“Human Trafficking and Protections for Undocumented Victims in the United States," David A. Shirk and Alexandra T. Webber, annotated bibliography

Norito Hagino

There are two types of human trafficking according to the authors: forced labor and commercial sex. Human traffickers target undocumented migrants by promising “safe passage” and “employment” in the U.S. and later exploit them for commercial sex and forced labor. It is difficult to combat human trafficking in the U.S. For example, authority goes into a prostitute ring that uses and holds human trafficking victims in custody but the traffickers escape (pg. 172). In most cases, the victims will not give any information about the traffickers because they fear punishment. They will be deported immediately.

In order to prevent this dilemma, the government initiated the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA). This grants a T-visa to victims of severe form of human trafficking. The T-visa gives an individual a temporary non-immigration status and public benefits (food, insurance, housing, etc.). This is beneficial for the government in the sense that the victims will have time to assist in the prosecution of their traffickers. However, the weakness of the TVPA is that even though it allows 5000 T-visas to be passed per year but only about 150 is passed every year (pg. 176). Furthermore, the conditions for an undocumented immigrant to be passed for a T-visa are too strict, according to the authors. It is argued that numerical estimates and types of human trafficking cases must be re-evaluated by the government, at the same time reconsidering the criteria at which undocumented immigrants are passed for T-visas (pg. 181). The government’s actions of the TVPA and T-visa are new steps towards legalizing illegal immigrants in the U.S. but it can be said that at this point, the program is still incomplete.

The Border Within: NAFTA and the New World Border, annotated bibliography

Ty Iwamoto

NAFTA increases the prosperity of some, ruins the subsistence of others, brings more immigrants to the United States, sends more gangs and drugs across the border, enhances the quality of life for many natives and many strangers, burdens schools and hospitals, and binds countries together in ways that will become all the more astounding.

Mexican American historian Douglas Monroy analyzes the historical and cultural relationship between Mexico and the U.S. surrounding NAFTA and transmigration. NAFTA (North America Free Trade Agreement) was a utopian idea that sought to benefit both countries by eliminating tariff on imported products from the other country which would allow both sides to sell more of its products to each other. In the case of corn trade, which has always been Mexico’s staple, its inclusion under NAFTA increased the export of corn by the US. This consequently destroyed the domestic economy of Mexico, costing the welfare of corn producers and forcing Mexican citizens to migrate and look for job across/near the border, ‘developing underdevelopment.’ The transnational migration of workers led to gangs, drug-trafficking, and making Mexico more American. The economical and cultural relations between Mexico and the US today call for greater attention.

Human Rights Along the US - Mexican Border, annotated biblography

Eric Cheung

Human Rights Along the US - Mexican Border discusses the major issues of sexual violence, human trafficking and indifference of governments along the borders of Mexico. Migrants short on money and legal documents are often victims of sexual violence when trying to cross borders. Olivia T. Ruiz Marrujo, the author of the chapter stresses the importance of recognizing the intensity of sexual violence towards migrants and the increasing trend of femicide along borders.

Distinct from sexual violence of willing migrants, human trafficking involves forced labor and sexual exploitations. Desperate migrants are put into compromising situations in attempts to coerce the victims to be exploited. This leads to many migrants being trafficked across borders to become forced laborers or prostitutes. The biggest issue that encompasses both sexual violence and human trafficking across borders is the government’s inability to handle the issues. Among sexual violence cases, many incidents have been overlooked, undocumented, and the sentence of convicted crimes have been lenient. The same could be said for incidents of human trafficking.

The most important idea the three chapters that Human Rights Along the US - Mexican Border focus on is methods of resolving the issues. Victims have to recognize their civil and personal human rights and should not be afraid to seek authorities to denounce crimes. Governments must recognize these crimes and be readily able to provide help to victims and justly convict the criminals responsible.

Global Village or Global Pillage, Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello, annotated bibliography

Hiroko Yoshimura, Akiko Toya, and Masanobu Okada

The main argument of the reading is how globalization has resulted to benefit the developed countries by exploiting the labors and resources of the developing countries. The author first explains how the global competition of business came about (p. 143-145). In the 19th century, old businesses, including shoemakers and hatmakers started competing against each other. When the globalization came about, such competition began involving developing countries, using their cheap labors. As a result, we see factories such as Maquiladoras, in which people’s labor is exploited and their human rights are taken away. (Hiroko)

As growing globalization of business, advanced countries tend to take advantage of developing countries. For example, since companies in advanced countries are trying to sell product as much as they can at low price, they force labors in developing countries to produce product by working at law wage, unreasonable length of time and treatment in bad work environment. To combat such a situation, the authors introduce the concept of “Grand Bargain” (p. 110). This is an idea of mutual negotiation done by both the advanced and developing countries to come to the solution that benefits both groups. Examples of this type of negotiation are “Earth Summit” and “Social Summit,” formal dialogues about environmental and social issues by many of the representatives of both advanced and developing countries (p. 111). (Akiko)

