International Human Trafficking and Migration
1000 Chinese Cooks Enslaved in Germany
Published August 19, 2009 @ 12:38PM PT
Modern-day slaves can be found anywhere, doing anything. This week in Germany, over 1000 of them were found cooking in Chinese takeout restaurants. They were victims of a human trafficking ring which smuggled Chinese nationals into Germany as "specialty cooks" and then made millions off their labor.
Here's how it worked: Chinese workers interested in coming to Germany to earn money would pay 10,000 Euros for a visa and what they thought was a legitimate contract for work. Once in Germany, however, their passports were taken and they were thrown into debt bondage, unable to leave until they repaid the massive debt. They were forced to work 80-90 hours a week cooking in Chinese restaurants all over the country and paid a paultry 3 Euros an hour. Even though these workers were paid, because they were held in debt bondage and not free to leave, they were slaves in the restaurant industry.
Too often the faces of human trafficking feel far away from us. We think of the young girl in the brothel in Brazil or the child enslaved in a diplomat's home in Washington DC and think- how could this ever reach to me? But Chinese takeout reaches millions of people in the U.S. and Europe. Who doesn't have a favorite dish from the place down the street? How many of us know the delivery boy or girl by sight, if not by name? This is one form of trafficking many of us are connected to.
This story comes from Germany, but it could just as easily have happened in the U.S. One of the reasons human trafficking in restaurants is so hard to find, is that we have only a tiny fraction of the labor inspectors we would need to visit every restaurant once, much less on a regular basis. Plus, site inspections often focus more on immigration status than labor and human rights issues. We need more inspectors who are specifically looking for labor exploitation and human trafficking as opposed to immigration status. If that ever happens, we might find what Germany found.
Bravo to Germany for ending the exploitation of over 1000 people. I hope the U.S. and other countries can learn from your experience that slaves can be anywhere, even in the kitchen.
Image from unionleader.com
Legal Prostitution in Australia a "Failure"
Published August 18, 2009 @ 10:53AM PT
Ten years ago, Australia made a risky policy move it thought would help protect women and children: it legalized prostitution. Today, only 10% of the prostitution industry operates in Australia's legal brothels. The other 90% takes place in underground, illegal sex markets thick with forced prostitution and human trafficking victims.
The University of Queensland Working Group on Human Trafficking recently released a report stating that the prostitution laws in Australia had failed. Since 1999, women in Australia have had the option of working legally in licensed brothels or on their own. The hope was that women with an entrepreneurial spirit and a passion for commercial sex would set up their own businesses, and make everything safe, legal, and regulated. That hasn't happened.
What has happened, instead, is entrepreneurial pimps have lured and trafficked Asian women to Australia and set up illegal brothels with lower prices. Trafficking is "booming" in Queensland, and there are few laws to help protect women who are lured or coerced into prostitution against their will. And as legal brothels try and compete with the trafficking boom, they cut costs, which often involves cutting freedom and benefits for women. Even in the legal, liscenced brothels of Queensland, women have reported being coerced into working under unfair conditions or against their will.
Australian advocates and policy-makers are offering a number of solutions to this problem, everything from increasing the police force looking for illegal brothels to making the legal brothel's fees lower to adding new legal protections for immigrant women in the commercial sex industry. The one thing everyone seems to agree on is that legal prostitution in Australia isn't working to protect women. But how should it be fixed?
Here's my vote: Legal prostitution in Australia isn't working to protect women because legal prostitution doesn't work to protect women. It will always be cheaper to set up an illegal brothel full of slave labor than to pay fees and salaries and health care to licensed workers. As long as there are men demanding cheap commercial sex, there will be traffickers willing to supply it. And where there is a legal market, there will be more men demanding sex, though not always at legal market prices.
Australia's experiment is one more example of when the theory of prostitution and the practice of it don't match up. In theory, Queensland should now be full of empowered women owning and working in commercial sex businesses and a vast majority (if not all) of women in commercial sex participating freely. In practice, it is a tiny, ineffective legal commercial sex industry with little entrepreneurship and a massive, booming industry of sexual slavery.
