How reform of U.S. immigration policies would significantly improve its human trafficking situation
International Affairs Review explains why protecting immigrants in the U.S. will reduce human trafficking, the UN Special Rapporteur warns of continuing failures to assist trafficking victims, and an EJF investigation finds evidence of labour abuse on Chinese fishing vessels off the Somalian coast.
The Biden administration has an important opportunity to make a significant impact on human trafficking in America and it starts at the U.S.-Mexico border, according to a new article published in the International Affairs Review.
In the United States, 72 per cent of trafficking victims are immigrants, mostly immigrant women. In a study by Harvard Law, which examines the intersection of migration and human trafficking in America, sex and labour trafficking victims were found to be from the U.S., Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. Immigrant women and children are especially vulnerable to trafficking due to their lack of education, inability to speak English, immigration status, and limited understanding of U.S. employment protections. This vulnerability is increased because they often work behind closed doors and without government labour protections.
The article suggests, therefore, that in order to improve the trafficking situation in the U.S., the government should focus on the protection of immigrant men, women and children and reduce their immense vulnerability to trafficking. Enacting legal reform on immigration and enforcing current labour and employment protections would significantly strengthen existing efforts to address trafficking.
The first step, it says, would be to protect the rights of undocumented immigrants in America. Current policies create barriers to legal migration that leave migrants far more vulnerable to trafficking, especially if they seek employment. Aggressive immigration enforcement then creates a fear that leaving their employer or seeking help will lead to deportation. Furthermore, unscrupulous recruiters often take advantage of migrant workers’ lack of knowledge to deceive them and prevent them from leaving their employment. Human rights organizations have called for immigration policies which protect undocumented immigrants from this high trafficking risk and reduce the traffickers’ power, such as extending all labour and employment protections to this group and creating pathways to legal migration.
Additionally, they say, labour laws must be vigorously enforced, in order to protect those most at-risk. Trafficking occurs in industries with high rates of labour violations and limited labour protection, such as domestic work and agricultural labour.
The Trump administration’s policies made immigrants even more vulnerable to trafficking during the four years of his presidency and, the article says, it is crucial for the new administration to reverse this approach. In 2019, the U.S. government significantly decreased protection efforts for victims of trafficking, including granting the fewest ever number of T-visas (which allow certain victims of human trafficking to remain and work in the U.S. temporarily), and fewer Certification Letters, which provide access to benefits and services for foreign national adult victims of trafficking. To boost anti-trafficking efforts, many more T-visas should be granted, and these should be a vehicle to application for long-term asylum.
At the beginning of 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic took hold, Trump’s administration rapidly expelled thousands of migrant children, who would have been highly susceptible to human traffickers upon arrival back in their home countries. Many human rights organizations have called for the deportation of migrant children to be stopped and for a return to the pre-Trump era practice of entering children into a government shelter system, in which they are assigned caseworkers, receive shelter, education and medical care, and are allowed to make their case for staying in the U.S.
Trafficking is a symptom of a multitude of systemic vulnerability factors and, in order to significantly improve the situation of trafficking in the United States, it is imperative that the U.S government critically analyze the root causes of trafficking, the vulnerabilities immigrants face, and how its own immigration policies are perpetuating and exacerbating the situation. The policy actions of protecting undocumented workers, ending the deportation of migrant and unaccompanied children, and expanding the T-visa program, would provide stronger wraparound services, and would thus prevent some of the most vulnerable in America from falling prey to traffickers.
Here’s a round-up of other noteworthy news and initiatives:
In 2019, Facebook launched a massive effort to combat the use of its platforms for human trafficking. However, the Facebook Papers raise questions over whether the social media company could have done more, and sooner, to protect victims, and how much it benefitted financially from human trafficking activity on its platforms.
The collaborative Disrupting Harm in Kenya report details comprehensive evidence of the risks children face online, how they develop, how they interlink with other forms of violence, and what we can do to prevent them. Most children who have experienced some form of online child sexual exploitation and abuse (e.g. grooming, coercion or blackmail to send sexual images, etc.) have also experienced in-person physical, sexual or emotional abuse.
Victims of trafficking by terrorist groups are too often being punished instead of protected, the UN Special Rapporteur on trafficking in persons warned the General Assembly last Wednesday. The expert was presenting a report about continuing failures to identify and assist victims of trafficking and protect their human rights, and informed the assembly that vulnerable children are disappearing from refugee camps and from camps for internally displaced people.
Crew on board Chinese vessels fishing illegally off the coast of Somalia were beaten, deprived of food, and forced to work for nothing, investigations by the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) have revealed. In an attempt to swim ashore to escape the abuse, one man drowned. The six vessels were fishing without authorization and using prohibited gear, violating both Somali Fisheries Law and China’s Distant-Water Fishing Management Regulation.
In the context of the debate around mandatory Human Rights and Environmental Due Diligence (mHREDD), Shift, a nonprofit center of expertise on the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), have come together to look at effective accountability for new regimes. The resulting policy paper explores how administrative supervision can complement civil liability for harms in the effective enforcement of due diligence requirements, and suggests practical guidance for policy-makers to avoid pitfalls in other areas of corporate regulation.
On Wednesday, The Freedom Fund launched a new round of the Tariff Act Legal Fund, to support the effective implementation of section 307 of the U.S. Tariff Act, which prohibits the importation of goods produced with forced labour. The Fund will provide grants of up to US$ 50,000 to civil society organizations, worker groups, unions and investigative journalists to conduct on-the-ground investigations of forced labour in the production of goods, collect evidence of their import into the U.S., and provide this information to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The request for proposals closes on 3 December.
Freedom Collaborative is currently working with IOM to develop and implement a pilot online foundational training on standardized and safe survivor data management. We are hoping to make the training available to more Freedom Collaborative community members next year, so if you feel this would be of interest to you or your team, please let us know.
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