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Arizona's recent immigration bill has been widely debated, garnering intense criticism from many circles as well as intense support. A number of entities and organizations are threatening or bringing legal challenges and suits, and many believe the bill will be found unconstitutional. If the law is not overturned, though, it will have a strong impact on human trafficking victims. Regardless of the law's future, it raises questions for anti-trafficking work.
The law will be one of the strictest in the nation. According to the New York Times, the bill "would make the failure to carry immigration documents a crime and give the police broad power to detain anyone suspected of being in the country illegally."
While some of the bill's defenders have invoked human trafficking and crime reduction as a justification for the bill, the bill has the potential to hurt trafficking victims. Traffickers use people's immigration status to control victims, and the Arizona law is likely to make people more vulnerable to this type of control. Additionally, many people who are in the United States without documents or are out of status will be even more afraid to come to the police when they know about human trafficking or other crimes, or are victims of trafficking or other crimes.
Amanda Kloer argues that the Arizona law "will probably mean imprisoning victims of human trafficking and other crimes. . . The fact is that this law is going to up the chances that undocumented trafficking victims end up detained or deported and documented traffickers walk free." Moreover, in focusing efforts on people in the US without documents, finite resources will be diverted from efforts to address violent criminals, such as traffickers (including US citizen traffickers and traffickers with documents). Former Arizona Governor Napolitano vetoed similar bills for this reason.
A recent Human Trafficking Project piece on a failed Alaska bill pointed out that immigration laws frequently impact trafficking victims, though trafficking victims' needs may not be considered in the crafting of this legislation. While the author's hope that "other legislators give survivors this kind of consideration in similar bills" has not been the case with the Arizona bill, hopefully the broader immigration reform debate this bill has sparked will give serious consideration to the needs of trafficking victims and survivors.
Posted by JenniferKK at 7:04 AM
The Human Trafficking Project: Arizona's Immigration Bill and Human Trafficking
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