessible data sources, including video cameras for law enforcement and security. With Immigration databases unified with IRS databases and Homeland Security databases, laws and regulations originally intended to curb financial abuses enabled by green card status, even naturalized citizenship status, could themselves be abused to widen the slave-capture net.

I’ve so far limited myself to the U.S.-El Salvador axis of this slavery potential, but it’s worth mulling the prospect of competition among the New Slave States in this dystopian projection. And not just market competition, though that’s a factor.

Let’s say El Salvador is getting export-pricing benefits not just from imported slave labor and its depressing effect on agricultural labor rates for its cash-crop exports, but also adds competitive devaluation of its currency, with the net effect that it doesn’t feel the 10% tariff at all. Honduras is jealous and wants to get into the act. And Honduras gets an even better deal from Trump & Co. If nations can be said to feel, how do they end up feeling about each other.

Well, time was, Honduras and El Salvador had a war sparked by Honduras winning, by one point, a soccer match between their national teams. (I’m not making that up. Actually, during my time in Silicon Valley, I once worked with the son of the guy who scored that point, who felt so much heat that he moved the family to the U.S., where his son made it to MIT.)

Bidding wars to be slave labor brokers combined with competitive devaluations among nations with similar cash-crop exports combined with the endemic corruption already present in these countries combined with the power of criminal gangs that, in some cases, practically run some prisons in such countries by making prison administrators an offer that they can’t refuse . . . . It’s not that hard to see how it can all add up. War helped drive export of slaves from Africa to the U.S. And that slave trade added further incentives to widen war.

In political economy terms, war and slavery tend to be concomitants. They can cause deep divisions between nations that would otherwise benefit by unifying and resisting. To a very real extent, to be anti-war is to be anti-slavery, and vice versa.

Tariffs, as a blade for divide and conquer. Technology—including the technology of high-tech warships, where a proposed $300 billion increase in the U.S. “defense” budget would substantially go toward increasing America’s ship-building capacity. The buffer of oceans between the Americas and the rest of the world, against other nations—even against other empires. Corruption, in the developing world, including Latin America, and increasingly in the U.S. A narrow-minded focus in democracies on individual increases in the standard of living. All this, and more.

These are the ingredients for Making America Great Again, in a certain way: restoring hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, possibly far exceeding its previous reach and clout in the 19th and 20th centuries.

What is greatness? When I was a young reader, our family’s shelves had a book with capsule biographies of Great Leaders. “Great” not in the sense of “good”, but in the sense of history-changing. Lincoln was in it, certainly. But also Napoleon. Stalin. Mussolini. Hitler. Don’t we all want to be great? The authors and editors of that book were trying to tell my young brain something: be careful about what you want, because you might get it.