At tonight’s GOP debate, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis provided up a Trumpesque phrase salad of border boogeymen, promising to construct a wall alongside the USA’ southern border to assist cease fentanyl trafficking, human trafficking, and intercourse trafficking. As soon as once more, we’ve got a politician conflating very separate points and spouting myths about their origins with a view to rating low cost debate-stage factors.
“We’re going to construct a wall,” stated DeSantis. “I am not going to sit there and permit moms to lose extra youngsters as a result of of fentanyl overdose. I am not going to sit there and let intercourse trafficking go unabated, or human trafficking go unabated. There’s going to be a new sheriff in city, and these drug cartels battle buckle up.”
As we have identified repeatedly right here at Motive, fentanyl primarily enters the nation through U.S. residents smuggling it in by authorized factors of entry, not through overseas nationals illegally crossing the southern border.
As for “sex trafficking” and “human trafficking,” these are phrases that beneath U.S. regulation don’t truly require the crossing of borders in any respect. Illegally bringing individuals throughout the border is called human smuggling. Human trafficking is an umbrella time period that refers to forcing or coercing individuals into labor (labor trafficking) or business sexual exercise (intercourse trafficking).
A large mythology has been constructed up round these phrases, particularly intercourse trafficking. In popular culture and on social media, the phrase conjures photographs of shady worldwide cabals, forceful abductions, captivity, confinement, and folks sneaking ladies and kids in or in a foreign country.
In actuality, most main “sex trafficking busts” that make headlines merely goal grownup intercourse staff who’re within the nation legally and never being compelled into something.
And most victims of compelled, coerced, and/or underage prostitution within the U.S. look nothing just like the Hollywood or Washington narrative. They are not being secretly ferreted throughout the borders by Mexican cartels, or arriving in delivery containers from someplace far-off. They’re prone to know their perpetrator, and to be saved in additional of a metaphorical bondage than a bodily one. Perhaps they really feel a romantic attachment to their “trafficker.” Perhaps it is a member of the family. Perhaps they’re bonded by dependancy, or paralyzed by threats to report them to authorities (perhaps for his or her undocumented standing, or for participating drug use or prostitution), or an abuser threatens to get their youngsters taken away, or one thing like that.
What you simply do not see in U.S. intercourse trafficking circumstances is individuals being kidnapped in mall parking lots after being distracted by candy bar wrappers (as one weirdly prevalent social media delusion goes) or being smuggled en plenty throughout the southern border, a la the paranoid rantings of Ron DeSantis.