Trafficking in persons has generated heated debates and proposals for unilateral and multilateral policy reforms. The question of viable policy actions at a national and transnational level brings together governments, international organizations, law enforcement agencies, non-profit organizations and ground-level activists. Notwithstanding these debates and controversies, trafficking in persons is still one of the least studied forms of international migration. Consequently, policy recommendations have often outstripped conceptual development and empirical justifications.
With funding from the TransCoop Program for transatlantic research cooperation of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the IZA project entitled “International Trafficking in Humans: A Cross Country Analysis” brings together a team of researchers from Europe and North America: Randall Akee (Tufts University), Arnab Basu (College of William and Mary), Arjun Bedi (ISS, Erasmus University Rotterdam), Nancy Chau (Cornell University), Melanie Khamis (IZA) and Hilmar Schneider (IZA). The goal is to answer three sets of questions: First, what are the push and pull forces of human trafficking, and how do these factors compare with the forces that influence voluntary and economic migration flows? Second, how do international policy initiatives (e.g. the Palermo Protocol of the United Nations) fare in stemming the tide of the transnational flows of trafficked persons? Third, is there cross-cutting linkage between policies restricting/facilitating conventional migration flows and the incidence of trafficking in persons?
The IZA project contributes to trafficking research in three substantive ways. First, a cross-country matrix of international trafficking links (2000-2009) has been compiled based on reported incidence of trafficking in persons worldwide. Second, particular attention is paid to the role of the middleman traffickers in determining the effectiveness of international policy cooperation. Finally, the project introduces a full range of empirical methodologies to trafficking research, including gravity modeling, and the construction of migration openness indicators.
The project generated a series of papers: “Transnational Trafficking, Law Enforcement and Victim Protection: A Middleman’s Perspective” (by Akee, Basu, Bedi and Chau) presents a conceptual model of the international trafficking problem where the clandestine activities of middleman traffickers play a critical role. The model shows that the trafficking response to host and source country bans on prostitution depends critically on the combination of three sets of factors: the elasticity of demand for the services of trafficked victims in host and source countries, the bargaining power of middleman traffickers in claiming a share of the victim’s price, and the transnational ease of mobility of middleman traffickers. The paper then makes use of these results to infer the elasticity of demand for the services of trafficked victims by empirically examining the role of prostitution bans in host and source countries on international trafficking flows.
“Vulnerability and Trafficking” (by Akee, Basu, Chau and Khamis) exploits the panel nature of the international trafficking data compiled for the purpose of this project, and the inception of the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons in the interim. The paper examines the importance of multilateral cooperation in efforts to mitigate international trafficking via a difference-in-difference and instrumental variables approach. The findings suggest a negative association between host-source ratification of the Palermo Protocol and observed bilateral incidence of trafficking in persons.
Another objective of this project is to stimulate cross-disciplinary work among trafficking researchers and migration researchers. Indeed, the sources of the push and pull factors of legal migration are by now well-documented. Less often observed, however, is the fact that legal migration is but one of possible alternatives available to migrants and facilitators of migration, including illegal migration, smuggling, trafficking, and other forced displacement of people due to economic forces, political unrests, or natural disasters. Migration policy reforms aimed primarily at any one of these forms may thus have important cross-cutting effects on both legal and illicit flows. These are the issues that motivated the IZA workshop entitled “Legal and Illicit Migration: Theory, Empirics and Policy” in July 2010, with funding from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation through the TransCoop Program.
A policy panel on illicit immigration and enforcement featuring Norbert Drude (Department of Financial Control and Illicit Work, Cologne), Thanh-Dam Truong (ISS, Erasmus University Rotterdam) and Dita Vogel (HWWI, Hamburg) included reports on the results of recent HWWI research on the economic importance of illegal and illicit migration in Germany and the EU, and the key distinction between (i) illegal migrant status and (ii) illegal work but legal identity in the conduct of enforcement activities in practice. Also discussed were the role of EU enlargement on illegal immigration trends; the critical issues of exploitative work conditions facing illegal immigrants and its relation to law enforcement and policy making, and the value-added of an interdisciplinary approach to address the relationship between migrants, employers, enforcement agencies, and the law.
The second part of the workshop showcased a series of frontier research themes surrounding legal and illicit immigration, such as political economy; host and source country perspectives; assimilation; coerced or forced migration; and deportation and return.
The conference papers can be downloaded from the IZA website:
www.iza.org/link/LIITEP