Image from abc.net.au
Mexican Drug Cartels Switch to Selling Humans
Published August 13, 2009 @ 11:19AM PT
Here's a math problem you won't remember from school: Which is higher, the black market value of a pound of cocaine or the black market value of a 13-year-old girl? If you guessed the girl, you get 100% on this math test.
When a drug cartel trafficks a pound of cocaine into the U.S., they can only sell it once. When they traffic a young woman into the U.S., they can sell her again and again. This is a simple economic fact that I (and others in this field) have been aware of for years. However, it seems some Mexican drug cartels have recently discovered this additional potential for profit, and they are now switching from trafficking heroine to trafficking human beings.
The idea that drug traffickers will suddenly switch to humans is even more disturbing in the light of an increased national discussion around legalizing some drugs, like marijuana. What would the pot traffickers do then? Would they get respectable jobs in the brand new legal marijuana industry? Or would they use their criminal contacts to traffic harder drugs, guns, and people? I'm of the inclination that while some criminals might go clean in a new legal drug industry, the rest will see how much more cash they can make through the illegal sale of human beings.
What do you think?
CNN recently did a story on this disturbing new trend, which feature anonymous interviews with women being trafficked into the U.S. by some of the Mexican cartels.
Chipotle's Slave-Stuffed Burritos?
Published August 12, 2009 @ 12:07PM PT
The foil on your thick, juicy Chipotle burrito might be hiding a secret ingredient: slavery. That's because Chipotle refuses to pay the farmworkers who pick their produce a living wage and take steps to ensure their suppliers are slave-free. Tell Chipotle executives to end workers exploitation and stand up to their motto: "food with integrity".
The Coalition of Immokolee Workers (CIW), who have won great victories in the past few years in getting the likes of Taco Bell and McDonald's to agree to better wages and non-exploitative working conditions for farmworkers, are now setting their sights on burrito giant Chiptole. This comes on the heels of Chipotle's support for Food Inc., a documentary about "big food". The Chipotle/Food Inc. relationship is a pathetic PR move that lacks any real ability to improve the lives of farmworkers in the U.S. and reduce human trafficking in agriculture. We know Chipotle needs to do something real to address this real problem.
Some of the farm workers are paid sub-poverty wages in gross violations of labor laws. Others have been,
I love a good burrito, but not one that has been tainted by slavery. It's time Chipotle stood up for farmworkers and against human trafficking and exploitation.
Click here to email Chipotle executives and ask them to live their motto "food with integrity." Also, you can call Chipotle as part of CIW's call-in campaign to urge Chipotle to create a formal agreement to give farmworkers better wages.
Together we can stand up for justice, integrity, and delicious burritos!
The Price of Sex
Published August 08, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT
Photo journalist Mimi Chakarova has created a great collection of videos and photos of Eastern European women telling their stories of being enslaved in prostitution. Four of the videos tell the stories of individual survivors, and two others are focused on women at risk and how sex trafficking works. You can view all these at: www.priceofsex.org.
This project tells the story of one form of trafficking from one region, affecting one group of victims. The issue of trafficking women into prostitution is, of course, a problem in areas other than Eastern Europe and former Soviet-bloc countries. However, as many of the videos explain, women in this area have been some of the most vulnerable to exploitation in prostitution. Many face the impossible choice of remaining jobless and poor in their home country or risking trafficking by taking a job overseas. It's a risk they know, and they take it because staying and starving is not a viable choice.
It's also important to note that many women who are trafficked knowingly and willingly enter prostitution. While the most publicized stories are about women who thought they would be waitresses or nannies, some take a job in the Netherlands or Germany in what they expect will be legal, safe prostitution on their own terms. Even after making that choice, women can be trafficked one their freedom is removed or their labor stolen and exploited. A woman who took a job as a prostitute and one who took a job as a waitress are equally trafficked once they loose their ability to leave or control their situation. The women from Eastern Europe thought they were taking a number of different kids of jobs, jobs that all turned into slavery.
