Actually there
is nothing much wrong with immigration laws anywhere. They generally meet needs well enough. What they do not do is solve poverty.
It is time to
stop beating around the bush and understand that the simple resort of managing
your currency system can make poverty impossible. I will not address details here because even
doing things right has to be done right.
Watching the abuse applied to micro finance warns us of just how hard
this will be in real terms. It is as if
two thirds of the world’s population wants to be paid off to halt their
neighbor’s suffering.
Thus is the
mentality of the unjustly secure.
Human
Trafficking: The Other Good Reason to Reform Immigration
Restrictive immigration policies have long been
associated with a variety of economic problems including the diminished
availability of foreign business and scientific talent, the inability to fill
low-skilled agricultural and service jobs typically scorned by legal residents,
and reduced access to the kind of entrepreneurial enthusiasm characteristic of
those willing to risk their futures in another country.
Only recently has it become clear how restrictive
immigration laws also produce harmful social consequences, particularly when it
comes to the age-old scourge of human trafficking—the use of force and fraud to
supply cheap labor and sexual services.
To understand these consequences, it is important to
appreciate just how lucrative a branch of organized crime the modern slave
trade has become. Efficient transportation, technological advances in
both farming and factory work, and advances in communication have all combined
to make the use of forced labor very cheap by historical measures.
Free the Slaves, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit,
has calculated the return on the cost of an enslaved field worker in 1850s
Alabama at just 5 percent, whereas today a trafficked farmhand can yield the
owner anywhere from double digits to 800 percent. Similarly, an
imprisoned prostitute shuttled around the boroughs of New York City in a van by
a driver scheduling appointments on his cell phone can service as many as 40
customers in a single shift. As one researcher coldly but accurately put
it, “People are a good commodity as they do not easily perish, but they can be
transported over long distances and can be re-used and re-sold.”
The result, according to the United Nations Office
on Drugs and Crime, is that 2.5 million victims, approximately 80 percent
female and 50 percent under the age of 18, are being trafficked around the
world at any given time. In 2005 the International Labor Organization in
Geneva, Switzerland, estimated the annual revenues from this “industry” at $32
billion, or $13,000 per victim.
It would undoubtedly surprise many Americans to
learn the extent to which this modern slave trade operates within their own
country. A 2004 study, Hidden Slaves: Forced Labor in the United
States, by Free the Slaves and the Human Rights Center at the University of
California, Berkeley, estimates that “tens of thousands” of women and children
are trafficked nationwide with the largest numbers coming from China, Mexico,
and Vietnam.
According to the study 46 percent are prostitutes,
27 percent are imprisoned household servants, 10 percent work in agriculture, 5
percent are held in sweatshops, and 4 percent serve against their will in
restaurants and hotels. A May 2012 televised report by the BBC identified
a single town in Mexico, Tenancingo, where 10 percent of the 10,000 residents
are engaged full-time in trafficking teenage girls to work the streets of New
York, Chicago, and other major U.S. cities.
The unexpectedly large size and scope of America’s
slave economy is hidden from policymakers and the public in part by its
criminal nature, but also by a longstanding federal metric that substantially
undercounts victims. The government has traditionally not tallied
imprisoned workers identified in crackdowns of border-smuggling operations or
in raids of sweatshops and brothels, only the relatively small number who
somehow escape their captors and formally apply for assistance.
Debt Bondage
It is also important to understand the basic
mechanism of human enslavement, which is typically referred to as “debt
bondage.” The victim, almost always from a poor, developing, or
economically unstable country, agrees to repay the trafficker from future earnings
the cost of transport, border-control evasion, and accrued interest in order to
land what is believed to be a legitimate job in a more prosperous part of the
globe.
By the time a trafficked laborer discovers the real
work he or she has been imported to perform, it is too late. Amid threats
of violence, uncertainty as to the help local authorities are willing to
provide, possible retribution against loved ones back home, inability to speak
the local language well, and a lack of financial resources, the victim has no
choice but to accept the captor’s unilateral modification of the contract.
Even when brothels, sex tourism operations,
exploitative factories, and farm labor camps are subjected to local law
enforcement crackdowns, the trafficker himself is typically insulated from
prosecution by having set up some of his victims as onsite managers.
According to the Danish Centre against Human Trafficking (DCAHT), most pimps
and forced labor guards rounded up in police raids around the world usually turn
out to have been trafficked themselves.
