The New Slave Trade

With migrant smuggling and slave trafficking now as profitable as the drug trade, the number of people enslaved around the world today rivals the numbers forced into bondage during the height of the trans-Atlanticslave trade.

By Bryant Furlow

Human smuggling and modern-day slavery are curiously obscure issues. Only after particularly lethal episodes wash up onto our front pages are we confronted with the fact that these are continuing evils, not relegated to the annals of history as we often pretend.

A shipping container of Chinese immigrants—many of them dead—is discovered in Seattle or Los Angeles, or Kurdish and Afghan refugees—many of them children—drown off Indonesia’s coast. Such episodes are usually reported as isolated incidents rather than symptoms of an underlying global pathology. Like inconsequential human flotsam, the issue bobs in and out of the headlines.

David Kyle, associate professor of sociology, is helping to change that. When not teaching or granting interviews to reporters from the New York Times, Chicago Tribune and CBS News (to name a few), he is in the remote Azuay region of the Ecuadorian Andes, studying communities from which in recent decades one of New York City’s largest migrant populations has arrived. Kyle is part of a new cadre of social scientists whose work is contributing to an emerging coherent theory of migration—a model of why and how people migrate—from which rational immigration policies can be derived.

The need could not be more pressing. According to a 2003 report on human trafficking released by the U.S. State Department, nearly a million people are smuggled each year across international borders. Twenty thousand secretly arrive annually in the United States. Hundreds—perhaps thousands—die trying, perishing anonymously at sea or in the cauterized expanse of stone and sand along our nation’s southwestern border.

Worth tens of billions of dollars a year, human smuggling now rivals the profits to be made in the drug trade—but for those who are caught in the act, the penalties are substantially smaller. Indeed, until just a few years ago, migrants were deported before they could testify in court against their smugglers, ensuring that traffickers would go unpunished.

That is no trivial issue. Smuggling is no longer a relatively benign matter of guiding illegal migrants across borders. It has become a gateway to enslavement. Migrants—particularly young women lured by the promise of jobs as nannies or maids—increasingly find themselves brutalized and imprisoned in urban brothels. As many as 75,000 illegal migrants are believed to be thusly enslaved in the United States alone. Nobody knows how many of the victims are minors. Men, too, are held captive, typically as farm laborers.

The bulk of the problem has emerged since the end of the Cold War. With the fall of the Soviet Union, already feeble national economies collapsed, and Communist-era wage guarantees were abandoned, plunging millions into poverty in the Ukraine, Moldova, ex-Soviet Central Asia and, of course, Russia itself. More importantly, though, American and European immigration policies—long formulated to reflect foreign policy priorities—became distinctly less welcoming.

“When the Cold War ended, our reason for allowing so many immigrants evaporated, and the door shut pretty quickly. In the 1990s we got very stingy,” Kyle recounts. “Now, there are millions of asylum seekers, and only 100,000 slots available worldwide.”

No country can be forced to take asylum seekers, so many, like Iraqi Kurds and Palestinians, become transnational nomads, stateless and without passports.

“Before the Cold War ended, these people had a fighting chance to get into a communist or democratic country,” Kyle says. “Now, nobody cares.” Such people are all but forced to resort to illegal means of emigration, he says.

And the continued commingling of foreign and immigration policies perpetuates inequity and hypocrisy, he notes. “If you are a Cuban, ‘one dry foot’ on American soil means you get to stay,” he says, “while Haitians, who are much worse off and more persecuted, receive no breaks at all.”

The new migration math

Economists and policy-makers have long believed that economics drives migration. International wage differentials were thought to work like the moon’s pull on the oceans, predictably dragging tides of migrants this way or that around the globe. But a new generation of migration analysts like Kyle is discovering that migration is much more complex than that, becoming, as it has, a global commodity with billions at stake.

Wage differentials are undoubtedly important, but they alone cannot explain many aspects of migration patterns. In Ecuadorian Azuay, for example, Kyle discovered that one town had been virtually emptied by migration to New York, while the emigration picture in a nearby community is much different. The factors influencing the decision to seek a new life abroad are multi-faceted, Kyle says. An individual’s decision is influenced by economics, certainly, but local history, social processes, psychology and especially what one’s neighbors are doing are also important factors.