The price of sex is higher than you think, and Chakarova eloquently tells the stories of just how high it can be.
Image from humantraffickingproject.blogspot.com
Texas Battles Rep as Human Trafficking Hub
Published August 07, 2009 @ 08:06AM PT
Texas, and especially the border areas of the Rio Grande Valley, have been called a human trafficking hub and the "gateway" of human trafficking into the U.S. Certainly, the Texas-Mexico border is a popular entry point for traffickers smuggling in people from all over Central and South America. But abolitionist Texans are refusing to let their state be further tainted by it's title, and have taken some serious legislative and grassroots action to close the gateway.
Local advocacy group Children At Risk has put forth a number of bills to the state legislature, including:
- HB533 created civil liability for human traffickers by providing victims with an avenue to sue traffickers.
- HB4009 established a victim assistance program, a statewide human trafficking task force and mandated training for law enforcement agencies to help identify victims.
- SB 707 requires sexually-oriented businesses to maintain proper identification records for employees or independent contractors.
- HB960 gives municipalities and counties the right to access the National Crime Information Center, to obtain criminal information on people applying for licenses to operate sexually oriented businesses.
- HB 3094 created civil liability for operating an illegitimate "massage parlor" in a county with a population of 3.3 million or more. The offense is a Class A misdemeanor and carries a fine of $1,000 per violation.
Despite these new tools for law enforcement and social service organizations, the abolitionists of Texas have their work cut out for them. An estimated 17,000 people are brought across the border each year, many of them duped with false promises of jobs that turn into slavery once they reach America. This is one of those cases where the issue of human trafficking does get tied up in the immigration debate and included in the hotly contested policies around border protection and immigration. Trafficking is one peice of a larger issue, but one which deeply affects both the people crossing the border and those who live in Texas and the rest of the U.S.
Immigration aside, however, bravo to Texas for being proactive. It's never easy to admit when you have a problem, especially one as serious as being the gateway to human trafficking into the U.S. But acknowledging the situation has helped Texas take important steps to rectify it.
Hear that traffickers? Don't mess with Texas.
Remembering Why Laura Ling and Euna Lee Were At the N. Korean Border
Published August 06, 2009 @ 07:29AM PT
The scenes of tearful reunion between journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee and their families yesterday, silhouetted against the stoic form of Bill Clinton, were moving to say the least. After months of captivity and living in fear of a sentence of 12 years in a forced labor camp, we all breathed a sigh of relief when the journalists came home. But let's not forget why Ling and Lee were captured in March- they were reporting on human trafficking across the Chinese-North Korean border.
The cross-border trafficking between China and North Korean primarily affects women and girls. They are sold as brides and forced into serviles marriages. Some North Korean women are promised greater job opportunities and education in China, along with freedoms not granted in North Korea. Too often, those jobs are forced prostitution or domestic servitude. Women in this region of the world are incredibly vulnerable to trafficking, due to the dire economic situations many of them face and the heavy corruption and criminal activity in the region.
Such cross-border trafficking between two countries is not unusual, but the situation between China and North Korea is even more complicated by the fact that both countries deny there is a serious problem with human trafficking over the border. Corruption among border officials in the region is high. Even the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof has speculated that Ling and Lee were sold by their guide to a North Korean border official, and that their guide tricked them into crossing the border. Fighting cross-border trafficking is hard enough when both countries admit the problem and take steps to address it. But in this case, denial is a river that runs across East Asia.
So as we celebrate Lee and Ling's safe returns, let us not forget why they suffered months of fear and imprisonment- to discover and report the truth about human trafficking. Let us also not forget that while they are thankfully safe at home with their families, thousands of women and girls in China and North Korea have been torn away from theirs. These women are imprisoned in brothels, homes, marriages, and workplaces. They too are scared and uncertain, Like Ling and Lee were, and wondering when they will see their families and friends again.
Who will help these women, the ones who are not yet home safe? Will it once again be Bill Clinton?
Or will it be you?
