National Human Trafficking Prevention Month

Mark Krikorian; Jessica M. Vaughan

By Mark Krikorian and Jessica M. Vaughan on January 26, 2023

Podcast

Listen to "National Human Trafficking Prevention Month" on Spreaker.

Summary

To bring greater attention to the issue of human trafficking, Jessica Vaughan, the Center’s Director of Policy Studies, joins our podcast this week to highlight border-related human trafficking. Current immigration policies are responsible for an out-of-control southern border and for lax guest worker programs, both of which are major contributors to the human trafficking industry in the United States. How do we end this criminal exploitation of the vulnerable?

Vaughan clarifies the important distinction between human trafficking and human smuggling, and describes how smuggling operations can develop into trafficking, which is on the rise. Forced labor trafficking is the most common form of trafficking at our Southern border, and Biden’s border policies create incentives for both smuggling and trafficking.

Vaughan says, “Failure to enforce our immigration laws creates ideal conditions for trafficking. And without any changes to immigration policy, the issue is unlikely to improve.”

Oftentimes, the victims are minors, who are placed in the care of smugglers by their parents who are told their children will attend school in the United States. Instead, some of these children end up working in dangerous and exploitative conditions, and the unwillingness of the Biden administration to enforce immigration laws in the interior makes these occurrences less likely to be discovered.

In his closing commentary, Mark Krikorian, the Center’s Executive Director and host of Parsing Immigration Policy, highlights the December border encounter numbers, the highest in recorded history for a single month – more than 251,000. Krikorian predicts the January published numbers to be lower due to the Biden administration’s newly announced program that illegally grants the alien parole before he reaches the border, so that he is not counted in the monthly arrest statistics.