The Role of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Contemporary Anti-Human Trafficking Discourse

poster abstractAccording to various sources, 27 million people worldwide are enslaved, hundreds of thousands are trafficked across international borders, and each year 15,000 to 17,000 people are trafficked into the United States. In response, anti-trafficking activists, academics, and others have sought to use the transAtlantic slave trade and slavery to understand and combat this modern form of exploitation. The form of use varies: Either “the old slavery” is compared to “the new slavery” with respect to, for example, the egregiousness of abusive treatment of the enslaved, the level of interconnection of the phenomenon with the global economy, or the race or ethnicity of the victims in order to distinguish the new slavery from the old. Often, the implicit hypothesis is that modern slavery is more widespread and awful, and involves more victims and, by extension, more human degradation than did the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Still others invoke the trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery to assume a mantle of self-righteousness, and distance themselves, their political and economic system, their state and its efforts, from modern trafficking in human beings. I claim that those who have invoked the trans-Atlantic slave trade have failed to explore it other than superficially, or to adequately map out the similarities and differences between the trans-Atlantic trade and human trafficking. As a consequence, the ability to effectively combat the modern traffic in human beings has been compromised both internationally and domestically. The analogy is underutilized as currently deployed because it does not illuminate the essential similarities or differences in the two forms of exploitation. Instead, the trans-Atlantic slave trade is too often invoked in appeals to emotions to serve particular ends of the user. The trans-Atlantic slave trade can be relevant if explored more deeply – there are similarities not merely in individual plights but in the deeper structures of the world economic system and the factors that cause and foster the rise in human trafficking

Free Labor! A Labor Liberalization Solution to Modern Trafficking in Humans

The buying and selling of people is a profitable business because, while globalization has made it easier to move goods and money around the world, people who want to move where jobs are face ever more stringent restrictions on legal migration. Perhaps the most profound challenge of all will be faced by citizens and policy-makers in migrant sending and receiving countries. Inhabitants of the latter will have to move beyond the state of denial that so often has characterized their approach to immigration policy to date. They must develop policies that recognize the inevitability of labour flows within a globalized economy characterized by well-established regional networks of trade, production, investment, and communications. Attempts to suppress population flows that are a natural consequence of a nation's insertion into these economic networks will not be successful, but they will present grave threats to individual rights, civil liberties, and human dignity

Interrogating Everyperson's Roles in Today's Slaveries

"Modem day slavery," "contemporary forms of slavery," and "modem forms of slavery." Today, these terms are used interchangeably virtually throughout the world to describe a variety of contemporary forms of exploitation. These forms of exploitation include the trafficking of human beings for labor and sex; child labor; child sexual exploitation; the commercial sexual exploitation of adults; and forced labor and the indentured servitude of adult men and women, and of male and female children. These forms of exploitation were legally defined as "human trafficking," after lengthy international and domestic debates. Now, amid deeper and more widespread knowledge of the existence of human trafficking, the term "slavery" has become shorthand for all exploitation that was labelled "human trafficking." In the context of the increasing use of the term "slavery," this paper interrogates today's "slaveries," and explores questions regarding Everyperson's' connection to these forms of exploitation

Exploring the Analogy between Modern Trafficking in Humans and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

Ironically, there are more slaves now than there were even at the height of the transatlantic slave trade. We must show new energy in fighting back an old evil. Nearly two centuries after the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, and more than a century after slavery was officially ended in its last strongholds, the trade in human beings for any purpose must not be allowed to thrive in our time. Apologists for the trans-Atlantic slave trade of yesteryear advocated for better ventilation and mattresses on ships for slaves, but all the regulation in the world would not have changed the fact that people used as slaves deserved freedom. The children and women of today deserve freedom too

Challenges to Caribbean Economic Sovereignty in a Globalizing World

This Essay encapsulates and expands on my comments at the February 2011 Symposium "Sovereignty in Today's World" organized by the Michigan State International Law Review