The world is in the midst of the unstoppable flow of globalization. The main question Jeremy and Tim posed in the essay is “how can those who oppose downward leveling do so effectively?” (Jeremy, Tim 105). Because there is no global government to legislate on behalf of the world’s people, the flow of globalization seems to be in stuck and bring considerable problems. Jeremy and Tim regard the system of nation-based economies as the core cause of the issues. In the essay, they propose the concept which might be silver bullet: transnational citizen action. They believe that this transnational citizen action can call on genuine democracy at bath local and national level depending upon people organizing themselves and acting independently of government. In doing so, the idea they call “Lilliput Strategy” is effective to be applied. Lilliput, described in the story Gulliver’s travel, succeeded to capture and control giant Gulliver by trying him down with hundreds of tiny threads. As this metaphor demonstrates, Jeremy and Tim state that people need to establish the dense network of threads tied around the world which can control the speed and degree of the globalization. If people succeed to do this, they can “utilize the relatively modest sources of power available to them” and “combine them with often quite different power to other participants” in order to deal with seemingly powerful global forces and institutions (106). (Masa)

Dying to Live, annotated bibliography

Dying to Live by Joseph Nevins

The history in the reading begins from 1803 and continues through 2007. Nevins presents the concept that controlling the border between the U.S. and Mexico was not natural nor precisely related to national security, but rather a manifestation of centuries of sentiments of racial and economical superiority. “The boundary has always not only about who belongs and who does not, and thus who gets what, but also about the terms on which people and places from either side of the line relate to one another” (Nevins 78). The border developed as a way to separate not only countries, but cultures as well, and as America believed in its “Manifest Destiny” duty to conquer, what once was part of Mexico became America. The U.S. wanted Mexico’s land but rejected its inhabitants, only accepting them on the terms of inferior laborers that must be regulated.

There were certain requirements that Mexicans had to have in order to enter the United States. The United States did not close the door to all Mexicans; there were those who qualified to be part of the work force.

The new practices applied to Mexican migrants attempting to cross the boundary included (depending in the assessment and dictates of the U.S. immigrant inspectors at the official ports entry) vaccination, bathing, and delousing. Medical experts “desirable” or “undesirable” based on their health (90).

According to CIA, unauthorized Mexican migration was a greater future threat to the United States than the Soviet Union because they would infiltrate and corrupt society.

Those who are not welcomed: imbeciles, idiots, feeble-minded persons, persons of constitutional psychopathic inferiority---a category that included pathological liars and persons with abnormal sexual instincts (homosexuals)---vagrants, physical defectives, chronic alcoholics, polygamist, anarchists, persons afflicted with loathsome or dangerous diseases, prostitutes, contract laborers, and all aliens over 16 years old who could not read (109).

Those who are welcomed: “Any Mexican citizen of good character may obtain an American Visitors Card, good at any time” (108).

Thus, controlling the border between the two countries has been not only to simply keep the land but also to maintain the pure race and the language. It can be said that the concept of border controlling is based on the roots of American nativism from the English colonial period.

Further Information:

Treaty of Guadalupe

Proposition 187

Braseros Program

“Operation Wetback”

Dying to live, (the film)

http://dyingtolive.nd.edu/

Rank and File: Historical Perspectives on Latino/a Workers in the US, Annotated Bibliogaphy

Rank and File: Historical Perspectives on Latino/a Workers in the US explores the history which led to the current situation of Latino workers in the US. The author of this article, Zaragosa Vargas, states that the influx of Mexican workers into the low-skill industrial and service sectors in the US will continue.

Even though Latinos had been racially discriminated in the US, Latinos working in the US auto industry had been considered as middle-class before the late 1970s. However, international competition in the auto manufacturing began and led to unemployment of Latino workers. In addition, NAFTA contributed to the formation of maquiladora in the border area, where companies pay as little as $0.50 per hour and have a low-cost production. This further encouraged the unemployment of Latinos in the US, raising the poverty rate of Latino population to 29 per cent. Also, as Vargas states “For Latinos, blue-collar employment, that previously provided middle-class income and status for America’s workers, was dramatically reduced by deindustrialization,” deindusrialization of the US economy, the shift from an industrial economy to a service economy, has created employment in service sector jobs for Latino workers in the US. Today, many Latino workers are considered unskilled and are working in low-wage industrial manufacturing, service sector jobs, or food processing.

In the next ten year, another 35 million immigrants, mainly from Mexico and other Latin American countries, will be added to the existing 25 million of Latino population in the US, and Latinos will soon become the nation’s largest minority group.

