Human Trafficking can easily be confused with migrant smuggling, but they're not the same; if anything, the difference is important. Migrant smuggling is a commercial service that normally occurs with the consent of migrants, and from illegal migration, which does not typically involve any forms of exploitation, whereas human trafficking is a situation in which an individual travelling abroad was locked and forced to work for no or little pay via means of coercion.
Socioeconomic conditions
The economic situation of people in these poorer regions of the world (like Mauritania, certain areas in Thailand, Pakistan, etc.) is a fundamental breeding ground for trafficking and exploitation, which may end up pushing vulnerable people to emigrate and seek better opportunities abroad. We're talking about a supply of potential victims and criminal actors fostered from suffering high unemployment, low wages and poor institutions. These factors have fostered the emergence of shadow industries offering migration services such as border crossings and illegal work abroad, such as domestic house maids, prostitutes, etc. For residents of low- and even middle-income countries, the large potential gains from migration, combined with network effects have generated an unprecedented push for legal migration to richer countries. However, with most middle and high-income country labor markets open primarily to the domestics, there are very limited legal working opportunities available for the foreign workers. So while, for them, there are less opportunities in the more desirable sectors, which tend to be reserved for people with better education; the demand for prostitutes and cheap manual workers in both high-income and low-income countries remain constant and high.People as "commodities"
Slavery is a life course event: when one is enslaved, there is no fundamental endpoint for when it might end for him or her. The only way to guarantee when slavery ends for a person is determined by his or her lifespan, and to criminal actors, that lifespan is tied to the slave's value. As one researcher 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”. This is consistent with the thought that for more people than we give credit, a slave can be a victim of not just one, but many kinds of trafficking.Incentive to Shut up
What tends to put the victims in a trap is when their environments make it hard for them to escape. Sometimes the government or police in the area are so corrupt, a victim can escape and be sent back to the place he or she fled from, and these kinds of dilemmas can discourage victims from denouncing their traffickers. For victims illegally residing in other countries, their dilemma , since doing so puts them at great risk of getting deported and the potential legal consequences with authorities in their home countries. In economic terms, they tend to find the costs of ratting on the traffickers greater than the benefits.Labor Supply: mostly voluntary
This is not the case for all, but most of the victims of trafficking depart to another country through voluntary means. Based on scarce scholarly input, two of these voluntary examples were modeled. These models are consistent with with Bales' writings on ways people can get trafficked these days.
One model describes the interaction between trafficking and migration, where potential victims pay a smuggler to help them cross the borders. In this situation where once migrants depart, it depends on the smuggler’s decision and the profitability of exploitation whether the potential victim end up being trafficked or not, which might have something to say about the kinds of persons that tend to get trafficked in a given country. A different kind of model looks at illegal migration markets with debt and labor contracts. Most migrants cannot pay for migration costs in advance, so criminal intermediaries and smugglers tend to offer loans to potential victims, which they have to pay back once they work in the destination country. The enforcement of these contracts occur in the criminal sectors, which is reasonable: these contracts in themselves aren't legal.
In speculation, this can be really bad for potential victims, because if the lender provides money for them to travel, chances are they will supply the migrant a job, which may likely be within the lender's network, where the criminal actor can monitor and control the victim's movements. Based on the cases in Brazil and in Pakistan, there is a good reason to think that a slave won't get paid enough money to pay off the debt in a reasonable period of time, assuming he or she gets paid at all.
Note #1: Human trafficking and migration pretty much go hand in hand, depending on how you see it. There is indeed a thin line between the two: that thin line may be a matter of whether the migrant ends up a victim to slavery or not.
Hypothetically speaking, the range of hourly pay would be somewhere in the range 0 ≤ k < q, where k is the amount of money paid to the slave, and q is the lowest amount an employer would pay a regular worker. This is consistent with the viable price region labeled on the graph, where P-high can be seen as the final price before the employer would prefer to pay for regular, more "skilled" workers, again denoted by q.
Note #2: The models mentioned provide a glimpse of how things are seen on the business side to human trafficking, and it is heavily fueled by a combination of desired lower labor costs, hopes of a better life, and immense scarcity (in relation to other regions/countries).
In speculation, this can be really bad for potential victims, because if the lender provides money for them to travel, chances are they will supply the migrant a job, which may likely be within the lender's network, where the criminal actor can monitor and control the victim's movements. Based on the cases in Brazil and in Pakistan, there is a good reason to think that a slave won't get paid enough money to pay off the debt in a reasonable period of time, assuming he or she gets paid at all.
Note #1: Human trafficking and migration pretty much go hand in hand, depending on how you see it. There is indeed a thin line between the two: that thin line may be a matter of whether the migrant ends up a victim to slavery or not.
A cost-minimizing effort
In the business side of human trafficking, firms hire traffickers to smuggle in people for the sake of lowering labor costs. They never expected to pay the victims a lot of money in the first place, otherwise they might as well pay for more "skilled" workers. A scholarly resource modeled this graph depicting demand for Human Trafficking victims. The limit paid for slaves is represented by the dotted part of the demand curve. |
| (Graph: Demand for Human Trafficking, Wheaton et al, 2010) |
A monopolistic-competitive look
Like a monopolistic competitive industry, the market for human trafficking victims is characterized by- many buyers and sellers
- differentiated products (the laborers at various age, gender, and ethnic combinations)
- easy entry and exit
The profits made in the human trafficking industry are rather paramount: about $32 billion in illicit profits a year is generated for traffickers. This attracts other firms or small-networked entrepreneurs to get into the mold and make profits; otherwise, they leave. For those who enter, they are able to at least control some of the price given the diverse group of people they have to target from within their communities.
Note #2: The models mentioned provide a glimpse of how things are seen on the business side to human trafficking, and it is heavily fueled by a combination of desired lower labor costs, hopes of a better life, and immense scarcity (in relation to other regions/countries).
Sources
- Tamura. 2007. "Migrant Smuggling." IIIS Discussion Paper No. 207, Institute for International Integration Studies.
- Mahmoud & Trebesch. 2009. "The Economic Drivers of Human Trafficking: Micro-Evidence from Five Eastern European Countries." Kiel Institute for the World Economy.
- Friebel and Guriev. 2012. "Human Smuggling". IZA Discussion Paper No. 6350. The Institute for the Study of Labor.
- Bales, Kevin. 2012. "Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy." University of California Press.
- Wheaton et al. 2012. "Economics of Human Trafficking.", International Migration Vol. 48, IOM.
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