It is legal for prisoners to be enslaved - perhaps you missed that little gotcha in the amendment.

If the goal of prison isn’t to turn criminals into better citizens, then why not put all prisoners in a hard labor camp?

Mostly, yeah.

The White or Black aliens are a lot nicer than the Terra Invicta aliens. They only launch their invasion because the religious organization asks them to, and even then, the aliens don’t hurt anyone intentionally.

Looking at the Terra Invicta factions, they end up like this in White or Black:

• Project Exodus never gets off the ground.
• The Protectorate is absorbed into the Servants, as the Protectorate comes to believe that the Servants’ methods are a better way to assert control over the human population.
• The Initiative is wiped out during World War III. Remnants are absorbed into the Resistance and Humanity First.
• As things get more desperate, the Resistance is absorbed into Humanity First.
• The Academy leads a strong alliance of nations in the East, but they are ultimately absorbed into the Servants around ~2098.
• Humanity First is greatly weakened in the early 22nd century, and nearly destroyed in the 23rd century, but small rebel factions continue to exist into the 27th century.
• The Servants control the entire Earth by the early 22nd century, and they take big steps to assert their rule in the 23rd century. They are unambiguously the winner in the 27th century.

The US is most similar to the 2030s-early 2050s US in the Chinese-written White or Black (Chinese variant of Brave New World).

• An alien shows up, and an international team sent to investigate kill it by accident.
• A bunch of aliens show up a few years later, but they’re content to float in the sky.
• After deciphering their language, humanity discovers that the aliens seek asylum on Earth, and they claim that the human race is doomed unless humanity does some immediate course correction.
• “Lol, no.”
• Meanwhile, a group of religious MAGA Republicans (Trump is presumably dead at this point) form a religion devoted to worshiping the aliens, believing that they’re angels sent by God.
• The aliens’ predictions come to pass. The collapsed US is then taken over by the alien supporting religious organization in the late 2060s-2070s.