B) A substantial amount of people in Asia live in rural areas. In India, nearly 920M people live in rural areas. The lack of infrastructure in rural areas means that things can happen that never ever reach the local authorities. People can simply slip away without a trace.
C) State power is weak outside of major population centers. Corruption is rife. Povery is rampant. Earning opportunities are limited. Combined, it means that criminals know they can get away with anything as long as they bribe the right people.
D) A substantial percentage of Asian population lives under failed states (same for Africa). State power isn't just weak; it's absent.
E) Asia is just way too large and geographically diverse. Easy to hide away illicit activity in a dense rainforest or deserted mountain than in wide open plains and farmland.
The Confederacy, for example, was militarily and economically a very weak state. It couldn't even supply shoes to its soldiers. It was unable to pierce the blockade on them by the Union. And so on.
But either way trafficking is typically shorthand for slavery in practise. The thing with trafficking specifically is that it is more likely to go somewhere that it can be spotted. Airports have signs in the bathrooms saying "if you're being held against your will try to get to this part of the airport" because it's the trafficking piece of the slavery/trafficking combo that takes the victim into the airport in the first place. Being trained to spot trafficking in jobs like TSA agents is thus very useful regardless of the slavery situation.
It's as absurd as creating a special term for whipping slaves using sticks of a certain color.
Trafficking is what enable slavers to stay hidden.
In Europe trafficking happens in tomato fields in Italy, online prostitution in Scandinavia, and everywhere in between. Victims can be in the country legally or illegally. I remember a case in Finland where an Indian restaurant hired a foreign worker legally, but then they took away his passport and coerced him to work 18-hour shifts using lies and threats of being sent back. That’s trafficking too.
The left and right have somewhat different ideas for solutions of course, with the usual recipes being further labor laws on one side and further limits on immigration on the other side. But probably such small tweaks won’t do anything to address the root issue, and in that sense it transcends left and right.
https://polarisproject.org/2020-us-national-human-traffickin...
To be clear though, what you’re hearing (or at least what I’m hearing) from the US right wing is not referring to this. It’s referring to a theory that specifically cultural elites are specifically trafficking children for sex. There’s no reason to believe this is a large issue, though obviously there were systemic failures in the whole Epstein ordeal that gave conspiracists a lot of ammunition.
The majority of trafficking is of laborers, which the right wing generally opposes protections of, and immigrants, which again the right wing generally opposes easy paths to legal citizenship and legal protection for illegal immigrants wherever possible (leading victims to believe they cannot contact law enforcement). Having grown up in a US border state I strongly suspect labor trafficking is dramatically underreported because a lot of immigrant laborers don’t even know they’re being trafficked. They’re essentially told they have no rights in the US and that’s just how it is. The reality of course is that you have ~100% of the legal protection offered to citizens the moment you set foot on US soil.
All of this applies equally to another large source of trafficking which is sex work. US right wing is fixated on the morality of sex work rather than the morality of building a system that rewards and enables coerced sex work.
I remember our commanders telling us that there used to be a trafficking route through the border of Egypt, but it stopped when the border patrol improved, couple years back. They were smuggling Eastern European girls to prostitute.
Did something change to your knowledge? Or are you talking about another route?
I think this idea is quite dangerous and reeks of superiority. It has happened before and it could happen again.
Sister comment made a point about forced prostitution and human traficcing being common.
I want to make a point that to get rid of this as a matter of policy, we've had revolutions and guillotines. To enforce this, we have well armed, strong goverments with long reach.
The fact that this keeps happening in every area without a strong government -from failed states to international waters - undercuts libertarian argument quite a bit. Youd think they would move to somalia en masse and turn it into the promosed land
Sure, I wasn't implying that it couldn't happen here, I'm just clumsy with words. I was trying to say it's hard to imagine it happening at similar scale _right now_, i.e. Danish fishing vessels buying slaves and throwing them overboard when they're too weak to continue working, in 2022.
I'm aware of trafficking, forced prostitution and indentured servitude with work in nail salons etc, but as far as I understand, the scale is (currently) very different, and it's much less extreme (assuming there are no secret mass graves we'll find in the future).
Somalia is not a libertarian country by any stretch of the imagination.
Myanmar is a hardcore communist military dictatorship, I'd hardly call that a weak government.