Trafficking
In addition to the many excellent writings by Laura Agustin (many of which are here), the abstract from Nandita Sharma’s “Anti-Trafficking Rhetoric and the Making of a Global Apartheid” (NWSA Journal, 17.3, 2005):
the historical and contemporary discursive practices of anti-trafficking campaigns […] within the global North, often led by feminists, constitute the moral reform arm of contemporary anti-immigrant politics that targets negatively racialized migrants. As in the past, current campaigns collude with a state-backed international security agenda aimed at criminalizing self-determined migrations of people who have ever-less access to legal channels of migration. I argue that only by recognizing the agency, however constrained, of illegalized migrants can we come to understand how processes of capitalist globalization and the consequent effects of dislocation and dispersal shape the mobility of illegalized migrants. Within the current global circuits of capital, goods, and people, I argue that along with a call to end practices of displacement, a demand to eliminate immigration controls is necessary if feminists are to act in solidarity with the dispossessed in their search for new livelihoods and homes.
The rest is here as a pdf.
Also, while not on ‘trafficking’, Mandy Thomas’ piece on the garment industry might be of some interest. Part of it - the part about watching horror films - reminds me of why I think the Zombie Shuffle might resonate more than do EuroMayDay-type actions with the experience of precarious work (and without the latter’s recourse to strategies of inclusion-regulation).
For some reason the pdf link won’t work for me: any ideas if is this my computer, or the link itself?
benjamin rosenzweig [June 14, 2007 @ 7:24 pm]
Hey benjamin, I couldn’t download it from mediafire today either. Try this link:
http://www.filecrunch.com/file/~wlrqps
influxus [June 14, 2007 @ 8:30 pm]
Thanks for that I. I don’t know what the problem is; worked a day ago, works with all the other files there. I tried deleting and uploading again, also renaming - nada. So, I’ll change that link above, then.
s0metim3s [June 14, 2007 @ 9:47 pm]
Hi all,
Someone sent me this from Crikey. Chinese construction workers on 457 visas the new “sex slaves”?
Oh dear…
“Slavery, debt bondage and involuntary servitude in modern Australia
Richard Farmer writes:
Our great and powerful ally has at least been tactful in the way it has linked Australia with slavery, debt bondage and involuntary servitude. The just-released annual report of the US State Department for 2007 required by the USA’s Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) says the “Government of Australia fully complies with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking”.
That compliance ensured Australia retained its ranking under the Act as a Tier One nation in the listing of countries for which only “a country of origin, transit, or destination for a significant number of victims of severe forms of trafficking” qualifies.
According to the State Department, it generally requires in the order of 100 or more victims to be given a ranking with placement in first tier “based more on the extent of government action to combat trafficking, rather than the size of the problem, important though that is.”
Severe forms of trafficking in persons is defined by the TVPA as: (a) s-x trafficking in which a commercial s-x act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person is induced to perform such an act has not attained 18 years of age; or (b) the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage or slavery.
Even making the list illustrates that Australia has a problem which the State Department report summarised thus:
Australia is a destination country for some women from East Asia and Eastern Europe trafficked for the purpose of commercial s-xual exploitation. The majority of trafficking victims were women who traveled to Australia voluntarily to work in both legal and illegal brothels, but were subject to conditions of debt bond-ge or involuntary servitude. There were several reports of men and women from India, the People’s Republic of China, and South Korea migrating to Australia temporarily for work whose labor conditions amounted to slavery, debt bondage, and involuntary servitude.
The Government of Australia fully complies with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking. During the reporting period, the government strengthened its domestic trafficking laws to cover offenses involving deception, exploitative employment, conditions and contracts, or debt bondage. The government also ensured that each person in a trafficking network could be prosecuted in cases involving internal trafficking. It also increased penalties for trafficking in children and for employers who exploit workers in conditions of forced labor, s-xual servitude, or slavery. The government provides significant resources to support anti-trafficking efforts throughout Southeast Asia, law enforcement training, victim assistance, and prevention activities. The Australian government should devote more attention and resources to addressing allegations of labor trafficking, including in connection with its 457 worker visa program.
