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?