The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, September 24, 2007

Jon Stewart: My guest tonight! An investigative journalist whose new book is called Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy, please welcome to the show: John Bowe! Thank you very much for joining us, your book is called Nobodies, it concerns slave labor right here in the United States. In the book you describe an America that most people wouldn't recognize, South Florida and Tulsa, Oklahoma.

John Bowe: Uh, yeah, I mean, this is the thing that nobody realizes. It's all around, I found a case the other day, or there's a case that I can't really talk about on national TV, but--

Jon Stewart: You're not on national TV, but go ahead.

John Bowe: What are we on? There are 2,000 workers from Thailand who have been brought to this country legally and they are working in about 14 different states and they come and they pay $20,000 to come and when they get here somebody says, "hey, we're gonna take your passport and you're going to be working on this farm in the middle of nowhere and we're not going to pay you and please don't tell anybody about it," and of course they don't speak English so that'd be pretty hard even if they wanted to.

Jon Stewart: Do they think, the difference is now, 'cause, obviously this is not systemic but it seems that it's very difficult to ferret out.

John Bowe: Yeah, it's incredibly hard to ferret out. These guys don't speak English; in a lot of cases, people are here illegally; they're not just gonna go flag a local cop and say, "hey, Mr." You know, a lot of times they're not aware of their rights or the idea of human rights or American laws, so t