Human Trafficking Around the World (7 page)

As time went on, their finances [deteriorated], and they needed employment. Initially, the workers were encouraged by a warm response from members of Congress and assurances that the case against Signal would take place in an efficient manner. The workers later told me, “Washington, D.C., is very expensive. We had to figure out a way to support ourselves while this [the suit against Signal] is going on.” It was at this point that the victims began dispersing. Some of the men knew of friends who had obtained employment working on the [Tharaldson] power plant in North Dakota. They learned that they were actively recruiting welders and pipefitters.

Nelson says the workers had a good experience working on the power plant. They were treated well and were paid overtime. The workers felt that the employer valued them, and, according to Nelson, Wanzek has stated that the men were excellent workers. Then, on the last day on the job the men received notice that they should come to headquarters. This is when the men were arrested. “It seems coincidental that the employer [Wanzek Construction] felt compelled to perform its civic duty of reporting the men to ICE after the job was complete, after they no longer needed the skilled services of the men,” Nelson said. The Cass 23 workers had entered the United States legally with H-2B visas, which they obtained through their alleged traffickers. Because the visas are employer specific, when the men escaped the labor camp and trafficking experience, they lost their visas. If their T visa applications are accepted, the men will be able to legally live and work in the United States for three years and can subsequently apply for permanent resident status (a green card). While waiting for the lawsuit to proceed, the men faced a long time when they could not legally work but needed income to survive. “Their biggest crime was trying to support themselves while the justice system slowly ground on,” Nelson said. “I have never seen a situation where people were so victimized and continuously trapped by a system that is ours.”
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What is most surprising about this case is that the workers were prosecuted regardless of the trafficking assertion. Drew Wrigley, then-U.S. attorney for the District of North Dakota, was aware of the trafficking allegations before he decided to prosecute the workers, but he was more concerned with the workers’ visa statuses than with their alleged-victim statuses. “Nothing in those allegations would allow them to disappear in the American mosaic and reappear in North Dakota and obtain employment,” Wrigley told
Forum
reporter Patrick Springer (Springer, 2008c). Aside from the fact that Wrigley’s actions are in direct conflict with the objective of the TVPA, deporting victim-witnesses can obviously significantly weaken a case against the victims’ traffickers.

Like many law-enforcement units, ICE has historically used arrest quotas. Until recently, fugitive tracking teams (consisting of four to seven agents) in the Fugitive Operations Program had to arrest at least 1,000 fugitives per year (Taxin, 2009). The controversial Fugitive Operations Program has received much negative publicity surrounding the large number of noncriminal arrests resulting from agent raids. The Migration Policy Institute reported that 73 percent of nearly 97,000 persons arrested by the Fugitive Operations Program between 2003 and 2008 did not have criminal records.
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Some experts blamed the large number of noncriminal arrests on the arrest quotas of the Fugitive Operations Program. Additionally, arrest quotas can obstruct efforts to arrest criminal offenders, whose cases can take more time. Then, in August 2009, ICE director John Morton announced the elimination of arrest quotas in the Fugitive Operations Program and stated that the program would focus on criminals who have ignored deportation orders. “The Fugitive Operations Program needs to focus first and foremost on people who have knowingly flouted an immigration removal order, and within that category, obviously we will focus first on criminals,” Morton stated. “I just don’t think that a law-enforcement program should be based on a hard number that must be met,” Morton said. “I just don’t think that’s a good way to go about it. So we don’t have quotas anymore” (Gorman, 2009c, p. 11).

Whereas immigration violations such as illegal border crossing and overstaying a visa have historically been treated as administrative or civil offenses, persons who have ignored deportation orders are now considered fugitives (Mendelson, Strom, & Wishnie, 2009; Rood, 2009). Morton told reporters that he would continue enforcing the law against immigrants who refuse to follow deportation orders. “It is important that the system have integrity,” Morton said. “I am not signaling in any way that we are not going to enforce the law against non-criminal fugitives” (Gorman, 2009c, p. 11). According to Tim Counts, a spokesperson for ICE, “80 percent of the fugitive population is non-criminal. While we focus on the worst offenders, we are charged with enforcing the nation’s immigration laws.” Counts goes on to state that nonfugitives are not in the clear; if discovered, they, too, will be arrested. “If we get leads, we’re not going to ignore administrative offenders” (Rood, 2009, p. 1).

Many legal and social service providers were hopeful that the relationship between ICE and legal and social service providers would improve under the Obama administration. And according to Caitlin Ryland of Legal Aid of the North Carolina Farmworker Unit, this seems to be happening. “What we have seen lately is a forging between local law enforcement, ICE, and direct service providers. ICE has indicated to us that they have been given specific instructions [by the Obama administration] to concentrate on employer-focused enforcement actions. We understand this to mean that they are targeting enforcement actions on employers as opposed to workers.”
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Ryland states that it is in the best interests of trafficking victims for local police, ICE, legal service providers and direct service providers to have a working relationship: “There are many different types of first responders—it may be a migrant housing inspector, a Department of Labor inspector, an NGO, a health clinic, or local law enforcement. A lack of cooperation between groups can be detrimental to trafficking victims. One example is that of a trafficker of one of our clients who was actually able to use an unknowing police officer to further his trafficking scheme.”

The trafficker had called local law enforcement in order to stop a victim from leaving the trafficking labor camp. The officer who arrived at the location did not speak Spanish and allowed the trafficker to act as an interpreter between the officer and the trafficking victim. As a result of this interaction, the victim understood—through his trafficker’s fraudulent translation of the conversation—that the police officer was demanding that the victim sign a paper indicating that he could not leave the camp without repaying his alleged debt to the trafficker. “If the law enforcement official had been sufficiently trained to see those red flags, then perhaps this person could have had an opportunity to leave the trafficking situation at an earlier date,” Ryland said. “Additionally, it might have prevented the trafficker from trafficking others. Instead, the trafficker was actually able to use law enforcement to further his trafficking scheme.”