“International migration is usually ‘over-determined,’ meaning that there are multiple reasons for leaving,” Kyle explains. “It is not the poorest who migrate, but typically those who are somewhat better off than their neighbors. Not being left behind is a big factor; it is perceived relative deprivation that is crucial.” Migration “fevers” can strike towns like a gold rush. Within a few years, everyone who is able to do so has left for greener pastures.

This “over-determination” to migrate has important implications for destination countries’ immigration policies, Kyle believes. When borders slam shut, migrants don’t give up on migration. In the end, smugglers just get more business for higher profits, placing migrants at greater risk of exploitation.

Militarizing borders won’t help either, Kyle insists. In the late 1990s, the border patrol’s budget was tripled, and tall steel fences were installed along much of the U.S. border with Mexico. “Did this have any effect?” Kyle asks. “Virtually none—except more deaths on the border.” Demographers had predicted five or six million illegal aliens in the United States by the turn of the century, but the 2000 census suggested approximately 10 million were actually here.

So determined are migrants, in fact, that attempts to educate source populations about the risks of hiring smugglers often backfire. When the International Organization on Migration offered classes in Third World countries about the dangers of hiring smugglers, instructors were often approached by audience members who wanted to know how to contact a smuggler. “They were accidentally advertising that smuggling is a way out,” Kyle says.

“It’s a big decision, starting all over,” Kyle says. “It’s never done lightly.” But the motivations should be familiar to any college student leaving home, he adds. “It’s a new adventure, often, and migrants see themselves as going into temporary debt to better themselves in the long term.”

He smiles. “Sound familiar? I just paid off my undergrad debt—15 years after I started college.”

Unlike UC Davis students, however, migrants take tremendous risks achieving their goals. As immigration restrictions harden, more are turning to smugglers—and more are unwittingly putting themselves in the clutches of slave traders.

Today’s slave trade

What started as illegal but straightforward human smuggling has in many regions in the past decade devolved into debt bondage. This debt bondage, in turn, has often slipped into outright slavery: Migrants become chattel, haggled over and purchased. Informal smuggling networks have become increasingly violent, and criminal organizations previously preoccupied with the drug trade are now sidestepping into the more profitable venture of people trafficking.

The “fees” charged to migrants are no longer smugglers’ primary source of income. Instead, those fees are a pretext for enslavement. Migrants are told not to worry about paying their fees until they’re working in their new home. Then, once across the border—and sometimes even before crossing over—they are simply sold to another criminal franchise. With each subsequent sale, the migrants’ “debt” increases, and they are told that they’ll have to work it off at wages determined by their captors.

As smuggling has become increasingly criminalized, traffickers have also become more pro-active in seeking “customers.” Because illegal migrants are by definition on the wrong side of the law, they are a natural target for classic con-job manipulations, Kyle notes. A “cooler”—the member of the con artist’s team who draws in the victim or “mark,” typically a kindly older woman or old “friend” from school—gains the mark’s confidence.

Not all smugglers stuff migrants into ship hulls or lead them on foot through the desert. Increasingly, particularly for women being duped into prostitution, traffickers simply use falsified documents and a plane ticket.

“A brick of cocaine will always look like a brick of cocaine,” Kyle says. “But a smuggled migrant can look like a tourist or businessperson.

“Regionwide migrant exporting industries result,” Kyle says. Entire local economies can be corrupted. Printers become producers of counterfeit documents that are then brokered by once-legitimate travel agents. Loosely knit community-based networks of helpful travel agents and guides are transformed by the prospect of immense profits into organizations ranging from legally gray mom-and-pop agencies to brutal criminal enterprises.

In Ecuador, an American Embassy employee showed Kyle a false passport that was good enough to fool a 3M scanner—brand-new color laminate technology that the corporation had believed could not be faked. “Interdiction is virtually impossible,” Kyle says. “There’s an arms race problem here with forgers, and the forgers are currently winning. You are never going to control illegal entry with border enforcement or document enforcement.”

Once migrants are here, local authorities are rarely pressured to achieve what immigration officials did not. Once their victims are in the United States, people smugglers are usually home free. Slavery flourishes.

“It’s in Sacramento, the Bay Area—and probably in ethnic restaurants throughout the U.S.,” Kyle sighs. “Even possibly, right here in Davis.”

Today’s slaves are not always chained or kept behind locked doors (though many certainly are). Instead, most are caged by their ignorance of English and of American laws, their fear of authorities and the threat of violence if they escape and are recaptured by their owners. They’re told that local authorities in host countries will not help them.

