It's the same basic model as any criminal enterprise: people who value money above all else self-select into these roles, and the owners insulate themselves from the guy wielding the cattle prod with layers of underlings. See also drug cartels, extortion rackets, etc.

And the leaders are supported by huge throngs of people who need or want money and are willing to ignore their role (wittingly or unwittingly) or are blackmailed into compliance.

A) The west just has fewer people. The most populous country in Europe - Germany - would be only the 10th most populous country in Asia.

B) A substantial amount of people in Asia live in rural areas. In India, nearly 920M people live in rural areas. The lack of infrastructure in rural areas means that things can happen that never ever reach the local authorities. People can simply slip away without a trace.

C) State power is weak outside of major population centers. Corruption is rife. Povery is rampant. Earning opportunities are limited. Combined, it means that criminals know they can get away with anything as long as they bribe the right people.

D) A substantial percentage of Asian population lives under failed states (same for Africa). State power isn't just weak; it's absent.

E) Asia is just way too large and geographically diverse. Easy to hide away illicit activity in a dense rainforest or deserted mountain than in wide open plains and farmland.

Thank you, very good points. Combining those factors probably makes for a perfect storm.

"State power is weak" is a weird claim since the powerful states don't prevent trade with slavers. Powerful states like US and China run slavery operations directly. It's even explicitly enshrined in the US Constitution.

The US didn't become a powerful state until the Constitution was amended to ban slavery.

The Confederacy, for example, was militarily and economically a very weak state. It couldn't even supply shoes to its soldiers. It was unable to pierce the blockade on them by the Union. And so on.

It's a far stretch to say that allowing slavery or involuntary servitude as a penalty for duly convicted criminal is somehow "enshrining" it.

You’d be surprised. I’ve chanced upon operations of this kind in Malta, Bulgaria, and Israel.

Just today there was an article about police operation in UK with Czech people being slaved for sex work.

As an Israeli former soldier, could you elaborate?

I remember our commanders telling us that there used to be a trafficking route through the border of Egypt, but it stopped when the border patrol improved, couple years back. They were smuggling Eastern European girls to prostitute.

Did something change to your knowledge? Or are you talking about another route?

Human trafficking is a real issue in the West. Restaurant workers and prostitutes may not end up outright killed, but the conditions can be close to slavery.

Is it a real issue? I hear it constantly from the right but I'd like to see some numbers

> In 2020, 10,583 situations of human trafficking were reported to the U.S. National Human Trafficking Hotline involving 16,658 individual victims. Shocking as these numbers are, they are likely only a fraction of the actual problem.

https://polarisproject.org/2020-us-national-human-traffickin...

To be clear though, what you’re hearing (or at least what I’m hearing) from the US right wing is not referring to this. It’s referring to a theory that specifically cultural elites are specifically trafficking children for sex. There’s no reason to believe this is a large issue, though obviously there were systemic failures in the whole Epstein ordeal that gave conspiracists a lot of ammunition.

The majority of trafficking is of laborers, which the right wing generally opposes protections of, and immigrants, which again the right wing generally opposes easy paths to legal citizenship and legal protection for illegal immigrants wherever possible (leading victims to believe they cannot contact law enforcement).

All of this applies equally to another large source of trafficking which is sex work. US right wing is fixated on the morality of sex work rather than the morality of building a system that rewards and enables coerced sex work.

As someone who had inside knowledge of the sex work industry the incident rate of trafficking was extremely low. Most trafficking was related to Asian gangs in LA, SF, NY. It's an anecdote, take it with a grain of salt.

Yeah this meshes with my understanding as well. To be clear, my comment above is that sex work is a substantial part of human trafficking, not that human trafficking is necessarily a substantial part of sex work.

What number is "extremely low"?

Criminal activity should be compared to other countries and historical data (per capita)

The existence of human trafficking isn’t really a left/right question (at least under the traditional definition — I suppose the QAnon-style folks may have been playing their usual games of redefining a real issue into some story they’ve invented out of whole cloth).

In Europe trafficking happens in tomato fields in Italy, online prostitution in Scandinavia, and everywhere in between. Victims can be in the country legally or illegally. I remember a case in Finland where an Indian restaurant hired a foreign worker legally, but then they took away his passport and coerced him to work 18-hour shifts using lies and threats of being sent back. That’s trafficking too.

