Discourse Analysis on Human Trafficking - Coursework Example

The debate about human trafficking is one that has been in the United States for a long time now. The United States, due to its economic prosperity and the advanced democracy, is a highly attractive place for most people, most of whom are willing to do anything to get there, legally or illegally. As a result, more than in any other developed nation, the debate about illegal (undocumented) immigrants and human trafficking has been on people’s lips more than in any other nation. This issue is so important to the public that the last presidential campaigns were littered with debates about immigrants, with the now president elect Donald Trump promising to get rid of illegal immigrant and build a wall on the Mexican border to avoid any entry by these immigrants. However, the issue of human trafficking and illegal immigrants is not one that is easy to understand. In the last few decades, the United States has enacted different laws such as the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 and the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000, regarding the issue of immigrants, and human trafficking. However, it is the TVPA that is of interest due to its approach to dealing with this issue. In this paper, the language and the expressions in the public discourse about the issue are addressed and analyzed in a discourse analysis to identify the issues that surround the problem of human trafficking.

To better understand how the language and choice of expressions affects the discourse on human tracking not only in the United States but also in the world, it is better to look at how the government itself has dealt with this issue from a legislation and policy point of view. The discussions and the debate on human trafficking have continued to take a certain course and structure depending on who is taking about it.

Illegal versus Undocumented Immigrants

In the current discourse, the use of the phrase illegal immigrant and undocumented immigrants have been utilized to refer to issues such as whether people should be referred as illegal. The public logic in this case is that there are no illegal human beings, and so the term or phrase illegal immigrant is not only a misnomer, but also a lack of dignity for human beings. The preferred term then becomes undocumented immigrants. This leaves the questions of whether the use of these phrases in this way has any positive value to the discourse, or it is just linguistics an semeiotic jargon.

Illegal Immigrants versus Victims of Human Trafficking

There seems to be a juncture between the so called illegal or undocumented immigrants, yet, the discourse surrounding the issue of these people has not tried to create a proper difference that can be used to deal with the gap. Laws such as the TVPA have identified the perpetrators versus the victims in a gendered way, despite the fact that a closer look might indicate that there are blurred lines between the two. For instance, human trafficking laws such as the TVPA have assumed that the issue if human trafficking is a matter of victims versus culprit, yet as seen in Brennan’s (2014, 77) book, most of the “victims” are also co-conspirators in the same crime that affects them. For instance, these people are the ones who actually initialize the process, even to the point of paying the so called traffickers and or smugglers so that they can be smuggled to the United States. Yet, the better part of the discourse on human trafficking does not address this issue and in fact makes it look like the victims are taken by force and sold into slavery.

Another element with this discourse is the ignorance with regard to some other pertinent issues such as the roles played by other individuals apart from the victims and the smugglers. In such situations where the victim of trafficking is the procurer of the smuggling, the so called smugglers may not be the ones who will send the victims to slavery (labor or sexual), but the victims only finds himself or herself into it due to the conditions, such as not having a valid passport and therefore being an easy target to those in the trade of modern (sexual or labor) slavery (Whittington and Logan 2011, 97). While this does not exonerate the smugglers from the guilt of crime, it does bring an issue that should be addressed, as it means that there is one more issue to be addressed by both law and policy. Most laws of smuggling and human trafficking for instance assume that the victims and the culprits of human trafficking are foreigners, while reports have also indicated that even legal residents of the United States, immigrants or born citizens, are also part of the game. Yet, for the most part, the discourse refrains from this, making the smuggling look like a foreign country issue, perpetrated by foreigners from specific countries that are the hot watch list (Weitzer 2015, 255).