The Closing of the American Border, Edward Alden, Annotated Bibliography

The Closing of the American Border by Edward Alden

The Fence, Chapter 8 of The Closing of the American Border, focuses on the changes that 9/11 brought to border control in regards to immigration as a result of the fear of terrorism. After 9/11 the priority of the U.S. government was to keep U.S. citizens secure by reinforcing the borders, particularly the southern borders diving the U.S. and Mexico. However, many criticized that the billions of dollars invested in securing the border completely was highly ambitious, unrealistic, and had little to do with fighting terrorism. Chertoff, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), admitted in a Fox Radio broadcast in June 2007 that he did not know a single case where terrorists had used the southern border to cross into the United States (274). Over emphasizing the border with patrols and expensive technology was no longer about preventing another terrorist attack but about preventing immigrants from coming into the United States.
“It was one thing to argue that immigrants were overpopulating the schools or draining social budgets or that a new generation of immigrants would for some reason be more difficult to assimilate than the previous generations; it was another to argue that some of them might be plotting to kill thousands of Americans (270).”

In 2004, a program called America’s Shield Initiative (ASI) was implemented, using remote sensors, spy drones, and high-technology to survey the border. However, the equipment proved defective and ineffective after a cost of $2.5 billion over 5 years. A second attempt at border security through “virtual fences” was initiated in 2005, called the Secure Border Initiative (SBI), contracted by Boeing. Cameras, radars, unmanned aerial vehicles as well as more Border Patrol agents were called for. SBI promised to have control over the border by 2013, but at a cost of $8 billion. Again, the equipment disappointed and the plan failed.
“When you try to fight economic reality, it is at best an extremely expensive and very, very difficult and almost always doomed to failure (274).”

The goal of the DHS was to make it so difficult and expensive to enter the United States for the sake of securing the country from terrorism, which caused negative effects in multiple ways. For example, in December 2007, the US doubled the cost of applying for a temporary visa to $131. Also, because of the lengthy FBI security background checks, by 2006 more than 1 million people were waiting for their applications for permanent residence in the US. Overseas travel to the US became down nearly 10% from pre-9/11 levels and the number of foreign students decreased greatly, as well. The author mentions that this is due to the difficulties with gaining visas and the perception of American hostility to foreign countries. Companies seeking skilled employees from abroad faced serious problems with getting visas, too. Thus, 9/11 has not only changed the purpose of the border control but also caused negative results in multiple aspects of society.

Transnationalization of Immigration Policy, Annotated Bibliography

Eric Cheung, Norito Hagino, Julie Matsumoto

Transnationalization of Immigration Policy, Saskia Sassen

Transnationalization of Immigration Policy illustrates the conflict of the implementation of immigration policy because of constraints from human rights but also due to economic globalization. Transnationalization of immigration policy weakens the significance of immigration policy between countries. Although the state still has central control over immigration policy, the global economy as well as interested social forces such as agribusiness, manufacturing, labor unions and humanitarian groups conflict with the implementation of immigration policies. These conflicts may continue to arise partially due to these social forces and globalization.

“The shift of governance functions away from the state to nonstate entities affects the state’s capacity to control its borders. New private and public systems of governance are being created that conflict with the state’s capacity to regulate immigration in the same old ways, and that conflict may increase. The ascendance of agencies linked to furthering globalization and the decline of those linked to domestic equity is likely eventually to have an effect on the immigration agenda (Sassen 67)”.

Daisaku Ikeda, Sustainable development

Education for Sustainable Development (2002)

A Quiet Revolution--"The Challenge of Global Empowerment: Education for a Sustainable Future"
(Written at the time of the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development)

The Need for Change

More than ten years have passed since the holding of the Earth Summit in Brazil, an event that sparked sharply increased awareness of the need to protect the global environment. Since then, the term "sustainable development" has become an integral part of our vocabulary, and on certain fronts progress has been made. Overall, however, the agreements reached in Rio have not been kept and the progress that has been made is not keeping pace with the degradation of Earth's life systems. It is clear that we cannot permit this situation to continue further into the twenty-first century.

Resolving this crisis will require the commitment of more knowledge, technology and funds. But what is even more fundamentally lacking in my view are such intangible elements as a sense of solidarity and common purpose with our fellow inhabitants of Earth, and a real sense of responsibility toward future generations.

Read more:

http://www.daisakuikeda.org/sub/resources/works/props/ed-sustain2002.html

Feminicide in the Americas

Violence against women has increased throughout Mexico and in other Latin American countries such as Argentina, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Chile and Peru. Law enforcement officials have often failed or refused to undertake investigations and prosecutions, creating a climate of impunity for perpetrators and denying victims/survivors of violence and their families access to truth and justice.

Terrorizing Women is an impassioned yet rigorously analytical response to the escalation of violence against women in Latin America during the past two decades. It is part of a feminist effort to categorize violence rooted in gender power structures as a violation of human rights. The analytical framework of "feminicide" is crucial to that effort, as Fregoso and Bejarano explain in their introduction. They define feminicide as gender-based violence that implicates both the state (directly or indirectly) and individual perpetrators. Feminicide is structural violence rooted in social, political, economic and cultural inequalities, and should be considered a "crime against humanity."

http://www.stopterrorizingwomen.com/