Human Trafficking Archives - Lokmarg

Illegal Immigrants – The Dark Side of The Wall

By Mahendra Ved 20th November 2023

Human migration forced by armed conflict is acquiring new and menacing dimensions as the world gets increasingly polarised. It needs talking since the discourse is predominantly about victory and defeat amidst daily reports of more and more arms pouring in. Human suffering has become a captive of the blame game. Even crocodile tears have dried up.

The Gaza crisis is poised for a decisive ‘resolution’ with the Israeli forces likely to over-run that strip of unfortunate land by the end of this month. Of prime concern over the longer term should be addressing the needs of over 200,000 people who have no home to return to. With aerial strikes continuing across Gaza, over two-thirds of the total population – about 1.5 million people – are currently internally displaced. Their number is rising by the day.

Nearly 6 million refugees fleeing Ukraine are recorded across Europe, while an estimated 8 million others had been displaced within the country by late May 2022. These are old figures but think of ninety per cent of Ukrainian refugees being women and children.

With these two conflicts raging, little attention is given to Yemen. 21.6 million need aid, including 11 million children, and more than 4.5 million are displaced. Yemen hosts around 99,877 refugees and asylum seekers, 70 per cent of whom are Somali and 20 per cent Ethiopian.

Being forced to move from the proverbial frying pan to the fireplace are 1.7 million Afghans who are unregistered as refugees in Pakistan. Many were born in Pakistan. Many had fled Afghanistan to escape the Taliban rule. They must return to a country they either do not know or detest.

These are conflict zones. But take India. Reports point to the rising craze to migrate, come what may, and the risks involved. Illustrative is the family of Brijkumar Yadav of Gujarat’s Gandhinagar. Trying to enter the US from Mexico, he climbed up the Trump Wall — the former US President built it to block illegal migration, but has failed — he fell on the Mexican side. His wife fell on the American side and died, leaving a 3-year-old child.

A Times of India report said that the number of people trying to illegally enter the US could be much higher. A Gujarat Police official said that for every one person caught at the border, there could be 10 others who have managed to cross into the US.

Collating information from Gujarat and New Delhi, the report also said that residents of Gujarat and Punjab aspiring to settle in the US are in significant numbers among the illegal migrants. What makes people from these relatively better-off parts of India risk entering foreign lands illegally? Is it their wanderlust, or enterprise that has characterised their progress through the centuries? Or is it that they are the marginalised lot who have been left out of the economic progress? This needs wider, deeper research and debate by experts in many disciplines.

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The people arrested are classified into four categories — single adults, unaccompanied children, children accompanied by family members and entire families. The figures include 700 unaccompanied children. Logic defies their presence. Either they were pushed there by their parents or were duped by greedy travel agents who operate as a network.

However, single adults are the largest category. The end of pandemic-era border policy Title 42 in May this year led to a surge in illegal immigration which was earlier prevented by the ruling which allowed the US to deport illegal immigrants without asylum hearings.

The larger burden of this essay, however, is that while India aspires to be “Vishwa Guru”, within the global count, Indians have a significant presence among illegal migrants. According to US Customs and Border Protection data, a record-breaking 96,917 Indians were apprehended while unlawfully crossing into the US between October 2022 and September 2023. This marks a fivefold increase compared to 2019-2020.

In September this year alone, 8,076 Indians were arrested by US law enforcement agencies. Of the total, 3,059 Indians were arrested from the US-Canada border alone, data from the US Customs and Border Protection has shown. The figure for September is the highest in a month in the period between October 2022 and September 2023.

This writer has visited Tijuana town on the Mexico-US border. Its emergence as an IT industry hub in recent years has not changed its old reputation. American mothers take their children to show them what poverty is. Looking at the dust and dirt, I heard a child tell the mother, “Mama, yuk yuk.” At the border barely two kilometres away, the US tries to block thousands seeking to cross into its territory, every day or rather, every night. The American side, at San Diego, has armed border guards and police in military-style formation trying to prevent illegal entrants. America’s border is snow-bound on the Canadian side in the north. But nothing deters desperate entrants. Whether they succeed or fail, many lose their lives, limbs and their dear ones. Their conditions as they await being pushed into America by touts are miserable.