This kind of discourse is seen not only in the United States, but also in other countries, as countries like Mongolia and Myanmar have also been seen to legislate laws relating to the issue of human trafficking. These laws in foreign countries seem to be following the usual discourse as seen in American legal framework, the media and the public. Usually, the main issues may be missed, and this means that the problem is not addressed properly. For instance Mongolia has been criticized for legislating laws about sex slavery trafficking, while the main issue is labor slavery trafficking. The three points aspects of the modern society which are; the mass media, the government in its capacity as law giver, and the public, have continued to share the same views on the discourse.

Trafficking in Persons Report

This is the U.S. method of trying to deal with the issue if supporting. The report draws a map of countries and their abilities and willingness to comply with the TVPA in order to minimize human trafficking. However, there is a big question as to the methodology, as well as the data used by the United States to come up with the report. First, the U.S. government tends to make a lot of assumptions as to the risk factors that may lead to human trafficking. These risk factors are not the same for all countries, regardless of the conditions in that country, leading to an error in the making of the report. For instance, the report does not consider the fact that some countries, even if they have the same economic and social conditions as those who have been reported to have the highest number of human trafficking victims, are less likely to have human trafficking issues, as the citizens of these countries may not be interested in going to the United States of America. Looking at the latest TIP report, one notices that Muslim countries are mainly in tier 2 and tier 3, which are the highest tiers in the report. According to the report, those countries in tier 3, are the ones that have not conformed to the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), and have not shown any efforts to do so. In other words, the U.S. requires these countries to conform with its laws and policies, in order to be able to be listed as safe when it comes to the issue of human trafficking. There is some irony with this, since most trafficking of humans is driven by economic conditions because most victims are people seeking economic opportunities, this does not add up as most of these Muslim countries are rich and their citizens are not likely to seek to illegally migrate to the United States.

Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA)

The TVPA was an act of congress enacted in 2000 as a way to respond to the issue of human trafficking in the United States. The requirements of the TVPA have been used as a yardstick in the measurement of the risk factor of a country being the origin of trafficking victims, which then means that it is the de factor standard of the Trafficking in Persons Report. There are however, some issues that come up with the TVPA. First, the issue of the definition of the victims and the culprits brings one more problem. The act defines vulnerable victims as women and children who have been trafficked into the United States. Under this definition, some who have willingly entered into sex trade and are not of any intention to leave it, can still be considered as victims (Moore 2015). When seen as venerable victims, they are then given more mercy and exoneration. The culprits are then defined as males, usually of foreign origins. The TVPA is therefore a very important juncture in how the discourse about human tracking has evolved in the last few decades. Prior to the enactment of this act, there had been other acts that tried to deal with the issue. For instance, in 1994, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, enacted during the Clinton administration, was one of the late 20th century way of dealing with the issue of immigration. Later in 1996 still under the Clinton administration, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) was enacted. The PRWORA, although not directly dealing with immigration issues, introduced a new paradigm to public welfare, which has a direct impact on immigrants.

In the same year, the Illegal Immigration and Immigrant Responsibility Act was enacted. This act describes the way of the state dealing with “illegal immigrants.” For instance, it gives clear directions as to how the illegal immigrants are to be dealt with. In this act, immigrants are treated as criminals. This was to later change in the PRWORA, which for its own definition changed the tone into a more sympathetic approach to immigrants. In fact, this act reduced the threshold of deportation for immigrants, from crimes that can earn a five year prison sentence, to minor crimes such as shoplifting. However, what is very clear in all these laws regarding the issue of immigrants and how it related to the issue of human trafficking, human smuggling and modern slavery is that the discourse has always missed important elements of the problem. It moved from treating the immigrants as criminals to treating them as victims then to racial, gender and even nationality profiling.

Conclusions

The public discourse about illegal immigrants is a complicated one, because, unlike other social issues such as crime, there are blurred lines as to who the criminals and the offenders are. This may explain why a look at the history of U.S. laws dealing with the issue has continued to shift from one side to the other. For instance, the law has moved from treating these immigrants as criminals, and then started treating them as victims. Even in treating them as victims, there have been some gaps, such as the defining of who the victims with regard to their gender and nationalities.