Introduction: The wider context of trafficking for forced labour

Abstract

The main themes of this book, human rights and migration, are both controversial and in combination even more contested. Migration between nation-states – or transnational migration – has been restricted by increasingly complex regulations in many places where people move across borders, but especially where this occurs from generally poorer to, on average, richer countries. These restrictions have dramatic impacts on the accessibility of many of the human rights of migrants, yet they are in themselves also a direct interference with the two most basic rights of migrants: the freedom to move and the right to have rights. These are not simply interesting theoretical discussions. Annually many migrants die on their way to their destinations (Carling, 2007; Nevins, 2007; Hinkes, 2008) or in destitution without safe access to adequate healthcare (Khosravi, Chapter 3 in this volume). While working on a European-wide project on trafficking for forced labour the contributors to this book realized the importance of the wider context of human rights and migration for the understanding of the exploitation of migrants. This became apparent in several ways. In multidisciplinary workshops we problematized the common distinction between ‘deserving’ victims of trafficking and ‘undeserving’ ‘illegal’ migrants – positioned as having committed migration crimes. As the Refugee Convention 1951 does not capture all circumstances under which people are compelled to leave their homes and, moreover, no human being is illegal, these distinctions do not stand up against ethical scrutiny. From research on smuggling it became clear, too, that the distinction between smuggling and trafficking as practices where either the migrant was ‘guilty’ or the migrant was a ‘victim’ did not coincide with the stories people told. Instead, many situations were a complex mixture of decision-making by the migrant and constraints provided by circumstances, for example openings in migration regimes, law enforcement officials discovering routes, or the barriers put by other actors in the ‘migration industry’, such as prices for destinations, violence along the way and connections between facilitators of travel and agents of employment (Khosravi, 2010; Van Liempt, 2007). Many migrants are grateful to their facilitators, even if the circumstances on arrival are hard. In most cases trafficked persons do not at first see themselves as such due to feelings of guilt and responsibility for decisions made to pursue a risky migration strategy (van den Anker, 2007). Of course in some cases, especially in trafficking of minors, there may not be such agency. Interviews with migrants who had their human rights violated showed that in some cases all three elements of the trafficking definition were present; that is, recruitment and transportation, force or deception, and exploitation at the point of arrival. Yet other cases of forced labour and exploitation where there was no clear link between recruiters and exploiters were no less unjust (MRCI, 2007). These findings motivated us to attempt in this book to grasp the complexity of human rights violations of migrants beyond the niche of narrow conceptions of trafficking. In the exchange of work at joint workshops and in panels at larger conferences we further discovered that steps towards increased codification of migrant rights, better enforcement and more activist claiming of migrant rights were all limited by the lack of understanding of the barriers to accessibility of human rights for migrants. The condition of deportability, the xenophobic environment and the lack of awareness of their rights among migrants require rethinking of the values underpinning approaches to making migrant rights accessible. In this book we do this by engaging with migration regimes, labour rights, human rights, global citizenship and hospitality as arenas of contest for social change. In the remainder of this introduction we will discuss the development of the wider debate around trafficking and migrant exploitation and list the main argument of each chapter.