3071-The political economy of new slavery

Jeroen Doomernik 45
adept at responding to all the new measures receiving states have come
up with so far. If a simple border crossing is no longer a possibility, they
will bribe officials or buy ‘legitimate’ travel documents for their clients.
This is just one example but it suffices to make clear that illegal immigration
merely becomes more expensive. The subsequent effect is that
only those clients who have access to sufficient financial means will be
assisted. In the case of asylum seekers this implies a pre-selection; not
according to whether he or she is in need of protection but by means
testing. Such pre-selection – from the point of view of the protection of
basic human rights, let alone the protection of the rights of refugees –
is perverse.
Debt-bondage
For those without sufficient means to contract the services of a smuggler,
it may mean that they are kept in debt-bondage until they have earned
their fee. Sweatshop labour (usually for male victims) or prostitution
(women and children) often are the only feasible options. For the former
we can refer to a study done among Chinese sweatshop labourers in
Manhattan (Chin, 1997, 1999), for the latter to the IOM’s reports from
its Migration Information Programme, which focuses on Central and
Eastern European migration to Western Europe. Another forced form
of repayment can consist of outright criminal activity, for example the
peddling of drugs. All these are gross violations of the human rights of
those concerned.
The debt-bondage may not just concern the individual migrant but
also (or instead) hit those who stay behind. To families it may be a
survival strategy to send one of its members abroad, either hoping for
the sending back of remittances, or for the future possibility of chain
migration. Either way, the family will have to invest in the departure
and subsequent safe arrival of the person sent abroad. One way of doing
so is by means of credit, either from an ‘ordinary’ loan shark or from
the same organization that is to smuggle the family member into a
prosperous society. The consequences can easily be serious in terms of
economic survival or of being forced into activities that are criminal or
incur a serious threat to the bodily integrity. Even in those instances
where no debt-bondage exists, the investment made can seriously undermine
the survival of a family if no or insufficient remittances materialize.
In transit
There is no way in which we can quantify the occurrence of different
modes of smuggling used. This is due to a lack of research 12 and the