The left and right have somewhat different ideas for solutions of course, with the usual recipes being further labor laws on one side and further limits on immigration on the other side. But probably such small tweaks won’t do anything to address the root issue, and in that sense it transcends left and right.

Can we please stop complaining about "trafficking"? If slavery exists, the least of anyone's concerns is that the slaves are being moved from here to there. The salient issue that the slavery itself is occurring!

Trafficking refers to people who are generally not slaves in their home country but are lured or transported to a foreign country to be exploited. It’s a distinct phenomenon, so I don’t see why it should be lumped under slavery.

How is it distinct? They're enslaved abroad! That doesn't make it any less slavery than if they were enslaved in their home countries.

The concern is because it's almost impossible to have slavery in a place where it's (de facto) illegal without some trafficking.

Trafficking is what enable slavers to stay hidden.

Moving slaves around, during which the authorities may notice, is a better hiding strategy than keeping them in one location? Are you quite sure?

Then keeping them around their home and families? I'm quite sure.

Two things can be bad and we're allowed to complain about both.

But either way trafficking is typically shorthand for slavery in practise. The thing with trafficking specifically is that it is more likely to go somewhere that it can be spotted. Airports have signs in the bathrooms saying "if you're being held against your will try to get to this part of the airport" because it's the trafficking piece of the slavery/trafficking combo that takes the victim into the airport in the first place. Being trained to spot trafficking in jobs like TSA agents is thus very useful regardless of the slavery situation.

But it's not two things. One is a subset of the other.

It's as absurd as creating a special term for whipping slaves using sticks of a certain color.

I'm really not seeing what you're complaining about unless you have some "all lives matter"-esque point that you're trying to make. Nobody's communication is being impeded by saying "let's stop sex trafficking" instead of "let's stop sexual slavery" and nobody's behaviour is going to be different on hearing those two sentences and nobody is going to pass different laws or behave differently in any way. I hadn't even thought of those two as separate previously but even taking the effort to mentally separate them to argue with you, I don't feel enlightened or challenged to act differently. There's nobody out there saying "Trafficking is bad but slavery is a-OK!". I really don't know where you're going with this.

Why did we feel the need to isolate a minor aspect of slavery, teach everyone the new term, and then arouse outrage against it, instead of simply organizing against "slavery", which had already been considered wrong for generations?

> Hard to imagine it happening at that scale in the West.

I think this idea is quite dangerous and reeks of superiority. It has happened before and it could happen again.

Sister comment made a point about forced prostitution and human traficcing being common.

I want to make a point that to get rid of this as a matter of policy, we've had revolutions and guillotines. To enforce this, we have well armed, strong goverments with long reach.

The fact that this keeps happening in every area without a strong government -from failed states to international waters - undercuts libertarian argument quite a bit. Youd think they would move to somalia en masse and turn it into the promosed land

>The fact that this keeps happening in every area without a strong government -from failed states to international waters - undercuts libertarian argument quite a bit

Myanmar is a hardcore communist military dictatorship, I'd hardly call that a weak government.

Communist ? The communist party of Burma (CPB) would be surprised to learn that

Evil doesn't imply strong.

> It has happened before and it could happen again.

Sure, I wasn't implying that it couldn't happen here, I'm just clumsy with words. I was trying to say it's hard to imagine it happening at similar scale _right now_, i.e. Danish fishing vessels buying slaves and throwing them overboard when they're too weak to continue working, in 2022.

I'm aware of trafficking, forced prostitution and indentured servitude with work in nail salons etc, but as far as I understand, the scale is (currently) very different, and it's much less extreme (assuming there are no secret mass graves we'll find in the future).

Libertarianism requires a government strong enough to enforce the rights of its citizens.

Somalia is not a libertarian country by any stretch of the imagination.

The "libertarian argument" (insofar as any one ideology can be summarized in a sentence) is for enough government for the rule of law to exist, with as many things as possible on top built by private efforts, not government. Somalia is about as far a place from the rule of law as conceivable.

Slavery is caused by one thing: imbalance of power between people. Whenever one entity or group gets too much power, slavery follows.

Effective institutions, independent judiciary helps a great deal.