In September 2009 the local ICE office agreed to inform the appropriate legal service providers when they start an enforcement action. In the past, says Ryland, ICE has placed those found at raids in the local jail—in black-and-white-striped suits—and in the same jail as their traffickers and johns:

ICE has now agreed to let us know when they begin a raid. If they have identified a potential victim they will try to place the victim somewhere other than the jail for the interviewing process, in an effort to minimize re-victimization. Trust between an advocate and a victim is just that [much] more difficult to foster when a person has been unknowingly re-victimized by people who are there to help them. However, ICE informed us that the extent to which they are able to make these alternative interview arrangements depends on the extent of their working relationship with the specific local law-enforcement agency involved in the raid.

One of the challenges in forging relationships between law enforcement and legal and direct services is that they have different professional guidelines. According to Ryland, the victim may not immediately give service providers permission to share information with law enforcement:

We are bound by a duty of confidentiality, and we understand that there are certain barriers that you have to get over to build trust with your client before they will (a) tell us the whole story and (b) grant us permission to share that story with someone else. However, law enforcement does not always realize that building trust takes time. They don’t always understand why a victim wouldn’t readily identify himself or herself as a victim of human trafficking.

Another obstacle to building a relationship with police, Ryland said, is the pressure put on local law enforcement: “It seems that local law enforcement has to meet a certain number of convictions for prostitution. For instance, they [law enforcement] may charge a person with prostitution and not drop the charges even when the person is found to be a victim of human trafficking.”
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Although the United States has taken significant measures to counter human trafficking worldwide as well as nationally, there exists a conflict between the objective of the TVPA to protect and assist victims of trafficking and that of ICE to combat illegal immigration. Those found in raids are often arrested and deported without a thorough evaluation as to whether they are trafficking victims. Such practices not only fail to protect and assist potential victims of trafficking, but also result in the deportation of critical witnesses, which significantly weakens the case against their traffickers. Hopefully, the removal of arrest quotas from the Fugitive Operations Program will help shift the focus so that traffickers and corporations that benefit from the exploitation of trafficked persons become the target of ICE instead of those who have been exploited.

CHAPTER 2

Japan

I apologize to those Brazilians or Peruvians who came to Japan with high hope[s]. Our policy was very wrong. We just wanted the cheap labor, but we don’t want to open our market to … foreign countries.

—TARO KONO, MEMBER OF THE JAPANESE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 2009

Japan has a hyperthriving sex industry amounting to $3 billion a year (Hughes, Sporcic, Mendelsohn, & Chirgwin, 1999; McNeill, 2004). Sex is openly advertised, yet conservative attitudes persist toward the open discussion of sex. According to James Farrer, former director of the Institute of Comparative Culture at Sophia University in Tokyo, this is not a contradiction but rather a reflection of a cultural difference between the West and the East:

In Japan it is acceptable to be a different person during the day versus the night. It is context appropriate. Japanese society doesn’t have the Protestant moral restrictions on sex like [that of] the United States. There has always been a commercial sex industry. For many people the world of the commercial sex industry is a vague and gray area, and they don’t get too bothered by it. Particularly in the cities, it is part of the urban landscape—you see it everywhere. It is seen as something that has its place but not in serious daily life. If kept in its place it is not morally significant. At the same time, the culture is modest, and talking about sex is considered immodest.

Michiko Yokoyama, a public outreach program officer at the Japan office of the anti-trafficking group Polaris Project, holds that this cultural dualism fosters ignorance on the issue of trafficking, particularly that of trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation:

There is a lack of social awareness on trafficking issues due to a lack of human rights and sex education at schools, poor media coverage, and the absence of a government campaign on human trafficking. I attended an NGO and government meeting on Japan’s new action plan on human trafficking on December 2, 2009. During the meeting a government official from the Ministry of Health mentioned that “many teachers are not willing to talk about issues too shocking for children” and refused to give clear answers as to whether the government is willing to include trafficking issues in human rights education.

According to Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA), efforts have been made to improve sex education through the subjects of physical education, health, and science (MOFA, 1999). But schools and health organizations do not always cooperate (Matsumoto, 1995). According to Chieko Ishiwata, “The issues of who should be providing sexual education, the extent of it, and how it is taught are extremely complicated.” For instance, curriculum guidelines imposed by the Ministry of Culture, Sports, Science and Technology limit the language teachers can use in teaching about sex and what topics they can discuss (Ishiwata, 2011). Masako Ono-Kihara, director at the UNAIDS Collaborating Centre on Socio-Epidemiological HIV Research and associate professor at the Kyoto University School of Public Health, said that teachers of sex education have to walk the line between cultural values and modern lifestyles. “This gap must be eradicated. But at the same time, we must be careful to consider family values where some protected young children might not be ready for explicit information” (Kakuchi, 2004).

Despite what appears to be societal and governmental naïveté on the topic of trafficking, Japan did adopt a national action plan of measures to combat trafficking in persons in 2004. Many skeptics hold that this was simply a political move to appease foreign nations as opposed to an acknowledgment that trafficking is indeed a problem within Japan. According to Farrer, the U.S. State Department
Trafficking in Persons Report
had a big effect on the Japanese Ministry of Justice. “There were open discussions on the topic of trafficking around that time, but they soon subsided. The societal perception is that trafficking probably exists on a small scale but that it is not a big part of the sex industry or that of labor.”
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