This quite modest criticism of the 457 visa system is clearly an embarrassment to an Australian Government unused to having squabbles with the United States over anything more important than such things as beef quotas.
Minister for Immigration and Citizenship Kevin Andrews knows that the Labor Party will eventually get around to attacking the so-called skilled migration system and the words of the State Department will be a wonderful peg to hang it on. So yesterday Mr Andrews plucked up his courage and called the US “ill informed in respect to the purpose of the 457 visa and the obligations placed on employers who use the scheme” and said “we reject absolutely the ill informed comments”.
It is a long time since such harsh language has been used in public conversations between the two allies. That it was yesterday is an indication of the sensitivity of the Australian Government to the likelihood that the debate will move from slavery to the use of the immigration program to allow the continued rise of the profit share of the national economic cake at the expense of the share going to labour.”
liz [June 15, 2007 @ 1:37 pm]
the likelihood that the debate will move from slavery to the use of the immigration program to allow the continued rise of the profit share of the national economic cake at the expense of the share going to labour.
I’m not sure I can make this out. On the one hand, it reads to me as if he’s fantasising about an outbreak in overt class struggle - or, at least, a conflict over the stark proportionalities of wages and profits. On the other hand, he wants to have his “national economic cake” and eat it too. As if this cake was not, in part, baked by slave labour from elsewhere. That slippage between what’s declared as ‘ours’ (as workers) and what’s ‘ours’ (as ‘the national economy’) that so often serves to resassemble class as populism, through of course, racism - and re-attaches workers to employers, united as Australian.
Someone call Zizek - they’re stealing our thing, but it’s not real clear who ‘they’ are supposed to be.
s0metim3s [June 15, 2007 @ 3:24 pm]
Hi all,
went looking for ALP stuff on 457 visas and found this. i actually didn’t notice they’d ever so quietly ditched TPVs. Not surprising since saying “Tampa” to an ALP kiddie induces a reaction not seen since the days when “Macbeth” could only be referred to as “the Scottish play” in London theatre circles for fear of inducing hysteria (well, that’s what Blackadder, my idiot’s guide to British history tells me…)
http://www.search.org.au/news/2007_May/ALP_conference_roundup.htm
I have not heard that any of the 457 visa holders are being sent back or detained - though I could have just missed it. Will try to find out - unlike what I understand Project Respect supports unless sex workers can prove they were “trafficked” - drugged, bound, etc, - as opposed to just ripped off on arrival through accomodation deductions and underpayment. Instead all the 457 cases seem to involve pressure for employers to pay back owed monies…
Wow - why didn’t Project Respect think of that?
Speaking of variations on the theme of yellow peril…
Have you heard the rumours about China wanting to buy BHP?
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,21861872-664,00.html
Gosh - it’ll be back to the union movement’s glory days of Eureka (the bits with lots of dead Chinese not-much talked about) when that gets out into the world beyond the business section…
Liz [June 17, 2007 @ 11:39 am]
Correction - that should have read “I have not heard that any of the 457 visa holders are being sent back AFTER BEING detained”.
When your sponsor pulls out of a 457 (which of course happens if you complain) then you can be sent back. But, i don’t know that the 457 visa holders are going through the same process that “trafficked women” go through which is often detention before deportation, plus trying to get hold of one of those visas that lets you stay in the country if you agree to testify against people….
I am going to try to find out more from people in anti-deportation world (though they care little about over-stayers).
anyone else know much about this?
Liz [June 17, 2007 @ 12:02 pm]
A couple of months ago, I started putting together stuff on the 457 (which led to these initial remarks) - for non-AU readersm the 457 is a ‘guest worker’ visa, a form of indenture in the detail, given the tethering to specific employers. I had trouble not being overwhelmed by a hatred for the ALP/union responses, and other stuff intervened, so I’ve yet to get around to a thorough reading. But I’ll take another look in the coming fortnight or so.
