International Labour Organization

INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM

THE UN CONVENTION AGAINST TRANSNATIONAL ORGANIZED CRIME:

REQUIREMENTS FOR EFFECTIVE IMPLEMENTATION

Turin, Italy 22-23 February 2002

GETTING AT THE ROOTS

STOPPING EXPLOITATION OF MIGRANT WORKERS BY ORGANIZED CRIME:

I. Supply and Demand Factors driving Trafficking and Smuggling of Migrant Workers

a) Supply Factors.

In this age of globalization, most countries of the world are engaged, to varying degrees, in processes of substantial economic reform. These include the adoption of market economies, trade liberalisation, privatisation, new rules of international investment and new labour regimes, as well as new forms of international cooperation and trade agreements[1].   As a consequence of some of these reforms, livelihoods have been lost through the disappearance of public sector employment, decline of traditional industries, loss of agricultural competitiveness, and elimination of jobs and subsidies by structural adjustment. Disappearance of jobs and increasing poverty has directly led to increased migration pressures in countries of origin.  As a recent ILO study puts it: 

“the evidence so far available on the impact of globalization points to a likely worsening of migration pressures in many parts of the world.  Peter Stalker finds that processes integral to globalization have intensified the disruptive effects of modernization and capitalist development.  While acknowledging that this has been different from one country to another, “the general effect has been a crisis of economic security.”[2]

Although there is insufficient research on this point, evidence indicates that shrinking opportunities for legitimate employment have affected women disproportionately to men and acted as a further push factor in women’s migration.  It is clear, for example, that the transition to market economies in Eastern Europe and the CIS States has had a particularly serious impact on women leading to disproportionate unemployment and wage differentials as compared to men.[3]

b) Demand Factors.

Globalisation and trade liberalisation have had contradictory impacts on employment conditions in countries of destination.  Demand for cheap, low-skilled labour in industrialized countries as well as a considerable number of developing nations in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East remains evident in agriculture, food-processing, construction, semi-skilled or unskilled manufacturing jobs (textiles, etc.), and low-wage services like domestic work, home health care and the sex sector. 

Small and medium size companies and labour–intensive economic sectors do not have the option of relocating operations abroad.  Responses in these sectors include downgrading of manufacturing processes, deregulation, and flexibilization of employment, with increased emphasis on cost-cutting measures and subcontracting[4]. In a considerable number of countries, these measures have expanded the number of jobs at the bottom of the employment scale.  These jobs are often those referred to as the “3-D” jobs: dirty, degrading and dangerous.  Such employment needs are only partially met or unmet by available or unemployed national workers, for reasons of minimal pay, degrading and dangerous conditions, and/or low status in those jobs and sectors, as well as alternative access available for unemployed in some countries to social welfare, etc.

The resulting demand for migrant workers provides a significant impetus to labour flows and facilitates the incorporation of undocumented migrants[5].  Despite relatively high unemployment in a number of developed countries, foreign workers –including particularly unauthorized migrants-- are able to find jobs easily[6].  On average, for example, a Mexican undocumented migrant worker to the USA will find a job two weeks after his/her arrival.  Similar evidence in Europe indicates that undocumented migrants are rarely ‘unemployed’.[7]

Industrialized countries and numerous developing nations have thus remained a pole of attraction for migrant workers, who migrate before the presumed economic equalization forces of trade liberalization have time to act.[8]  Often they are well-educated people who are ready to take up jobs that they would not accept in their home environment and this process involves an enormous loss of human resources.  Wage differentials however between countries of origin and destination justify their interest especially where conditions at home are akin to poverty.

II  Restrictive migration policies fuel markets for smuggling and trafficking of migrant

Trade and finance have become increasingly deregulated and integrated across regions and globally.  By contrast, however, migration policies have not been liberalized, nor have they otherwise addressed the gulf between continued demands for cheap labour and the increasing supply of such labour in other countries.  On the contrary, most industrialised countries imposed restrictive immigration laws and policies over the last decade, and many developing countries across the South appear to be following suit.

These restrictive measures often appear to have been established with little or no consideration of labour domestic labour demand and supply considerations.  In some regions, imposition of tighter border controls and restrictions on movement have frequently cut across traditional routes and patterns of labour and trade migration.  To put it in perhaps oversimplified terms, basic labour economics theory would suggest that placing barriers between high demand and strong supply creates a potentially lucrative market for services of getting the supply to where the demand is. 

Professor Clarke’s paper at this symposium described “opportunity structures” produced by social, technological and legal changes that give rise to illegal activity –often taken advantage of by what he described as temporary and loosely knit “networks of criminal entrepreneurs,” distinct from highly structured organized crime syndicates.  This may well be the case in response to increasing migration restrictions meeting increasing pressures.  Clearly, more research is required to better determine to what extent such “opportunities” give rise to illegal smuggling --and eventually trafficking-- activity by individuals and loose networks, as well as by highly organized criminal groups.

Another contextual factor is benign tolerance by some States for poor work conditions and non-regulation –situations that attract irregular labour.  Such tolerance appears to be all but official policy in some countries, in order to maintain marginally productive economic activity that nonetheless provides employment, export products, etc.

Tighter border controls have not halted migratory flows nor have they had projected results in reducing the number of workers crossing borders.  Instead they have put more pressure on those who migrate.  With few options available for legal migration in the face of strong pull-push pressures, irregular migration channels become the only alternative, and one which presents lucrative “business” opportunities for helping people arrange travel, obtain documents, cross borders and find jobs in destination countries. 

Testimony to the fact that restrictive immigration policies fail is the fact that the trafficking and smuggling ‘business’ is considered to be worth 7 billion US dollars, second only to drugs and arms smuggling.[9]  As noted by the ILO report on Forced Labour: ‘The recent rise in labour trafficking may basically be attributed to imbalances between labour supply and the availability of legal work in a place where the jobseeker is legally entitled to reside.’[10]  

Determining effective and appropriate policy and law enforcement requires distinguishing carefully between trafficking and smuggling. There are essential differences with major policy and practical implications between these two phenomena, distinctions often lost in much current public and political debate. The Palermo protocols provide specific, distinct definitions for each.

"Trafficking in persons" shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation.14

Trafficked persons are considered victims. We underline the violations of human rights and labour standards inherent in ‘use of force, coercion, fraud, deception and/or abuse of power…for purposes of exploitation’.

The other Palermo Protocol defines,

"Smuggling of migrants" shall mean the procurement, in order to obtain, directly or indirectly, a financial or other material benefit, of the illegal entry of a person into a State Party of which the person is not a national or a permanent resident.15

http://www.december18.net/paper44ILOUNICRI.pdf