The Business Model
For all the human misery inflicted by the slave
trade, there was little hard data on the problem beyond the statistics already
cited—until recently, when social scientists in the United States and Germany
began to think that a dispassionate economic perspective might be
helpful. Reasoning that an objective analysis of the market could
conceivably reveal unexpected vulnerabilities in the typical trafficker’s
business plan, they set out to create an unemotional commercial understanding
of slavery, framing what most consider an abhorrent activity in terms of
standard business concepts such as product demand, asset life, aftermarket, and
ordinary expenses.
In 2010, for example, Elizabeth Wheaton, Edward
Schauer, and Thomas Galli created a detailed report for the
journal International Migration, showing how traffickers calculate the
marginal cost of each new person sold into slavery and therefore the optimal
size of a given network. They also described how successful traffickers
in mature markets survive competition by cultivating resale customers.
The first thing such research began to make clear is
the surprisingly large number of subcontractors a trafficker needs to employ:
recruiters on the ground, corrupt officials, smugglers, forgers, pimps and
labor camp enforcers at the back end, and even people to compose advertisements
to lure naive victims with the false hope of legitimate jobs in distant lands.
What economists then began to see is that a trafficker’s
ability to control operating expenses is dependent almost exclusively on
migration patterns. Poor and underdeveloped regions where large numbers
of people are anxiously seeking employment in more prosperous countries with
closed borders give rise to large, efficient smuggling operations that reduce
the trafficker’s transportation expenses. (A smuggler is not necessarily
a trafficker until he is employed by one or branches out into that business
himself.) Economies of scale similarly lower the costs of recruitment and
documentation.
The most recent example of how migration alters
trafficking patterns involves the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This
may have been a welcome political development, but the resulting chaos in the
satellite counties led to waves of migration, which in turn made trafficking
from Eastern Europe exceptionally profitable. Combined with the formation
of the European Union, which eliminated border checkpoints across much of the
continent, the fall of the Russian empire made it possible to cheaply transport
coerced workers from countries like Bulgaria, Moldova, Romania, and the Ukraine
to almost anywhere in the West.
One result is that sex tourism in Spanish border
towns like La Jonquera is currently booming. According to local
authorities interviewed for a story by New York Times reporter
Suzanne Daley, a disproportionately large percentage of female slaves are lured
from Eastern Europe under the control of a network.
Between Poverty and Closed Borders
Weak legislation in the receiving counties, the poor
quality of law enforcement, and official corruption—all may exacerbate
trafficking, say the Kiel Institute’s Toman Omar Mahmoud and the Free
University of Berlin’s Christoph Trebesch in their study The Economics of
Human Trafficking and Labour Migration, but “it is first and foremost the wish
for a better life abroad that puts millions of people at risk of ending up in
exploitative working conditions.”
“In a nutshell,” they write, “trafficking and
exploitation are the sad but obvious consequences of migration pressure in a
world of closed borders.”
What this conclusion clearly suggests is that that
the most effective way to reduce trafficking would be to undercut the barriers
to employment migration in more affluent nations. Noting that the vast
majority of victims are trapped between a desperate desire to improve their
lives and restrictive immigration policies, Kevin Bales, professor emeritus at
Roehampton University in London and the author of Ending Slavery, argues
that stemming the illegal flow of slaves means “facing up to the economic
demand for people to fill jobs in richer countries.”
Interestingly, this argument dovetails with the
commonsense observations of those fighting slavery on the ground in countries
like Thailand, which is notorious for child prostitution, labor exploitation,
and sexual tourism. The Development and Education Programme for Daughters
and Communities (DEPDC) notes that the Thai government recognizes only nine of
the tribes in the remote highlands. As a result, the other tribes are
disproportionately vulnerable to traffickers because they are treated as if
they were foreigners and officially they have no rights. DEPDC has long
argued that the most effective antidote for human slavery in Southeast Asia
would involve conferring some kind of legal status on would-be workers who are
effectively stateless.
Halfway across the world in the United Kingdom, the
Adam Smith Society, a market-oriented think tank, has similarly argued that
government efforts to stop the trafficking of bonded labor to meet seasonal
demands in the European supermarket business are a largely a waste of time and
taxpayer money. Instead of passing tougher regulations or hiring more
police to crack down on illegal migrant workers, the society recommends making
employment visas more flexible and easier for foreigners to obtain.
The case for a more lenient immigration policy has
long been based on the sound economic argument that an open employment market
increases productivity, which in turn raises a country’s overall standard of
living. To that we can now append the opportunity to undermine sex and
labor trafficking and thereby begin to end an age-old source of human misery.
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