Human trafficking is a serious crime and a violation of humans rights. Every year people get tricked or forced into the hands of traffickers in their home countries to be transported illegally into another country for the purpose of forced labor or sexual exploitation.
The U.S. government has made efforts confronting human trafficking by making the borders around the country harder to get into but did not solve the problem. An article made by Carole Angel stated: “If anti-trafficking initiatives employ only immigration tools, such as the tightening of borders and the restricting of visas, there will be an increased demand for black market smuggling, limiting the victims’ options to cross the border legally” (Carole Angel 23). This would, in the end, defeat the purpose of solving human trafficking because of the further increase in demand for human trafficking.
Some solutions go toward helping the victims who escaped from the hands of the traffickers one being the Trafficking Victims Protect Act that was talked about in Angle’s article. (Angel 24). This act was made for the purpose of encouraging the victims to come forward and prosecute the people who violated the law (Angel 25). It also helped the victims by implementing a new visa specifically for trafficking victims and letting them stay if they agree to follow the countries laws. Although this does help the victims who got out, this solution does not help the people that are still being exploited.
My solution to this is to decrease the amount of business exploiting human trafficking by tracking down these businesses and by having more businesses that use background checks. We know from Avendano’s article that, “It is estimated that international human trafficking is a 32 billion dollar a year industry” (Avendano 103). From this, we know that one of the main reasons for human trafficking is because of the demand for cheap labor in America. Background checking can help figure out which businesses use cheap labor and they can be taken down. Once we do it and close the business who used it for cheap labor, we can then help the victims who were affected by it and start creating laws to then make sure this problem does not happen again.
Immigration Issues 