Human Trafficking in the Era of Global Migration

The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of 'global governance' and how it applies to the management of international migration by using trafficking of human beings as a case study. Globalization has altered the scene of world politics. A traditional state-centric view of the world order has been overshadowed by the increasing importance of other actors, including the United Nations, Multi-National Corporations (MNCs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Globalization has also altered the dynamics of rule making and their enforcement within the international system, in that not only States, but also these non-State actors exercise enormous influence. The concept of global governance acknowledges this as it aims to include all the pertinent actors involved. To illustrate this further, the author will use trafficking of human beings as a case study. Two key principles of global governance are participation and accountability. This paper will analyze how these principles are reflected and implemented in the regime dealing with the prevention and suppression of trafficking of human beings.

Inequality. Gender. Globalization. Corruption. Instability. These are factors we know matter when it comes to human trafficking. But does corruption work the same way in Cambodia as it does in Bolivia? Is it important for instability to be present with inequality to lead to human trafficking? Why do we typically see human trafficking flows in the same areas as migration flows? This book examines these questions by developing an integrated theoretical framework that draws from migration, feminist, and criminology scholars. Among the questions tackled by Sarah Hupp Williamson in this book are the following: How did the emergence of global economic policies from international financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank contribute to the emergence of these conditions? How do these conditions combine in various ways in different countries creating unique pathways for human trafficking to flourish? What is the relationship that these human trafficking pathways share with migration flows? Using cross-national comparative and in-depth historical analysis, these questions are answered through case studies on Cambodia in Southeast Asia, Bolivia in South America, and The Gambia in Sub-Saharan Africa. The book argues that neoliberal economic policies imposed by international financial institutions contributed to the conditions which both drove migration and allowed human trafficking to flourish. Critiquing existing anti-trafficking policy, the book concludes that to truly be effective, anti-trafficking efforts must address the root causes creating these pathways that often place migrants in a context vulnerable to human trafficking.

The global migration and trafficking of women is anchored in particular features of the current globalization of economies in both the north and the south. Making this legible requires that we look at globalization in ways that are different from the mainstream view, confined to emphasizing the hypermobility of capital and to the ascendance of information economies. The growing inmiseration of governments and whole economies in the global south has promoted and enabled the proliferation of survival and profit-making activities that involve the migration and trafficking of women. To some extent these are older processes, which used to be national or regional that can today operate at global scales. The same infrastructure that facilitates cross-border flows of capital, information and trade is also making possible a whole range of cross-border flows not intended by the framers and designers of the current globalization of economies. Growing numbers of traffickers and smugglers are making money off the backs of women and many governments are increasingly dependent on their remittances. A key aspect here is that through their work and remittances, women enhance the government revenue of deeply indebted countries and offer new profit making possibilities to `entrepreneurs' who have seen other opportunities vanish as a consequence of global firms and markets entering their countries or to long time criminals who can now operate their illegal trade globally. These survival circuits are often complex, involving multiple locations and sets of actors constituting increasingly global chains of traders and `workers'. A central point of the article is that it is through these supposedly rather value-less economic actors – low-wage and poor women – that key components of these new economies have been built. Globalization plays a specific role here in a double sense, contributing to the formation of links between sending and receiving countries, and, secondly, enabling local and regional practices to become global in scale.

This chapter examines the case of clandestine human mobility, one of the biggest “hot button” political issues in government efforts to control unauthorized cross-border flows. It addresses questions such as Is global migration out of control? What’s the distinction between a migrant and a refugee? What is driving migration, and what are the main migrant source and destination countries? What is the size of the unauthorized migrant population? Who benefits from unauthorized migration? What is the difference between migrant smuggling and human trafficking? How and when did trafficking become such a big concern? Why aren’t migrant smuggling and human trafficking primarily treated as human rights issues? How reliable are the statistics on human trafficking? Why are unauthorized migrants hiring smugglers? Are smugglers predators or travel service providers? Who is involved in migrant smuggling? How is the business organized? What is the role of social media in migrant smuggling? Is migrant smuggling converging with other forms of cross-border crime? What is the role of corruption in migrant smuggling? How much do migrant smugglers charge? How do migrants pay for the journey? How important is fraudulent use of documents? What measures have destination countries taken to curb unauthorized migration? How has the European Union outsourced immigration controls? How has the United States outsourced immigration controls? What has been the impact of tighter enforcement on unauthorized migration? How new is unauthorized migration across the U.S.-Mexico border? Why has it become so dangerous for migrants to cross through Mexico? Has targeting employers been part of the enforcement effort?

