House OKs Crackdown on Trafficking in Sex

The House, responding to a dramatic increase in sex trafficking in the last decade, on Friday passed a measure designed to protect women and children smuggled into the United States and forced into prostitution and other forms of slave labor.

The practice has been especially prevalent in Southern California, where authorities believe tens of thousands of people are being forced to work in sweatshops, restaurants, mom-and-pop stores and even underground brothels.

In one notorious Los Angeles-based case, 80 Thai workers--mostly women--were forced to labor for years under slave conditions. That case made national headlines, but authorities said Friday it is just one of many that underscore the extent of the problem.

As many as 10,000 Asian women are believed to be working in underground brothels in Southern California alone, said Hae Jung Cho, project director of the Los Angeles-based Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking.

The Trafficking Victims Protection Act, approved, 371 to 1, in the House, also is intended to crack down on those who illegally bring foreign “workers” into the country against their will and force them into indentured servitude. A Senate version of the bill is likely to pass Tuesday, and President Clinton is expected to sign the measure into law.

“This is the most significant human rights legislation [of] this Congress,” said Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.). The conservative senator co-sponsored the bill along with his ideological opposite, Democratic Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota--a demonstration of the wide, bipartisan support the measure has received. “Trafficking is the new slavery of the world,” Brownback said. “Worldwide, trafficking nets at least $7 billion a year--exceeded only by the international drug and arms trades.”

The exact number of victims is difficult to determine, experts and advocates say. But a CIA report found that about 50,000 people--many of them women and children--are brought to the United States under false pretenses each year and held in servitude.

The measure increases the possible prison term for those found guilty of trafficking in humans to a sentence of up to 20 years. A conviction could bring a sentence of life in prison in cases involving kidnapping, aggravated sexual abuse or sex-trafficking in children younger than 14.

Women found trapped in sex trafficking will have the right to sue their captors and become eligible for crime victims’ benefits.

The bill--at a cost of $95 million over two years--also makes victims eligible for a new non-immigrant visa that will enable them to work legally in the United States while authorities pursue investigations or while they themselves cooperate in criminal prosecutions or seek asylum.

Law enforcement officials and community activists in Los Angeles hailed the measure, calling it the first major step toward cracking down not only on the problem of human slavery but also on the flourishing trafficking networks that bring the men and women to the United States.

In recent years, hundreds of Chinese have been found in dozens of container ships in Southern California ports. Some “workers” are smuggled in with the hopes of getting a paying job. Instead, they are held against their will and even kept in bondage or high-security facilities.

Far more often, such laborers stay voluntarily as a way of working off as much as $50,000 apiece in smuggling fees that enabled them to gain entry to the United States. They live in group housing and buy their food and provisions in “company stores.”

Without contacts, money, passports or other identification--and with an ingrained fear of police--the workers are scared to leave. Instead, they often struggle for years, working dawn until midnight under sweatshop conditions.

“They face tremendous physical, psychological and sexual torture,” Cho said. “There is a labor shortage, as we know, and unfortunately people--instead of paying decent wages--look to find slaves who they don’t have to pay.”

There are other hot spots for trafficking in slave labor, including New York, San Francisco and Miami.

But Los Angeles is perhaps the nation’s worst for several reasons, said U.S. Atty. Michael Gennaco, who is part of a nationwide worker-exploitation task force mandated by Atty. Gen. Janet Reno a year ago.

Thousands of foreigners, mostly Mexicans and other Latinos, are smuggled in through California’s porous southern border, Gennaco and INS agent Jim Hayes said. Others, mostly Chinese, come by container ships that take advantage of the mammoth ports in Los Angeles, Long Beach and San Pedro. Still others, officials said, come by airplane or through Seattle and Vancouver, Canada.

Gennaco said that if the measure passed Friday becomes law, it finally will establish specific statutes “that really fit the nature of the crime.” He added that the bill’s provision giving victims special visas allowing them to stay in the United States will go a long way toward gaining their cooperation in what often are complex and long-running investigations.

Cho, however, said the bill doesn’t provide enough protections for potential witnesses in criminal investigations.

And despite its support for the measure, the Clinton administration expressed concern over the sanctions the bill contains against countries that fail to take action against sex trafficking, supporters of the bill said. There are no trade sanctions, but the measure does allow the administration to withhold non-humanitarian aid from countries that fail to take action against trafficking.

Jessica Neuwirth, president of Equality Now, an international women’s rights group, called the bill “an extraordinary example of bipartisan cooperation. It is a testament to the importance of this issue to see so many people with different perspectives come together.” Equality Now was one of several women’s rights groups that supported the measure, along with several conservative religious organizations, such as the Family Research Council.

The House also voted Friday to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, which provides $3.6 billion in federal funds to state and local efforts to combat violent crime against women. The Clinton administration, estimating that such violence had dropped 21% since the act first passed in 1994, had pushed for the reauthorization.

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Lambert reported from Washington and Meyer from Los Angeles.