Tiffany Williams: Silencing Human Trafficking Victims in America

From Other Words:

Women should be able to access victim services, regardless of their immigration status.

Thanks to a wave of anti-immigrant proposals in state legislatures across the nation, fear of deportation and family separation has forced many immigrant women to stay silent rather than report workplace abuse and exploitation to authorities. The courts have weakened some of these laws and the most controversial pieces of Arizona's SB 1070 law have been suspended. Unfortunately, America's anti-immigrant fervor continues to boil.

As a social worker, I've counseled both U.S.-born and foreign-born women who have experienced domestic violence, or have been assaulted by either their employers or the people who brought them to the United States. I'm increasingly alarmed by this harsh immigration enforcement climate because of its psychological impact on families and the new challenge to identify survivors of crime who are now too afraid to come forward.

For the past decade, I've helped nannies, housekeepers, caregivers for the elderly, and other domestic workers in the Washington metropolitan area who have survived human trafficking. A majority of these women report their employers use their immigration status to control and exploit them, issuing warnings such as "if you try to leave, the police will find you and deport you." Even women who come to the United States on legal work visas, including those caring for the children of diplomats or World Bank employees, experience these threats.

Though law enforcement is a key partner in responding to human trafficking, service providers continue to struggle with training authorities to identify trafficking and exploitation in immigrant populations, especially when the trafficking is for labor and not sex. While local human trafficking task forces spend meetings developing outreach plans, our own state governments are undermining these efforts with extremely harsh and indiscriminate crackdowns on immigrants.

Even before Arizona's draconian anti-immigration law went into effect, hundreds of immigrants were arrested and deported without screening that would have identified them as victims. While it's true that victims of crime who are "out of status" or undocumented can access immigration relief in the form of special visas, it will be impossible for service providers and advocates to reach them if their fears of law enforcement are reinforced by "ICE ACCESS" programs. The best known of these is 287(g), which allows local police to enforce federal immigration laws, as well as state legislation like SB 1070.

Approximately five million U.S. citizen children have at least one undocumented parent. A study by the Urban Institute revealed that children are often the real victims of workplace raids--80 percent of the children of workers in their study sites were less than ten years old. When families experience long separations from other family members, the report noted the effects can include significant economic hardship, psychological stress, and feelings of abandonment that can lead to sustained mental health problems.

When the American Psychological Association recently recommended overhauling our detention centers and social service networks to better protect children and maintain family units, it acknowledged the widespread psychological trauma caused by immigration enforcement--including everything from infant developmental delays to dismal academic performance.

Regardless of their legal status, these women are human beings working hard to feed their families. Their home countries' economies have been by shattered by globalization. Our economic system depends on their cheap labor. Yet much of the debate about U.S. borders fails to acknowledge immigrants as people, or appreciate the numerous cultural contributions that ethnic diversity has provided this country. As a result, humane comprehensive immigration reform remains out of reach in Congress.

We're a nation of immigrants and a nation of hard-working families. An economic crisis caused by corporate greed has turned us against each other in desperation and fear. We should band together to uphold our traditional values of family unity, to give law enforcement the tools they need to provide effective victim protection and identification rather than reactionary laws, and ensure that women can access victim services, regardless of immigration status.

I thought this was a particularly effective piece for making the case that you cannot consider immigration policy and anti-trafficking policy as completely divorced from one another. There are two longer journal articles I would recommend, which also touch on this issue: "Misery and Myopia: Understanding the Failures of U.S. Efforts to Stop Human Trafficking" by Jennifer Chacon and "Assessing the U.S.-Mexico Fight Against Human Trafficking and Smuggling: Unintended Results of U.S. Immigration Policy" by Salvador A. Cicero-Dominguez.

Related Movements

Many diverse social justice, human rights, and anti-violence movements intersect with the anti-trafficking movement. Looking at the trafficking nexus in fields ranging from workers rights, to immigration issues, to the environment, to violence against women, provides insights into human trafficking, its causes, and important considerations for anti-trafficking efforts. This month, we explore some of those intersections.

Lauren: Internal Displacement and Political Refugees
Upon returning to NYU for my senior year, I decided to take a course in NYU’s journalism program concerning topics and issues surrounding the Middle East, which opened my eyes to two much larger issues that are still taking place in that region, internal displacement and political refugee. At the end of 2009 there were an estimated 3.8 million Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in the Middle East, according to the Internal Displacement Monoritoring Centre. Internal displacement occurs when a person is forced to move due to human rights violations or endangerment to their life, yet unlike political refugees who flee the country, internally displaced persons stay within that country’s borders. IDPs around the globe outnumber the amount of political refugees two to one, and yet this group is not guaranteed the protection or aid under the 951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol that political refugees are. Considering historical evidence of violence and terrorism that can arise from ostracizing groups of people from society, it seems negligent that the international community is not taking higher measures of precaution in providing aid to IDPs and refugees. I also cannot help but wonder, are internal displacement persons and political refugees not victims of Human Trafficking? Are they not subjected to the same human rights violations, violence, and subjection that would allow them the attention that human trafficking victims are allowed?

Jennifer: Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault
Domestic violence and sexual assault have many intersections with human trafficking. Victims of sex trafficking are also victims of sexual assault, and intimate partners may be traffickers for both forced labor and commercial sex. Insights into victims' mindsets and the ways that psychological coercion is used by perpetrators to keep victims from leaving pioneered in the domestic violence movement are also valuable for assisting trafficking victims. Understanding the cycle of violence and the ways that power dynamics are used in relationships to control people can help those assisting victims. Victim-centered approaches and empowerment approaches that were developed in the domestic violence and sexual assault contexts also provide a framework for helping trafficking victims. In many places that do not have specific anti-trafficking service providers, domestic violence and sexual assault agencies provide shelter and other services to trafficking victims. Many of these organizations have expanded their programs to include anti-trafficking work, in recognition of the intersections with domestic violence and sexual assault, as well as in recognition of the expertise that many of these organizations bring to assisting victims of abuse and violence.

Amanda: Anti-Sweatshop Movement:
While the anti-sweatshop movement has more broad range workers rights goals than the anti-trafficking movement, there are quite a few intersections between the two groups. Primarily, the industries that attract attention from the anti-sweatshop movement should attract the attention of the anti-trafficking movement. These industries are largely free from real outside scrutiny and therefore are "ideal" places to exploit workers or victims of trafficking. An additional intersection is in how we approach fighting the problem. One approach is through consumer power. The anti-sweatshop movement asks concerned citizens not to buy from companies that use sweatshop labor. More recently the anti-trafficking movement has asked supporters not to buy from companies whose product chains may contain slave labor (think electronics or the shrimp industry in certain countries). There are still many things to learn from the anti-sweatshop movement though, including effectively utilizing national media to draw attention to the issue, as they did with several major clothing and athletic wear companies.