Restrictive immigration policies have long been associated with a variety of economic problems including the diminished availability of foreign business and scientific talent, the inability to fill low-skilled agricultural and service jobs typically scorned by legal residents, and reduced access to the kind of entrepreneurial enthusiasm characteristic of those willing to risk their futures in another country.
Only recently has it become clear how restrictive immigration laws also produce harmful social consequences, particularly when it comes to the age-old scourge of human trafficking—the use of force and fraud to supply cheap labor and sexual services.
To understand these consequences, it is important to appreciate just how lucrative a branch of organized crime the modern slave trade has become. Efficient transportation, technological advances in both farming and factory work, and advances in communication have all combined to make the use of forced labor very cheap by historical measures.
Free the Slaves, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, has calculated the return on the cost of an enslaved field worker in 1850s Alabama at just 5 percent, whereas today a trafficked farmhand can yield the owner anywhere from double digits to 800 percent. Similarly, an imprisoned prostitute shuttled around the boroughs of New York City in a van by a driver scheduling appointments on his cell phone can service as many as 40 customers in a single shift. As one researcher coldly but accurately put it, “People are a good commodity as they do not easily perish, but they can be transported over long distances and can be re-used and re-sold.”
The result, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, is that 2.5 million victims, approximately 80 percent female and 50 percent under the age of 18, are being trafficked around the world at any given time. In 2005 the International Labor Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, estimated the annual revenues from this “industry” at $32 billion, or $13,000 per victim.
CONTINUED at FEE. Written by Lewis M. Andrews.