Live-in workers particularly run the risk of ending up in virtual indentured servitude, at the mercy of sponsors with no compunction about threatening to call in the Immigration and Naturalization Service to extract more work.

"Do we not well know that the city is in thrall to corrupt men, who wax fat on their ill-gotten gains, while better men are held back and forced into virtual servitude?"

Representative Nydia M. Velazquez, Democrat of Brooklyn, said yesterday that she would introduce legislation to temporarily bar the deportation of the deaf Mexican immigrants who were found living in virtual servitude in Queens in July.

In one narrative strand a bourgeois wife escapes virtual servitude to a husband mired in self-absorption; in another, a young Algerian woman scores a major comeuppance after enduring years of savage abuse as a prostitute on the streets of Paris.

If it passes, H1B will be the largest guest worker measure since the 1942 bracero program, which imported millions of Mexicans farmworkers into virtual servitude, until it was dismantled in 1964.

Many functioned in virtual servitude, and some rancheros paid them only with liquor.

Her father, rabbi turned storekeeper, was a cold, sexually abusive tyrant who kept his children in virtual servitude, exploited his black customers and ultimately abandoned his wife.

The Dinowitz bill would establish two new trafficking crimes - one for using people as sexual slaves, the other for bringing people to New York and keeping them in virtual servitude for housework or other menial jobs.

Some refugees have accepted virtual servitude in order to eat.

In a larger sense, the affair brought into question the wisdom of an amateur system in which parents send sons into virtual servitude under virtual strangers.