CREA, a feminist human rights organization based in India, published a paper by Svati P. Shah that examines key issues in the relationship between sex workers’ and women’s movements, using the United States and India as its examples. The paper explores the history of women’s movements and sex workers’ movements, as well as whether and how they intersect. It goes on to discuss the contemporary context, including the status of alliances and dialogue between women’s movements and sex workers’ movements, the ways that HIV/AIDS have structured this relationship, and the question of agency.

Abstract: This article is concerned with the role of debt in contemporary practices of mobility. It explores how the phenomenon of debt-financed migration disturbs the trafficking/smuggling, illegal/legal, and forced/voluntary dyads that are widely used to make sense of migration and troubles the liberal construction of ‘freedom’ and ‘slavery’ as oppositional categories. The research literature reveals that while debt can lock migrants into highly asymmetrical, personalistic, and often violent relations of power and dependency sometimes for several years, it is also a means by which many seek to extend and secure their future freedoms. Financing migration through debt can be an active choice without also being a ‘voluntary’ or ‘autonomous’ choice, and migrants’ decisions to take on debts that will imply heavy restrictions on their freedom are taken in the context of migration and other policies that severely constrain their alternatives. Vulnerability to abuse and exploitation is also politically constructed, and even migrant-debtors whose movement is state sanctioned often lack protections both as workers and as debtors. Indeed, large numbers of migrants are excluded from the rights and freedoms that in theory constitute the opposite of slavery. As argued in the conclusion, this illustrates the contemporary relevance of Losurdo’s historical account of the fundamentally illiberal realities of self-conceived liberal societies. There remain ‘exclusion clauses’ in the social contract that supposedly affords universal equality and freedom, clauses that are of enormous consequence for many groups of migrants, and that also deleteriously affect those citizens who are poor and/or otherwise marginalized.

This article can be accessed at: http://migration.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/02/13/migration.mns002.full; or http://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/fileadmin/files/Publications/Reports/Anderson04.pdf

By Ashwini Sukthankar  

Preface: Visas, Inc. goes behind the scenes of the ad hoc set of visas that are sometimes referred to collectively as the “guestworker program.” It has become a lucrative business for employers, but with high costs for U.S. society as well as foreign and American workers. Employers are driving a system that lacks coherence and has serious long-term consequences for the United States.

Without thoughtful consideration of the future of U.S. labor needs as they were likely to evolve throughout the economy, Congress has responded over the years to industry-specific demands and created visas that addressed particular issues at particular moments in time. As the formal “work” visas became more regulated, employers learned they could skirt the tougher rules altogether by using other visas that were never intended to serve primarily as “work” visas. The result has been unsatisfactory to almost all the parties involved, especially the workers.

When we decided to look further into the system what we found was confounding and, ultimately, the reason for this report. We discovered a complicated, fragmented system that few understand well. It was also a place that has little room for the interests of foreign workers.

Now is the time to take a step back and reflect on the broad effects of this ad hoc system.

We hope that this report can help advocates already deeply engaged in the hard policy work on individual visas and abuses to see how problems for many different kinds of workers and communities are all connected in this chaotic system. We also hope it encourages new voices in the U.S. and overseas to join this conversation and work together to find solutions that will eliminate abuses and work better for everyone involved.

Access the Full PDF here: Visas Inc By Global Workers Justice Alliance (2)

Executive Summary:

Each year, hundreds of thousands of people from around the world are recruited to work in the United States on temporary work visas. Internationally recruited workers are employed in a wide range of U.S. industries, from low-wage jobs in agriculture and landscaping to higher-wage jobs in technology, nursing and teaching. They enter the United States on a dizzying array of visas, such as H-1B, H-2A, H-2B, J-1, A-3, G-5, EB-3, B-1, O-1, P-3, L, OPT and TN visas, each with its own rules and requirements. This report will demonstrate two key findings regarding the current U.S. work visa system:

1. Regardless of visa category, employment sector, race, gender or national origin, internationally recruited workers face disturbingly common patterns of recruitment abuse, including fraud, discrimination, severe economic coercion, retaliation, blacklisting and, in some cases, forced labor, indentured servitude, debt bondage and human trafficking.

2. Disparate rules and requirements for workers, employers and recruiters, as well as lax enforcement of the regulations that do exist, allow and even incentivize recruiters and employers to engage in abuses. The International Labor Recruitment Working Group (“the Working Group”) seeks to end the systemic abuse of international workers who are recruited to work in the United States. By convening workers’ rights advocates across labor sectors, the Working Group has undertaken a thorough analysis of the current regulatory and enforcement framework to identify the shortcomings and gaps in worker protections. This report aims to bring the voices of internationally recruited workers of all skill and wage levels into policy discussions to illustrate the extent of the problems with international labor recruitment practices. This report shows how structural flaws in work visa programs increase the vulnerability of workers to human trafficking.

The Working Group calls upon the U.S. government to adopt policies that protect internationally recruited workers from recruitment abuse. To do so, the government must acknowledge that these abuses are systemic rather than visa specific. Effective policies and oversight must be comprehensive, addressing core issues common across the worker recruitment experience.

Access the Full PDF here: The-American-Dream-Up-For-Sale-A-Blueprint-for-Ending-International-Labor-Recruitment-Abuse

ECPAT-USA’s groundbreaking report “And Boys, Too” addresses the widely overlooked prevalence of commercial sexual exploitation in young boys and men. Currently the little notice given to boys primarily identifies them as exploiters, pimps and buyers of sex, or as active and willing participants in sex work, not as victims or survivors of exploitation. “And Boys, Too” breaks the silence with startling information about sex trafficking in boys and the shortage of services currently available to male trafficking victims and survivors. Read the full length report here.