The Indian “boat people” are not confined to Europe and America. Even in Southeast Asia at the other end of the globe, many who go as tourists or on family visits, end up as casual workers and throw away their passports. Unsurprisingly, these people are unwelcome.

Surprising though this may seem, research in the US, at least, shows that illegal immigrants increase the size of its economy, contribute to economic growth, enhance the welfare of natives, contribute more in tax revenue than they collect, reduce American firms’ incentives to offshore jobs and import foreign-produced goods. They benefit consumers by reducing the prices of goods and services.

Economists estimate that the legalization of the illegal immigrant population would increase the immigrants’ earnings and consumption considerably, and increase U.S. gross domestic product. There is scholarly consensus that illegal immigrants commit less crime than natives and that immigration enforcement has no impact on crime rates.

Despite the pluses and minuses, it is worrying that this phenomenon is gaining more and more traction. A world that is combating numerous crises — all of them self-created — has little time and no sympathy for those leaving their homes, often with women and children — trying to sneak into another country. Such people, assuming that they survive the harsh travel and the hide-and-seek, are treated by the local law as criminals. But given the growing disparities, this is unlikely to change.

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Slave Trade – A Stain That Refuses To Go

By Mahendra Ved 6th July 2023

They are part of the past of many countries of origin, and of folklore that is fading into public memory as time moves. India is one of them. They are the unsung part of its diaspora, the world’s largest.

Those captured and shipped out as slaves are conveniently forgotten while India respects their successors, the indentured labour that left the shores with an official nod, never to return. Only, the past captors and the new consent-givers were the same.

Enslaving the weak and the vulnerable as part of the warfare caused by the thirst for territory and power is as old as mankind. But it became a lucrative business in the 17th century. The armed captors came stealthily, riding boats and ships, using the cover of darkness and local help, confident that the law was asleep.

Moving guns with goods for trade, also using religion when and where convenient, European powers colonized the world. They created national borders where none existed, to suit their geo-economic interests. The traders carved out empires where they impoverished the people and divided them into ethnic/faith/regional lines.

That colonial-era slavery is today surfacing across the world, Europe especially, as racism, apartheid and sectarian violence in countries that colonized and their erstwhile colonies alike. Note the shootouts, the terror attacks, the ethnic strife and much that is happening today.

The Empire is striking back as former colonizers struggle to co-exist with their former subjects. While this may be arguable, the recurring violence that is the consequence of colonization is not. And it is only going to escalate with time.

The provocation for writing this is the apology tendered last week by Dutch King Willem-Alexander. He laid a wreath at the slavery monument after apologising for the royal house’s role in slavery and asking forgiveness. Only, it has come on the 150^th anniversary of the date when slavery was officially outlawed. And with the ban had come compensation, not for the slaves but for slave owners.

Old records say the Dutch pioneered slavery as “the world’s oldest trade”, soon to be joined by Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium and Britain. The last-named defeated them all in Europe and/or in the distant colonies and became the world’s largest colonizer-Empire builder where, as it was famously said, the sun never set.

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To be fair, some European Union members are working to return the precious artefacts their ancestors stole from erstwhile colonies. But there is no such move in evidence in ‘Brexit’ Britain.

Unsurprisingly, sections of the Dutch opinion-makers last week said there is nothing to apologise for. They fear that this might open Pandora’s Box with former slaves and subjects asking for reparation. Didn’t the Britons bristle when India’s Shashi Tharoor held up a stained mirror to them at the 2015 Oxford debate?

India, the ‘jewel’ of the British Empire was perhaps the biggest ‘exporter’ of manpower. The context here is South Asia as, for nearly two centuries, its entire peninsula from Gujarat to the Arakans was the catchment area for slaves – 600,000 as per some estimates.

