Human Sex Trafficking: Another Side of Immigration

The epidemic proportion of sex trafficking is resulting in countless innocent victims, women and children demands public notice and action. There is a large demand in the United States, the U.K. and other European countries for people to carry out a variety of work, domestic and agricultural. The demand cannot be met by the local population, which creates a need for migrant workers to pass through national borders. If this demand for migrant workers can be met through legal methods allowing migrants to enter countries easily, there will be no need for illegal mechanisms such as smuggling people across borders. Therefore people looking to enter a wealthier nation will not have to take illegal and desperate measures and will be less likely to be tricked into the trafficking industry.

Four million people are trafficked each year, resulting in seven billion dollars in profits to criminal groups (the traffickers). Trafficking women and children is the third most profitable industry for organized crime, after guns and drugs. For these young women and children this is their reality. They encounter physical and verbal abuse, threats and rape on a daily basis.

Sex trafficking victims are often from impoverished countries. Due to the poverty in their own country a great number of women migrate in search of work. Women seek a variety of economic opportunities abroad using many resources such as newspaper ads, acquaintances, marriage agencies, labor recruiters and modeling agencies.

However, the agencies and ads are often a disguised ploy used to solicit women for sex trafficking, unbeknown to the victims. Women are often tricked into believing they are signing up for a job and are then abducted upon arrival to their new work. The increase of globalization has given rise to the trafficking of women from poor countries to wealthy ones. In wealthier countries, customers are willing to pay a lot more than in the poor countries because there is a higher standard of living. This is especially seen in the United States one of the wealthiest nations in the world. There are believed to be 30,000 to 50,000 sex slaves in captivity in the United States at any given time.

Victims of sex traffic trade suffer psychological physical and emotional trauma. Girls are physically abused, raped, threatened, beaten physically, and subjected to psychological and verbal harassment. Traffickers often introduce the girls into the sex work industry by beating and raping them into submission. They do this before they bring in customers so the girls will not try to escape. The girls are then sold out to customers.

The government has looked at easy publicly appealing answers to sex trafficking, granting victims asylum in America, giving traffickers twenty years in prison and collecting their monetary assets. But lets look at the bigger picture here, the United States and Western countries have a higher standard of living mostly due to the exploitation and occupation of countries cementing them into poverty. We have a high demand of work that cannot be fulfilled yet we continue to block people from entering the country. People have to take illegal means and life risking situations to enter the country, often they become abducted and smuggled into a horrific industry in which would have never happened if they were legally allowed in.