Chapter 9 From Liberalism & Democratization to Trafficking: America's Spiralling Problems and Still-Aspiring Controls

Abstract

As a growing literature points out (Aronowitz, 2009, pp. 165–213), HT becomes criminal because it involves displacing, exploiting and commercializing a human being, all of these necessitating transportation, trade and torture to varying degrees to survive and succeed (Nair, 2010, pp. 12–19). John T. Picarelli informs us, these began ‘in the Americas’ from 1502, ‘when Portuguese traders brought the first African slaves to the Caribbean’ (Picarelli, 2011, p. 180, but see all of Chapter 9). African slaves continued to be imported into the United States until 1808, but by the time the 13th Amendment ‘outlawed’ indentured servitude in 1865, the 645,000 slaves shipped from Africa had multiplied beyond 4 million, to whom were added (a) Chinese women, ‘to work in brothels … to serve both the Chinese and white communities’ after the 1860s; (b) Europeans, through collusion between ‘criminal syndicates’ and ‘U.S. [law enforcement] officials’, in what was called ‘the white slave trade’ from the 1880s (Shelley, 2010, pp. 235, 237); and (c) Hispanics (Alba & Nee, 2003; Gordon, 1964; Suárez-Orozco, 1998), in tandem with the dominant U.S. migratory inflows and economic needs after the 1960s (Borjas, 1999; Huntington, 2004, pp. 30–45), and the emergence of sex tourism after the Cold War (Clift & Carter, 2000; María Agustin, 2007; Rogers, 2009; Thorbek & Bandana Pattanaik, 2002).

Citation

Hussain, I. (2012), "Chapter 9 From Liberalism & Democratization to Trafficking: America's Spiralling Problems and Still-Aspiring Controls", Aslaug Sollund, R. (Ed.) Transnational Migration, Gender and Rights (Advances in Ecopolitics, Vol. 10), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 185-210. https://doi.org/10.1108/S2041-806X(2012)0000010013