The existence of human trafficking isn’t really a left/right question (at least under the traditional definition — I suppose the QAnon-style folks may have been playing their usual games of redefining a real issue into some story they’ve invented out of whole cloth).
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.
> In 2020, 10,583 situations of human trafficking were reported to the U.S. National Human Trafficking Hotline involving 16,658 individual victims. Shocking as these numbers are, they are likely only a fraction of the actual problem.
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.
As someone who had inside knowledge of the sex work industry the incident rate of trafficking was extremely low. Most trafficking was related to Asian gangs in LA, SF, NY. It's an anecdote, take it with a grain of salt.
Yeah this meshes with my understanding as well. To be clear, my comment above is that sex work is a substantial part of human trafficking, not that human trafficking is necessarily a substantial part of sex work.
