This brings up something I've never considered before. Would you still need to traffic if the jobs were legitimized, and you could sponsor employees?
2) It's much easier to protect the victims when they are strictly victims, and not participants in an illegal act. In the US, crackdowns on human trafficking overwhelmingly result in the women being arrested.
It's absolutely going to be the case that, at least sometimes, even with legal prostitution, someone is going to find a migrant who doesn't speak the local language well, steal their passport, and force them to engage in work, including sex work. (I mean, that already happens with crew on fishing vessels, kitchen staff in resteraunts, farm labourers...no reason sex work would be different right?)
What you want is for that story to end "...so then the victim went to the local police, who arrested the perpetrator, prosecuted them, gave the victim their passport back, and offered them a suite of support services".
What you don't want is "...but the victim was afraid they'd be arrested, so they didn't go to the cops" or "...but when the victim went to the cops, they were arrested and prosecuted; meanwhile the perpetrator was let go, because prosecuting trafficking is hard but prosecuting prostitution is easy, and the prosecutor wants to keep their stats up because they're running for the Senate next cycle".
(And increases legal occurrences too of course)
It seems to me you were assuming / guessing. Lots of things are counter intuitive though
What can make sense is that it would be illegal to buy sex (but ok to sell). Otherwise, if attacking the prostitutes, the legal system hurts the ones it was supposed to help
The prohibition of prostitution was never to protect prostitutes, who were viewed as the both immoral actors and temptors of others into immorality.
Its true that a modern rationalization of maintaining the prohibition of prostitution is that it is a tool to protect people from being victimized by being compelled or misled into becoming prostitutes, but that’s more of an attempt to sell the policy to people who would reject the original premise by people who are personally invested in that premise but recognize that others are not than anything else.
What was it about?
It was about punishing the
> immoral actors and temptors of others
(from the lawmakers point of view, at the time)
?
Where I am, it's different, in that the laws are meant to help those people (hence, legal to sell, but not to buy, around here)
> New Zealand legalised prostitution fully in 2003, and it seems to have had no negative effects. There was a major review 5 years after the law was passed (so 2008). Safety up, crime down, fewer sex workers on the streets, and at that time, no instances of human trafficking for the sex industry were able to be identified.
As I noted, data on human trafficking is very poor, but...best data we have seems to be that no, legalisation does NOT increase it measurably. In addition studies suggest it hasn't increased the number of prostitutes either (see, eg, https://www.otago.ac.nz/christchurch/otago018607.pdf).
It's easy to find claims of horrendous harms, but the NZ government, as part of it's official review in 2008, actively looked for and was unable to find any, and subsequent studies have consistently confirmed that.
NZ has had legalised prostitution for almost 20 years now, and the effects seem to be entirely positive.
Legalization in more areas would also probably help, because an empty place (it's illegal in Vegas IIRC) going to have a harder tim serving sex tourism from the whole country.
Ask the people of Austin how legalization of homelessness went.
Things that are not typically legalized with prostitution still have a market which (absent successful constraints other than mere legalization of prostitution) will continue to be met by sex trafficking.