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KJ of ImmigrationProf Blog says

The University of Pennsylvania Law Review will hold a conference on “Trafficking in Sex and Labor: Domestic and International Responses November” on November 13-14, 2009 at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Philadelphia, PA. Human trafficking is currently a major global concern. Rates of trafficking, slavery, and involuntary servitude continue to increase, and the global economic crisis is expected to worsen the problem while frustrating efforts at prevention, prosecution, and remediation. Trafficking also touches upon a broad array of domestic and international legal issues, from policies on immigration and prostitution to gender equality and the problem of violence against women. The issue is currently under active debate in Congress and is likely to receive renewed focus with the change of administration in the United States. The University of Pennsylvania Law Review Symposium will address trafficking in persons—the transportation of people across national borders, often through the use of force, coercion, fraud, or duplicity—from a domestic and international perspective.

KJ

Read the quote in context here.

(Via Google Alerts on the keyword “sex trafficking.”)

Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors says

Wouldn’t you think the media would be a little more invested in figuring out why Ling and Lee were considered threats by North Korea? It’s because they were investigating sex trafficking for Current TV, as only briefly noted in this NYT article, which states: “It ended a harrowing ordeal for the two women, who were stopped on March 17 by soldiers near North Korea’s border with China while researching a report about women and human trafficking.”

She said it here.

To be perfectly honest no, I don’t think the press was so much not invested in the trafficking angle as they were in the much more operatic “ZOMG North Korea’s Got Kim Jong-il and Teh Bomb.” An oldie but goldie for the press since the lead up to the Korean War in the 1950s.

That’s not to say the situation for North Korean migrants in China isn’t really, really dire. They caught firmly in classic political and economic shears: on the one hand there’s no, zero, none opportunity in North Korea and a fairly substantial chance of outright starvation; on the other hand it’s particularly illegal to migrate without documentation to China from Korea, and the penalty (being “repatriated”) brings gruesome penalties at home. Consequently migrants there, like, say, undocumented Romanian migrants in Italy or undocumented Haitian migrants in Florida are extraordinarily vulnerable to sexual or other forms of labor exploitation. Something about “all I have to do is contact the authorities and you’ll be dead in a month” that really gives employers… or for that matter random-but-documented passers by… extraordinary leverage in negotiating, um, tasks and wages.

When the border in question separates cultures which both have strikingly awful human rights records and indifferent to bad attitudes towards women in particular then yeah, good for Lee and Ling for putting their lives on the line to shine light on the situation. Now that they’re home, and once they’re rested, I hope Lee and Ling will have an opportunity to write not only about their experiences in custody but also about the topics they went into jeopardy to cover in the first place.

In a section called “Debunking Common Trafficking Myths” Department of State Trafficking in Persons Report 2009 makes a some helpful distinctions about who becomes trafficked and when. (Italics mine.)

Initial Consent: A person may agree to migrate legally or illegally or take a job willingly. But once that work or service is no longer voluntary, that person becomes a victim of forced labor or forced prostitution and should accordingly receive the protections contemplated by the 2000 UN TIP Protocol. Once a person’s work is recruited or compelled by the use or threat of physical violence or the abuse or threatened abuse of the legal process, the person’s previous consent or effort to obtain employment with the trafficker becomes irrelevant.

A person may agree to work for an employer initially but later decide to stop working because the conditions are not what they agreed to. If an employer then uses force, fraud, or coercion to retain the person’s labor or services, the employer becomes a trafficking offender and the employee becomes a victim.

In April 2008, this type of misplaced reliance on a worker’s initial consent led to the deportation of three Thai victims from a European country because, according to the head of the anti-trafficking police unit in that country, the victims had consented to the employment and had arrived voluntarily in that country as guest workers. The victims in this case discovered their employment conditions were vastly different from what they expected when they initially accepted their jobs and traveled to Europe; further, their employers retained their passports, forced them to sometimes work without compensation, and threatened to turn them over to police if they did not work as they were told.

Prior Work History: Previous employment choices also do not exclude the possibility that a person may be a victim of trafficking. Some government officials fail to identify victims of sex trafficking because they may have willingly worked in the sex industry prior to being trafficked. Law enforcement may fail also to identify victims of labor trafficking because they are migrant workers and may have previously worked in difficult conditions, either legally or illegally. Whether a person is a victim of labor trafficking turns on whether that person’s service or labor was induced by force, fraud, or coercion.

Read the quote in context here.

It’s good to hear acknowledgement that neither sex work nor migration are synonyms for trafficking (despite neocons and conservative feminists to make them so.) Instead “trafficked” is something sex workers and migrants can become.

In a nod to a particular bugaboo of mine (and other people who wonder WTF with the vestigial “k”) there’s a clarification of what, exactly, is meant by the word “trafficking,” in a section on how it translates in different languages. (Italics again mine.)

Finding the right words to describe the crime remains a persistent challenge in combating human trafficking. Most formulations used to describe trafficking focus on the trade or buying and selling of people, or they mean something closer to “smuggling,” which relates specifically to movement over borders. These words, including the word trafficking in English, may not adequately capture the most important aspect of the practice: exploitation.

