Undocumented Cambodian migrants in Thailand are transported to the border by train. Joe Lowry for IOM/Flickr. Creative Commons.
Current efforts to combat ‘modern slavery’ must be understood within the wider context of discourses, programmes and policies that target migrant labour. Since the 1990s, the dominant political focus has been on ‘human trafficking’. Although anti-trafficking remains popular, it has been subject to considerable criticism, even within the anti-trafficking sector itself. A key point of contestation regards the ways in which anti-trafficking relates to migration policies.
For example, it is well known how anti-trafficking discourses easily lend themselves to anti-immigration agendas. Deporting a migrant under the auspices of anti-trafficking efforts makes deportation sound almost heartwarming: the poor victim gets to be re-united with their loved ones ‘at home’. The language of ‘modern slavery’ unsurprisingly emerged out of these anti-trafficking discourses. However in recent times we have also seen other related approaches come to prominence. One example is ‘safe migration’, a concept that allows aid programmes, activists and moral entrepreneurs to advocate for migrants in ways that attempt to evade a focus on repressive border control regimes.
