So, I'm "daring the gods" with this post today. Yesterday, officials in Florida took the podium…
...and grandly announced the “horrifying” tale of eight women transported illegally into the country, where “payment” of $60,000 for the “service” was working in the sex industry, whether prostitution, “masseuse” work or “exotic dancing,” which the women were reportedly tied to doing by the confiscation of their ID. From the perspective of the smugglers, they probably believed this was a quicker way to get their money than just allowing these women to simply escape across the country without paying anything.
Did these women know what the “deal” was? They were all 19-24 years of age, so they were capable of adult decisions. Nevertheless, it is a crime to hold people in “bondage” by confiscating their “papers,” even if those "papers" are useless in this country as far as illegal entry is concerned. One of the women apparently contacted a human-smuggling hotline to tip-off immigration officials about her plight. She probably didn’t like the “deal” and wanted to get out of it, and she was also likely conned by the suggestion that the victim "status" that the hotline number promised would get her a “free pass” into the country.
Of course she probably didn’t read the fine print; she and these other women were still illegally in the country, and the “assumption” made by the human-trafficking statute is that they were brought into the country against their will, so once these women served their purpose for Gov. Ron DeSantis and the far-right anti-immigrant propaganda machine, off they go, back to where they were trying to escape from in the first place, maybe to an even more dangerous situation with U.S.-bred and deported gang violence.
Being that there are two sides to every story, it is hard not to be cynical about all of this after the political stunt that DeSantis reportedly colluded with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott with, “shipping” gullible Venezuelan asylum seekers to Martha’s Vineyard. Regardless of the merits of this particular case, as the website openDemocracy reported after the 2020 election, “human-trafficking” has been used as a catchall phrase to describe most instances of cross-border activity.
Describing “anti-trafficking” propaganda as an “inside job” in the article, Nandita Sharma offers a woman's perspective on the issue. She writes that it is a way to put a “humanitarian face” on inhuman anti-immigrant policies:
Anti-trafficking has always been an ‘inside job’. This is true in at least two ways. First, we have an alliance between anti-trafficking organizations and state officials, who have worked together to embed the anti-trafficking framework into both international agreements and national and local laws. This alliance has actively dismissed the concerns of feminists, including sex workers, who have spoken up about the harms that tend to occur whenever anybody gets it in their head to ‘save women and children’. It has also sidelined evidence that anti-trafficking measures tend to intensify the harms already being done by immigration and anti-sex work policies.
Why would she say something like that? Isn’t that against the grain of the popular victim narrative? What Sharma is referring to here is that the anti-trafficking people are only interested in the women in the sex industry insofar as they are useful in plying an anti-immigrant policy in general. As mentioned, being a “victim” will not be useful for undocumented women in regard to legal status: they will be sent back to the place they were trying to escape—and not only that, they will be used as pawns to “criminalize” all other migrants.
Sharma doesn’t stop there with pointing out the hypocrisy of anti-trafficking “crusaders”:
Secondly, we have organizations who have used anti-trafficking and the access and influence it enables to advance other aspects of their agenda. Groups seeking to abolish sex work are the prime culprits here. Abolitionist campaigners have successfully harnessed sympathy for trafficking victims to further criminalize sex work, harass sex workers and their clients, and deny safe and law-bound routes of intra- and international migration for sex workers. Under the guise of anti-trafficking, in many jurisdictions previous victories gained by sex workers have been rolled back and sex workers have become more exposed to the punitive power of the state.
Note that last month Florida law enforcement officials posted mugshots of 160 men arrested for being "johns," reinforcing the idea that sex for sale is still a "crime" in this country, even if the women in business overlook the fact that they are supposed to be "victims" and are back on the street hoping they get their money before the next "john" is arrested; it is a fair question to ask who is worse: the "drug" dealer or the "drug" user? In the above commentary, Sharma is of course speaking of this issue on an international level, since there are countries where sex work is legal as long as the workers are "registered."
But take out the “legal” part, it is the same theory of what is going on in this country, and the motives are far from "pure." With the election of Donald Trump in 2016, since “protecting women and children has long been a powerful tool for soliciting sympathy, money, and weapons…anti-trafficking is indeed a well-oiled machine: the Trump administration alone has authorized approximately $430 million to ‘fight sex and labor trafficking.’” In other words, throwing money at creating a “humanitarian” face on racist anti-immigrant policies.
Thus Sharma would argue that the women “saved” by DeSantis’ storm troopers are not necessarily seeing the kind of benefit from the action of their “saviors” as they believe. Sharma continues: “Talking about ‘traffickers’ and ‘smugglers’ is not only an effective way of closing down other conversations, it also enables nation-states who would otherwise be defined by their anti-migrant, anti-environment, anti-women, anti-worker, and anti-poor policies to be viewed as the saviors and protectors of ‘victims of trafficking’.”
Sharma notes that Trump claimed his "anti-trafficking" polices were giving “voice” to the “voiceless,” but in reality it was silencing those protesting his restrictive, anti-immigrant policies (of course with the help of white nationalist Stephen Miller):
Yet “the voiceless” to which Trump refers clearly does not include anyone affected by Trump’s immigration policies, including those harmed by the effective ending of lawful routes of migration to the United States, the implementation of a ‘Muslim ban’ (which reintroduces racism into US immigration law), the interdiction of asylum seekers at the US’s southern border, and the organized abandonment of would-be refugees in hazardous, make-shift camps in Mexico. Most egregiously, Trump’s concern for the most vulnerable does not extend to the separation of children from their caregiving adults as part of his administration’s “zero tolerance” policy – an especially vicious tactic to try and thwart future migration to the United States.
This is the kind of inhuman policy that DeSantis is showing us he will reinstate if he is somehow elected president in 2024. Sharma further notes that so-called anti-traffickers did not “prioritize” the real victims—not just all of those effected by Trump’s anti-immigrant polices who have tried legal means to get into the country, but the children kept in cages like animals. The true “evil” is not “trafficking,” but what at the time was “his administration’s continuing failure to reunite over 600 hundred children whom they separated from their parents.”
To return to the “savior” theme, Sharma writes
By presenting themselves as ‘saviors’, anti-traffickers have secured prestige and authority within societies which have become obsessed with the trafficking of women and children. It should come as no surprise that this is an obsession which they have played no small part in fomenting. Even far-right conspiracy theories have by this point jumped on the anti-trafficking bandwagon as a way of re-presenting themselves as rescuers of victims and not victimizers.
Sharma notes that QAnon conspiracy theorists have played a part in this:
The QAnon slogan, “save the children,” borrows directly from the rhetoric accompanying efforts to ‘combat trafficking’. Indeed, the use of this slogan has increased the popularity of QAnon – and, unsurprisingly, the popularity of Trump. QAnon adherents believe the current president is secretly fighting a network of liberal Hollywood celebrities and Democrats supposedly running a child trafficking ring. President Trump’s tacit support of QAnon aligns with his own anti-trafficking agenda. Both incorrectly portray Trump as the protector of women and children.
No one should be fooled by people like Trump, DeSantis and the far-right anti-immigrant agitators in and out of the media claiming that they are “saving” people from being victimized by “smugglers” and “traffickers.” This is just a means to justify shutting down avenues to legal methods of entry, because people who are being "smuggled" are actually "victims" who don't really want to be here—even asylum seekers. If migrants are not “criminals” entering the country on their own, then “criminals” are helping them enter the country. Either way, they all are “criminals.”
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