Now you’d probably be right if you thought using “exploitation” to clarify “trafficking” wasn’t exactly a step up. For instance Karl Marx pointed out (in a strictly technical sense) that the CEO of a corporation can be considered “exploited” if his or her labor nets her or his company more in revenue that it pays in salary, wages, stock options and other perqs. And thus someone (in the case of sex-workers even conservatives become Marxists) that any sex-worker or migrant who creates more value from their labor than they are provided in compensation is exploited. Similarly (as Jill né Twisty) points out PETA (sexually) exploits women in its pursuit of… killing and eating organism (or, in the case of Che Guevera’s grandaughter’s carrot bandolier, killing organisms for use as decoration) that are genetically less rather than more related to us.

But in this case the term doesn’t just mean “brings in more that you’re being paid out” or even “do something you’d otherwise rather not do but you’re doing for work.” Instead it means “applying leverage to get people to do something whether they want to or not, while not compensating them for what other, free individuals could reasonable expect to be compensated for.”

And if you put the first quote (common myths) with the second (trafficking is “exploitation”) you see something that isn’t expressly mentioned, delved into, analyzed, discussed, or debated in the Department of State Trafficking in Persons Report 2009: the leverage that’s most often applied in the exploitation of sex workers and migrants is that if the exploited individual tries to get help from the authorities the authorities will instead jail and/or deport them because both migration and sex work tend to be far more illegal than trafficking.

Don’t get me wrong — trafficking can happen for forms of work that strictly speaking don’t involve transnational migration or sex work — the egregious trafficking of children into sweatshop and agricultural labor in India and parts of Asia come to mind. But there’s not much the State Department, or the United States government, or governments of so-called “First World” countries in general can do about that. But the bulk of exploitation through trafficking that happens in the U.S. and other “first world” countries is about transnational migration and sex work. And it is within those countries’ power do do something about it.

Don’t know why the report, authored by people from here, wouldn’t get into that, since the illegality of undocumented migration and sex work are the key ingredients of exploitation here. But there you go.

Late last week there was a list circulating in libertarian circles about illegal markets that would stimulate the economy if they were legalized. The items were… predictably libertarian: gambling, drugs, immigration, and the handful of sex-work tasks (gay prostitution in Nevada, prostitution everywhere else) that aren’t or aren’t yet legal. Matthew Yglesias says he might support some of the proposals but doesn’t think they’d have the effect economic-oriented advocates of legalization claim. (Emphasis his.)

With regard to things like drugs and prostitution, bringing some transactions that are already happening into the above-ground economy would certainly boost our GDP measurements. But these are transactions that are already happening. Shifting them from the illicit to the licit economy doesn’t actually change the fact that there are already people in America earning a living as prostitutes or pimps or drug dealers.

He said it here.

That sounds about right. In fact my instinct would be that given the extraordinary margin between the real cost of drug production and black-market prices, legalization would strongly contract their component of real GDP. (Ear nose and throat doctors pay $7/gram for cocaine; even eye-popping cannabis bud costs only dollars a pound to grow.) That’s actually a good thing: the biggest drug dealers on the planet are convenience-store clerks dispensing tobacco and alcohol but, surprisingly, none of them can afford Glock bullets let alone Glocks, few of them can afford car fresheners let alone cars, and as far as I know no child, anywhere, past maybe age 4 sees 7-11 clerks as glamorous, romantic, let alone emulatable role models. Drug-dealing themes are a major component of popular media. Convenience-store clerks have two movies Clerks and Clerks II. (But… but… even then the drug dealers in the two Clerks movies, Jay and Silent Bob have four movies about them!) But I digress…

I can’t be sure how much legalizing the rest of adult sex work would change the economics, but like Yglesias I think it would mostly shift numbers from the off-the-books ledger to on-the-books. Otherwise? On the one hand I’d imagine pimping would evaporate — legal bodyworkers like massage therapists and chiropractors somehow manage to stay healthy, wealthy and wise without them. And without the “opportunity cost” of arrest and jail time, not to mention the threats of unreportable rape, robbery, assault, murder, and police shakedowns sex workers could change when and how often such work was performed and therefore possibly what they would charge and/or what customers would be willing to pay. Again, though, it seems pointless to speculate without sounding like a bad case of Male Answer Syndrome.

But really, in the case of both drugs and sex work, my interest isn’t really in the direct economics at all but the potential for risk and harm reduction: if a drug habit cost only dollars a day instead of tens or hundreds the vast amounts of collateral losses of life, property, and security would be mitigated, and if a drug habit cost only dollars a day gangs would have very little incentive to have turf wars period let alone turf wars over schools and parks. Similarly if sex work was legitimized there would be diminished opportunities for pimps, serial killers, corrupt cops, and whatever fraction of customers are dishonest or violent to abuse sex workers. Oh yeah, and to put the two together, to the extent that pimps and traffickers actually do use addictive drugs to enthrall involuntary sex workers, the availability of legal drugs at dollars a day would undercut that little avenue as well.

And to touch briefly on the other mainstream libertarian issue, as researcher and author Laura Agustín says over and over international and national migrants often accept sex work when they might ordinarily not because a) social and economic opportunities at home are so bleak the work seems worth it compared to the alternative of staying home b) because they migrate without documentation they have few opportunities for other employment, also c) once they become illegal migrants they’re often at the mercy of the same pimps, criminal customers, corrupt cops, and twilight conditions that make life so perilous for illegal domestic sex workers.

My points being, then, that a) regardless of economic arguments drugs, sex work, and immigration are socially entangled and b) our decisions to keep them illegal keep increase that entanglement and keep the activities closeted in ways that obstruct use of social as opposed to law-enforcement policies.