The Effects of Restrictive Migration Policies on Human Trafficking

Destination countries’ governments are generally reluctant to acknowledge their responsibilities in fostering human trafficking, especially if that entails putting at stake their restrictive migration policies: they are used to follow a scheme within which trafficking is essentially a criminal act perpetrated by criminal groups, where only traffickers are to blame for the violation of trafficked persons’ human rights.
The accent on traffickers allows states to develop anti-human trafficking policies centred on repressive measures and prosecutions, perfectly coherent with restrictions to migration based on borders’ patrolling and closure.

The core strategy against human trafficking is currently based on the fight against organized criminal groups, the assistance to trafficked persons considered as innocent victims, and their final repatriation into countries of origin as a way to restore their original situation, as preceding the trafficking experience.

In all this process, trafficked persons are merely considered as passive victims, without a serious recognition of the concrete motivations that led them to leave their homes and migrate to other countries.
In the vast majority of cases, as we have seen, victims of trafficking initially started their journey as migrants, pushed by social, political and economic troubles, while their vicissitudes are quite more complex than how often results from the popular picture of kidnapped and imprisoned people.
The consideration of trafficking as a mere criminal problem “makes it difficult to apprehend those elements of migration that are associated with trafficking but which have a quasi-legal status and those cases where the status of the migrants drifts in and out of legality during the process as a whole”, and permits politicians to see trafficked persons not as subjects but as mere objects of state intervention.

If within the referred construction of victim’s concept, trafficked persons are previously seen as passive entities in the hands of traffickers, and then as quiescent objects of state policies, it is now the case to wonder if the nexus between human trafficking and migration as underlying phenomenon, is always and totally overlooked by governments, as it seems to be in the light of the above considerations.
As we have explained in the preceding paragraph, trafficked persons are increasingly regarded in destination countries as irregular migrants, and treated accordingly.

However, the mentioned coherence of anti-trafficking measures with restrictive immigration laws conceals a conflict between the need to protect victims on the one side, and the purpose of states to close their borders to migrants, which also entails the expansion of organized crime involvement, on the other.