Modern world is a global Roman Empire.
Remember, their citizens were lumpens living off free bread, and most of the work was done by slaves?
Todays governments act the same. They decided that it is much cheaper to keep fat and doped population on welfare, just enough for them not to rebel, and import cheap foreign labour to do all the work. Just look around you: in most developed countries, construction workers, cleaners, nurses, police, firemen, bakers, plant workers and almost every other workplace is occupied by a foreigner. Every successful state has a few poor countries around to import the slaves from. In ancient times, the master provided the slave with food and shelter. Nowadays employees pay the foreign workers just enough to get some food and a place to sleep.
Even more powerful entities – multinational corporations – also use slave labour to produce their goods as cheap as they can for a higher profit. You probably remember a satire commercial from GTA 3 if you played the game, about an underage worker producing Eris Running shoes, who made a dollar yesterday.
Those thoughts came up while watching The Island. The movie is about a group of people, who found out they are actually clones, born for slaughter to donate body parts to their originals, when the latter would need them. That’s the artist vision of future immortality.
However, real life seems to be going away from cloned organs. Why bother, if there are so many poor slaves ready to sell their organs? Genetical match may be a problem, but you have a l lot to choose from.