3071-The political economy of new slavery

Arne Dormaels, Bruno Moens and Nele Praet 79
on migration issues. Furthermore a multidisciplinary team is sent out
to the diplomatic offices abroad in order to collect data and train officials
from the diplomatic offices to improve their knowledge on issues
such as fake or forged documents. Special administrative investigation
commissions have been set up within certain Belgian diplomatic offices
to investigate the genuine character of foreign documents that have
been submitted for legalization.
Care is needed, however, to avoid taking actions that are too severe
in the administrative field, since this could actually have a countereffect
by increasing the migrant’s need for assistance and recourse to
traffickers and smugglers. This dualism is one of the most important
challenges in the contemporary migration debate (De Ruyver and Siron,
2002). Reference could, for example, be made to the existing provisions
on carrier liability as a means of preventing illegal immigration or trafficking
in human beings, 5 which, in fact, prejudges the right to asylum
and as a consequence increases the risk of being trapped within the
trafficking ring (Vermeulen, 2002). In this regard it is important to
underline that an ideal migration policy must focus on the balance
between the state’s interest – that is, internal cohesion and identity –
and migratory pressures and therefore attune the enforcement policy
and legal possibilities for migrants (Morrison, 1998).
A third problem is the gaps within existing legislation that promote
various forms of abuse. For example, the Parliamentary Committee on
Trafficking in Human Beings pointed out that the au pair statute too
often led to abuse and should, as a consequence, be amended. Authorities
discovered that a considerable number of foreign women were trafficked
to Belgium as au pairs but in reality were employed as domestic workers
and consequently faced economic exploitation. By Royal Decree the au
pair system was brought back to its essence: further linguistic education
and general cultural knowledge through a better understanding of the
country’s customs and living within a family.
On the issue of visas for cabaret artists, the Parliamentary Investigation
Commission stressed that the employment of young foreign women
as cabaret artists often masks an organized form of trafficking and
commercial sexual exploitation. In the late 1980s and 1990s women
from Eastern Europe and South-east Asia were recruited by impressario
agencies who sold them to Belgian brothel owners with a view to their
performing in cabaret shows. It became clear that the policy of issuing
visas for cabaret artists led to widespread abuse. To counter the abuse,
new decrees gave a more specific definition of cabaret artists and set out
some specific conditions with regard to the issuance of visas.