In recent years there has been a significant increase in trafficking in human beings as a global phenomenon. COVID-19 pandemic created conditions that increased the number of persons who were vulnerable to human trafficking and disrupted current and planned anti-trafficking initiatives. Human trafficking treats human beings as commodities to be bought and sold and put to forced labour often for lower or no payment. This constitutes a modern form of de facto slavery, servitude and forced or compulsory labour. This article provides an overview of international law on human trafficking and considers response to human trafficking in Africa. It further considers whether diplomats can be held accountable for exploitation of migrant domestic workers in receiving States. It further examines whether diplomatic immunity can be used as a bar to the exercise of jurisdiction by domestic courts and tribunals of a state which hosts the diplomat (the ‘receiving state’) in cases of employment of a trafficked person by a former or serving diplomat. It ends by considering whether trafficked persons should be held to bear individual criminal responsibility for crimes they have committed (or were compelled to commit) in the course, or as a direct consequence, of having been trafficked. Such crimes may include unlawful entry into, presence or residence in another country of transit or destination, working without a work permit, sex work, and use of false identity/false passport.

Having entered the global migration processes, from the second half of the 1990s, the Republic of Moldova faced the problem of human trafficking and became a country of origin for victims of human trafficking. One of the important measures aimed at preventing human trafficking is the awareness of the population, primarily young people, about the risks and consequences of human trafficking. The education system plays an important role in raising citizens’ awareness of the risks and consequences of human trafficking. However, as shown by the sociological study conducted by the author, in the prevention of human trafficking, the majority of respondents do not consider the activities of educational institutions effective and sufficiently effective. Therefore, the curricula of general education and higher educational institutions should include training courses that will provide young people with information regarding legal and illegal migration, human rights, gender issues, and the dangers associated with THB. Together with all interested state and public structures, educational institutions should support efforts aimed at raising awareness of the most vulnerable groups of the population about the consequences and risks associated with human trafficking. Awareness-raising activities will lead to an increase in the number of citizens who will be confident that they are insured against situations related to human trafficking.

Since the 1990s, west African young men have increasingly aspired to migrate through football, i.e. to play football as a career and a strategy to migrate abroad. Key figures in their migration projects are intermediaries – agents, coaches, and club owners who seek to facilitate and control their mobility in the global market of football players. This article examines mediation of football-related migrations from west Africa to Europe in order to reflect on broader issues of global capitalism and its underlying structures of inequity. It examines questions of legality, intermediaries’ motivations, their relationships with aspiring migrants, and racial constructs of Whiteness and Blackness. Ethnographic insights into football migration mediation reveal that structural inequities have less to do with outright racism and human trafficking – two well-documented issues of global football and migration in general – and more with a speculative nature of global capitalist markets, stringent migration regimes, promises of inclusion and empowerment, and racialization of categories like opportunity, discipline, and merit.

This article deals with historiographic and semantic change in prostitution studies through some examples from recent literature. Current studies evaluate prostitution as sex work and emphasize the agency of women from a historical point of view. By doing so, they situate prostitution studies within the global labor and migration history which treats the issues of «trafficking in women» as labor migration and questions the notions of «fallenness» or «victimhood » in various contexts. The article also contextualizes the periodization of prostitution studies while presenting briefly how sources and actors of prostitution studies widened our perspectives on modern state, colonialism, institutions, labor and gender politics.