“Threats to family back home are common,” Kyle says. “Slave importers are violent. Victims are afraid.”

In important ways, of course, modern slavery cannot really compare with the trans-Atlantic slave trade that for centuries brought unwilling Africans to the New World in chains and inflicted on generations the hopelessness of inherited servitude. Most people in bondage today voluntarily—if unwittingly—surrendered their freedom. They were coaxed into a series of bad decisions by expert con artists, rather than bound and gagged at gunpoint for the slave ships. The chains that bind today’s slaves are less often literal than psychological. And modern governments around the world at least nominally forbid the sale and purchase of human beings.

But modern debt bondage is nevertheless slavery. And in terms of the sheer numbers of people robbed of their autonomy, today’s secret slave trade rivals the more infamous institution of slavery that lost the American government’s sanction with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation—and it’s much more profitable than its legal predecessor.

New policies: helping or hurting?

There are no easy answers here. “We’ve had no real success with stopping drugs,” Kyle points out. “We certainly are not going to have great success with interdicting the smuggling of people.”

Improvised, poorly considered policies that attempt to do so will often backfire. “Every policy has unintended consequences,” Kyle says.

President Bush’s recently proposed reforms, which would give temporary sanction to employers who hire illegal Mexican immigrants, are no exception. Asked whether this could reduce deaths on the border, Kyle shakes his head. “In the short term, I think it may increase deaths. Unless we dismantle these militarized [border] zones we’ve created, migrants will continue to be funneled out into desert areas, and deaths will continue.” With the perceived possibility of an impending amnesty for migrants, he explains, it will only get worse as people scramble to get here in time to benefit. “So, if I had to guess, short-term illegal migration will increase.”

After lobbying by an unlikely alliance of conservatives and liberals, including both Bill Bennett and Gloria Steinem, Congress passed in 2000 a bill that sanctions nations that do not curb human smuggling. The law also offers work visas to enslaved migrants who help convict traffickers. Already, some enslaved farmworkers in Florida, shielded by that legislation, have helped convict their captors under a Civil War-era antislavery law.

Perhaps the largest hindrance to such laws’ ultimate success, however, is the fact that migrants are a major export market for many developing nations. Mexican laborers in the United States send $4.5 billion home each year. “Migrants’ remittances home are key to Ecuador’s very survival, too,” Kyle says. “It’s the nation’s second largest source of income.”

“So there will be cosmetic conformity” with America’s wishes, Kyle suspects—“just like with drug trafficking. Token arrests will be made, but nothing will really change.”

When it comes to sexual slavery, a number of policy-makers and analysts have called for another solution: simply legalizing prostitution, opening it up to government regulation and scrutiny by law enforcement. A heated debate about this issue is currently under way in Thailand, for example, where unsafe “working conditions” in unregulated brothels have helped spawn drug-resistant strains of HIV.

Kyle is skeptical. “Creating legal venues for prostitution, as has been done in Europe and elsewhere, does not mean that sexual slavery will go away. Just the opposite—it will create areas where men know they can go to find prostitutes.” Red-light districts, whether legal or not, will be gathering places for those who pimp or seek child prostitutes, he fears.

Ultimately, combating human smuggling and slavery will involve managing—rather than trying to prevent—increased flows of transnational labor, Kyle suspects. “The central tension today is that there is a globalization of commodities and capital, but not labor,” Kyle says. “In the past, labor moved easily across borders. Something has to give.

“Just trying to lock up the borders is a recipe for failure and continued death. However, we need to know much more about our neighbors and the world at large before most in the United States will accept a system approaching the relatively free movement of labor.”

At heart, humanity is an itinerant species. “We’re all Africans surprisingly few generations back,” Kyle says. “Migration is a fundamental part of the human condition. In a world with such disparity of wealth and resources, the real mystery is not why so many people migrate, but why more of them do not.”

For further reading
U.S. State Department Human Trafficking Report: http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/21577.pdf

International Organization for Migration: http://www.iom.int/

Kyle, D. Transnational Peasants: Migration, Networks, and Ethnicity in Andean Ecuador. Johns Hopkins Press, 2000.

Kyle, D. and R. Koslowski, eds. Global Human Smuggling: Comparative Perspectives. Johns Hopkins Press, 2001.