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| In the wake of Maidan, what future awaits a renewed wave of Ukrainian migration? |
A few weeks ago I
wrote in Dissent Magazine about human
trafficking, labour exploitation, the vulnerabilities faced by
migrant workers, and the misplaced criticism of migration by Europe's
far-right. In the article I argued that increasingly punitive
legal regimes, driven by right-wing reaction, help increase the risks
run by vulnerable migrant workers and help expand the
informal labour markets on which traffickers thrive. Furthermore, I
argued that inter-regional inequality and uneven labour market
development compel migrant workers to seek work abroad in
increasingly tumultuous conditions. Uneven labour market development
- i.e the concentration of demand for certain profitable skills in
certain geographical locations at the relative expense of other areas
- at once forces migrant workers into seeking unstable work in
foreign markets and increases the pressure on national governments to
protect their domestic labour markets from foreign workers, thus
compounding the problems. Capital benefits from the cost-saving
effects of such a social division of labour while governments accrue
cheap political capital by punishing foreign workers with legal
sanctions. Those who benefit over all are the traffickers, not the
workers. What follows is a short case study of Ukraine, a country
which perfectly exemplifies the contradictions of the social division
of European labour. While immigration as such is both socially and
culturally beneficial, the contradictions driving migration from
Ukraine at the moment are hardly benign. While welcoming new
arrivals, we should bear in mind the price often paid to bring them
here.
Much like the Czech Republic, Ukraine
has recently become a destination as well as a source and transit
country for trafficking victims. According to research
by CARIM East, 22,000 Ukrainians were enslaved
abroad in the mid-2000s. Approximately 10% of respondents knew
victims of human trafficking. Since the mid-2000s there has been a
dip in the number of prosecutions for trafficking, though with the
political situation as it is in Ukraine, emigration can be expected
to increase and not necessarily peaceably.
Most depressingly for Ukrainians hoping
to join the European Union, the highest numbers of trafficked
individuals come from recent EU member states - namely, Bulgaria and
Romania. This suggests that, in the short-term at least, membership
of the EU can actually facilitate trafficking rather than dampen it.
A "clear majority", in the words of the Eurostat paper, of
trafficking victims in the EU are in fact EU citizens (61% according
to their data for the years 2008-2010). The EU itself is not able to
solve the contradictions of trafficking because of the inequalities
that exist between states and different states' abilities to combat
the phenomenon at multiple levels. Add to that a rising tide of
xenophobia and immigrant bashing in the EU core states and it is easy
to see why people are not getting the protection they need. Then
there is the matter of sexual exploitation. In a survey of European
countries, one research
paper found that 62% of victims were
trafficked for purposes of sexual exploitation with 68% of the total
number of victims being women. More pervasive and even more dangerous
than exploitation of labour, exploitation of sex is less visible and
harder to keep track of.
According to the US State Department,
which regularly publishes its global
findings on trafficking, Ukraine is a "second
tier" country: that is, a country actively engaged in making its
institutions meet minimum global standards but which hasn't met them
yet. Because of the Ukrainian state's long history of corruption,
compliance in these areas has always looked unlikely. Now, given the
revanchist mood in Russia and the seeming descent towards civil war,
effective action looks impossibly distant.
The Ukrainian state lacks both the
institutional capacity and the willpower to assert even a minimum
level of effective control over trafficking. Furthermore, Ukraine is
caught in a peculiar core-periphery market transition, whereby it is
gradually becoming a de facto part of the wider European
polity and economy, even as Russia makes aggressive demands on its
political and cultural allegiances and attempts to reassert its
fading economic and geopolitical influence. The result of such
contradictory development in human terms is the widespread
exploitation of people, in the form of both sexual slavery and forced
labour, in the context of unstable and coercive legal regimes.
The scale and extent of organised crime
is often shocking. Terry FitzPatrick of Free The Slaves informed me
of the following case, described in detail here
by the US Attorney's Office of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
The crimes are all the more impressive for their unlikely bypassing
of the EU and concentration on the US. Omelyan
Botsvynyuk, a fifty-two year old Ukrainian national, was sentenced to
life imprisonment for his part in an elaborate trafficking cartel
which smuggled Ukrainian labourers into the US via flights to Mexico.
Most astounding was their strategy for negotiating the US-Mexico
border. Botsvynyuk and his brothers coached Ukrainians on how to
approach border guards, dressed them in "US-style" clothes,
and had them march straight through border control points. Those
caught without papers were merely issued with a court summons,
released, and subsequently picked up again by the Botsvynyuk
organisation. Once they were back in the hands of the Botsvynyuks on
the US side of the border, the workers could easily be transported to
the borthers' base in Philadelphia. Keeping their victims in unsafe
and dirty living conditions, the whole range of coercive and violent
trafficking techniques were then conducted: personal documents and
court summons were confiscated; physical force, threats of violence,
sexual assault and (in at least two cases) rape were used to cow
workers; debt bondage was used to keep victims in their place;
threats against family members were used to keep people quiet.
Though
extreme in almost every sense - not only in terms of human cost but
organisational scale, flagrant defiance of the law, as well as
defiance of some of the world's most tightly monitored borders - the
case of the Botsvynyuk gang cearly demonstrates the inadequacies of a
narrowly legalistic, often border-focused and anti-immigrant approach
to ending human trafficking. Police action, with its entrenched
institutional and practical biases and ideological limitations, can
do little to prevent trafficking. The material conditions which
allows traffickers to step in - upheavals and declines in national
and regional economies; the mass redundancy by shifts in capital
concentration of huge swathes of otherwise able workers; political
and social tumult on the capitalist periphery - will have to be
addressed by a clearly articulated, political anti-trafficking
program. In increasingly strained international
regulatory conditions, in which foreign labour is already grossly
exploited, more and more Ukrainians will be driven into the arms of
opportunist traffickers.
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