There are several different issues affecting migration on the global scale, which are commonly interconnected. These include work migration, lifestyle migration, ecological migration, workers’ wages abroad, transit migration, irregular global migration, forced and forced humanitarian migration, human trafficking, refugees, and the safety of displaced populations. This study analyzes causation and consequences of Turkish workforce migration. Aim: Bu çalışma hayatlarını iyileştirmek amacıyla kuraldışı göçmen işgücünün Avrupa’ya göç etmesiyle birlikte yükselen sorunlara odaklanmaktadır. Methodology: Social and cultural discourse analysis are used in the study. It is preferable to investigate the macroeconomic factors of each country, in order to assess the economic implications of immigration. The present study looks at immigration from an economic, as well as a cultural and social point of view. Findings: Apparently, immigration policies are unable to achieve their prespecified demographic targets, at least under most circumstances, because controlling the synthesis and volume of net migration poses a remarkable challenge. Apart from the economic crisis, certain factors that are unique to Turkey lately, such as social-legislative problems and unemployment, push large segments of the population to migrate to other countries, raising the fraction of immigration therefore. Results: Demographic circumstances and effects of relevant policies work in tandem, and their combined influence alters the volume and makeup of the workforce in complex ways. Moreover, any undertaking to pinpoint the needs of the future work market in a decisive way, regarding immigration, and to optimize immigration strategies, appears to have modest results as well.

Contemporary anti-trafficking narratives exemplify the centrality of family unaccountability as one of the root causes of sex trafficking. Suggesting that human trafficking can be explained by bad family values, or cultural norms that consider girl children to be disposable, facilitates the heroic, paternalist, and “caring” interventions that have now been well-documented by activists and scholars of trafficking. Focusing on the family, these references also expose two conflicting modes of care work that are implicated in contemporary anti-trafficking activism. Building on an extensive scholarship on care work, which has rarely been read alongside critical human trafficking scholarship, this article asks how human trafficking rescue programs expose disparate types of care work deeply connected to sexual commerce. Extending Rhacel Parreñas’ typology of moral and material care work of Filipina migrant domestic workers, this article argues that the shifting contexts of gendered care work under conditions of global migration, development, and humanitarianism, require an acknowledgment of how the moral care work involved in global “anti-trafficking” rescue performed mainly by first world women operates in opposition to the material care work of supporting families and households performed by migrant sex workers who are being rescued. As an additional articulation of material care work, global sex worker activists have also expressed how care work is a vital component of the labor relations of sex work itself—as a way to call for its recognition as a form of labor.

This paper critically interrogates the dynamics of modern migration, globalization, and the international security challenges they generate within the world system. While global migration is inevitable in the age of globalization; global migration has become a vehicle for the spread of deadly diseases and international organized crimes, making the world unsafe for everyone. Diseases such as HIV/AIDS, SARS, Ebola and lately, COVID-19 which killed many in time past spread throughout the world due to modern migration and globalization. Also, criminal networks across international borders have taken advantage of modern migration to expand their illicit trade in arms, narcotics, migrant smuggling, human trafficking and terrorism, making it extremely difficult for governments to deal with. However, the paper posited that while modern migration and globalization have contributed in no small measure to mobility of labor force and enormous wealth to some parts of the world in an unprecedented manner, same phenomena have engendered poverty and lack in some parts of the world especially, the Global South countries predominantly in Africa and Asia, whose citizens resort to irregular migration as a survival strategy, despite the risks involved. Using the world system’s theory, the paper maintained that global migration started with Trans-Atlantic slave trade, followed by colonization and today’s neo-liberal globalization, all driven by capital accumulation. In the light of the above, the paper concluded and suggested the need for global response by different countries to tackle these challenges by prioritizing border security to protect their citizens from crimes and diseases. Also, there is the need for responsible leadership and good governance in the Global South to create opportunities, and to engender development and discourage irregular migration from the Global South.

About the Contributors

The United Nations in the 21st Century, Sixth Edition, provides a comprehensive yet accessible introduction to the UN. It explores the historical, institutional, and theoretical foundations of the UN as well as major global trends and challenges facing the organization today, including changing major power dynamics, new threats to peace and security, the migration and refugee crises, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the existential challenges of climate change and sustainability. Thoroughly revised and expanded, it contains two new chapters on the UN and the environment and on human security, including issues of health, food security, global migration, and human trafficking. There is enhanced analysis of theoretical perspectives on post-colonialism, feminist theory, constructivism, and non-Western views. New content has also been added on the UN’s budget crisis, public–private partnerships, and the role of women in the organization. By examining the UN as an intergovernmental organization facing the broader need for global cooperation to address economic, social, and environmental interdependencies alongside the threats posed by rising nationalism and populism, this popular text is the perfect reference for all students and practitioners of international organizations, global governance, and international relations.

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