Can’t wait for the outpouring of nationalist sentiment over the BHP thing.
s0metim3s [June 17, 2007 @ 1:22 pm]
Dead Chinese at Eureka? There were plenty of Chinese miners in the vicinity and there were none in the rebellion but I think the lynchings came later.
Pete [June 18, 2007 @ 7:58 pm]
Hi Pete,
The worst of the massacres was I think in NSW at Lambing flat in the early 1860’s, and there’s plenty of debate in lefty and trade union world about who is ultimately reponsible for that violence (yes, its the ruling class, for anyone who was wondering): the use of Chinese as strikebreakers is one “mitigating” factor raised by union people, but there was a fair bit in the way of anti-Chinese agitation in Bendigo and Ballarat as far back as 1854, though you’re right that the mass killings did not occur at exactly the same time as the celebrated actions at Eureka. My point is that whilst I’m sure we all agree that “the system” is responsible for “violence” there is evidence of working class miner “heroes” killing Chinese on the goldfields. While I’m not suggesting there will be organised mass violence against Chinese 457 visa holders if there is a Chinese government push for BHP, I think the union movement has form that should be acknowledged when it comes to this.
I’ll have to ask my Mum for good sources for all this: she showed me her stuff on this when I was in high school - I’ll try to hunt down some good sources on it though I think there is probably some in internet world…
liz [June 19, 2007 @ 1:33 pm]
Aside from the questions raised here, I think there’s an interesting complexity to pick up on: the list of demands made at the Eureka rebellion (or at least some of them) were borrowed from the Chartists - or maybe it’s more accurate to say that they appeared at Eureka because of the migration of, well, Chartists and their supporters. Those involved were, though, from quite different political perspectives - and some of them were indeed racists, but that (very fleetingly at least) was not articulated in the demands.
But, it was on the grounds of that obvious Chartist influence that police and other authorities accused those involved of being foreigners.
So, while there were anti-Chinese mobilisations at Ballarat (and Lambing Flat, etc) both before and after the events we’re talking about, as Eureka began to circulate as political symbolism, it acquired a distinctively nationalist, racialised aspect - which persists to this day. In other words, there was an effort, and indeed on the part of some of those involved, to prove that they were not foreigners - and it’s worth noting that the laws which followed hot on the heels of these events, and was argued for on the grounds of them by the Goldfield’s Commission, were not the content of those demands, but the introduction in the Victorian Parliament of further restrictions on migration from China.
So, maybe the argument should be less about whether it’s possible to deploy Eureka symbolism without its baggage, than how to avoid the trap of wanting to argue that certain struggles belong to or typify the essence of some national polity.
That said, and speaking of goldfield politics, everyone should watch Deadwood.
Some of the episodes are here.
s0metim3s [June 19, 2007 @ 2:07 pm]
AN Australian trafficking film, just completed and being spruiked by the church anti-trafficking kids….
http://www.thejammed.com/
liz [June 21, 2007 @ 1:37 pm]
Thanks for that.
Also, not sure if people caught it, but I put Gretchen Soderlund’s essay “Running from the Rescuers” up here. It’s really quite good. A couple of excerpts, the first of these is from the conclusion, the second situates the rise of ‘anti-trafficking’ in the context of a Holy War:
s0metim3s [June 21, 2007 @ 2:58 pm]
I particularly liked the reference to “false consciousness” that explains away why women run from the rescuers and back to the brothel. An excellent way of explaining away the dissenting voices from the “victims”…
Liz [June 22, 2007 @ 5:45 pm]
Isn’t theology grand.
And for those with an interest, a couple of essays from the sidebar links, via L. Monina Wong’s, “Chinese Workers in the Garment Industry in Africa”, and Dae-oup Chang’s & Monina Wong’s, “After the Consumer Movement: Toward a New International Labour Activism in the Global Garment Industry”.
s0metim3s [June 28, 2007 @ 1:45 pm]