According to a study by Ruchi Singh for Migrationpolicy.org: “The 1833 abolition of slavery in most parts of the British Empire transformed the colonial system, replacing slavery with indentured servitude. In the eight decades that followed, the United Kingdom relocated millions of bonded Indian workers to colonies across Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean.”

A million ‘girmitiyas’ – those who signed an agreement – found work, but their poverty was replaced by another type with inclement weather and working conditions and what became their permanent separation from home. The story of the slaves and the indentured labour overlaps, with only shades of differences.

On the studied silence on slavery, Hubert Gerbeau has acutely observed, “The specialist in the slave trade is a historian of men and not of merchandise, and he cannot accept the silence of those transported.” While trans-Atlantic slavery from the western African shores to the Americas has been fairly well-documented, the Indian Ocean region is not.

Indeed, the study of how European traders set up ‘factories’ to trade, and forts for protection, took advantage of weak Indian Rajas and turned maritime powers. The competition in trade included the slave trade. It was huge, even though the records of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) cynically put the proportion of the slave trade as merely five per cent of the total.

The Portuguese imported Africans into their Indian colonies on the Konkan coast between about 1530 and 1740. Slavery in India continued through the 18th and 19th centuries. During the colonial era, Indians were taken into different parts of the world as slaves by various European merchant companies as part of the Indian Ocean slave trade. Slavery was prohibited in the possessions of the East India Company by the Indian Slavery Act, of 1843, in French India in 1848, in British India in 1861, and in Portuguese India in 1876.

There is hardly a mention of slavery – from India and by Indians. For, India was also a large slave trade hub in which all communities participated and benefitted. In historical terms, it was the latter-day business enterprise succeeding what each invader to India did and by those who built kingdoms through internecine warfare. Each battle – and they were numerous, history says – meant enslavement by the victor of the vanquished – men, women and children – who were killed or converted and many shipped out.

Scholars of the slave trade say that the practice continued, stealthily, with an unofficial nod, long after slavery and trade were banned by the Europeans. Keeping slaves was as common as keeping concubines wherever feudalism married business enterprises. The former helped with abundant manpower that the latter needed for indigo, cotton and tea cultivation, or to build roads and railways.

One may not call it slavery. But labour under duress is rampant in most of the former colonies. Is it surprising to see today under-aged boys at wayside restaurants and factories (despite the Factories Act) and little girls minding babies while ‘memsahib’ is at a kitty party or simply surfing on a cellphone or watching the latest film?

The writer can be contacted at mahendraved07@gmail.com

MP: 12-Yr-Old Girl Sold For Rs 40,000 In Bhopal; 5 Arrested

By LokMarg 29th June 2023

Five people have been arrested for abetting child marriage and human trafficking in Madhya Pradesh’s capital Bhopal, police said.

The arrests were made after women and child welfare department officials prevented the marriage of a 12-year-old tribal girl with a 27-year-old man on June 27 in a village under Gunaga police station limits near Bhopal, police said on Wednesday.
According to police, the girl’s parents had sold the girl for Rs 40,000 and received an advance of Rs 20,000, with the remaining amount to be handed over to them after the wedding.

Superintendent of Police (SP, Bhopal rural), Kiranlata Kerketta said, “We received information from the Women and Child Development Department about a child marriage in Gunaga police station area on Monday (June 26) following which we reached the spot and saw that the ‘haldi’ ceremony was taking place. On inquiry it was found the girl was 12 years old and the person whom she was getting married to was 27 years old.”

The minor told police that her parents had fixed her marriage for Rs 40,000 and they had dimissed her protests, SP Kerketta said.

The officer added that a case was registered against five persons so far, including the parents of the minor girl, the bridegroom and his parents under the Human Trafficking, Juvenile Justice Act, Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, SC/ST Act.

All these accused have been arrested, police said.

Further investigation into the matter is underway, the police official said adding that cases would be lodged against those who worked as brokers or were if they were found to be involved in the case. (ANI)