Trafficking as the moral filter of migration control
Cameron Thibos, Neil Howard
The fight against ‘human trafficking’ has, since the 1990s, become a cause célèbre of modern politics. It is a bipartisan issue that everybody can be safely for and that nobody wants to be against (Quirk and Bunting 2014). It has been championed by high profile political figures as diverse as Theresa May, George Bush, Robert Mugabe and Ivanka Trump, and many thousands of NGOs around the world are working right now to eradicate it (ibid.). But, popular as the cause is, it is not without its critics. Today there are two broad camps within anti-trafficking work with academics, practitioners, policymakers and activists on both sides. One side views human trafficking first and foremost as a crime, perpetrated by individuals upon other individuals, which can be stopped through sufficient enforcement and prevention. The other side views trafficking as the far end of a spectrum of exploitation brought about by the regularly functioning, structural mechanisms of modern-day capitalism. Furthermore, it highlights the problematic governance effects of the trafficking frame. Firmly grounded in this second perspective, we argue in this chapter that the traction afforded to the discourse of human trafficking has made it a unique and powerful tool of migration governance. It operates primarily by creating a zone of exception within the broader landscape of labour migration. Inside this zone, we are told by anti-trafficking advocates, criminals move people forcibly or through deception in order to exploit them. This movement is said to constitute an egregious abuse of vulnerability, a violation of human rights, and a crime, and governments thus have a duty to prevent it.