TIP needs improving: The effectiveness of Congressional legislation largely depends on the quality of the information on which it is based. This is especially true in complex areas of policy such as human trafficking. Congressional information on this subject comes in the form of the “”Traffic in Human Persons Report” (or TIP), In recognition that the world increasingly treats labor as a commodity, but with scant attention to the human costs involved, TIP ranks all nations in three “tiers.” Placement on the ranking is tied to U.S. assistance and TIP aims to “name and shame” those in the lowest tier. TIP should be helping Congress to a better understanding of the scale of labor migration, with country-by-country statistics of in-flow and out-flow. It should be developing cross-national comparisons of problems and policies. It should be providing analysis, again country-by-country, of the root causes of migration and human rights abuses. But TIP does none of these things. TIP fails to provide basic statistics. Congress needs to know, if only by estimates, the numbers of migrants who are crossing national borders. How else can Congress understand the burden posed by labor migration in each country? Congress needs to know the extent of the problem that governments confront before judging their policies. All told, 67 countries fall into TIP’s lowest categories of trafficking performance, the Tier 2 “Watch” category, and Tier 3, the ultimate category of failure. These 67 countries fall far below the 31 Tier 1 countries (the United States, Canada, and all the EU countries, plus Israel, Taiwan, and South Korea). With only few exceptions (China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia), Tier 2 “Watch” and Tier 3 countries are low on global GDP rankings. If the world were a classroom, we would say that it’s nearly always the poor kids who get the failing grades. What, besides economic under-development, gets a country a bad TIP grade? There are, to be sure, many TIP “performance indicators” for prevention of trafficking. They include, for example, trafficking investigations, prosecutions and convictions, and the availability and condition of government facilities and procedures for protecting victims. One problem in the use of such indicators is that countries differ widely in the accuracy, quality and detail of the reports they make on them. In many cases, therefore, TIP uses NGO and other sources to report on compliance activities. As a result, TIP’s country summaries differ markedly in length and in the amount and reliability of the information they present. Countries differ in even more basic ways. They differ in terms of the types of trafficking victims, the industries and businesses that victimize migrants, and the governmental and legal systems they use for prevention of trafficking. Given such differences, what is the common standard for measuring compliance? The truth is that TIP has no hard metrics, no true comparative measures of national performance. In this global classroom, many students can fairly complain that the teacher’s grades seem arbitrary, even political. TIP’s weaknesses are illustrated by its treatment of the countries of mainland Southeast Asia: Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia and Thailand. TIP accords each of these countries between 2,500 and 5,000 words of descriptive text. Burma, Laos, and Cambodia are judged by TIP to fall in the Tier 2 “Watch” list. Thailand and Malaysia have suffered an “auto downgrade” into Tier 3. The five Southeast Asia countries stand at the bottom of the TIP class, but for widely differing reasons. If TIP were a good teacher, it would distinguish among the five nations in terms of their widely differing situations. Thailand, for example, is by far the most burdened by migration. Tens of thousands cross its border with Burma, Cambodia and Laos every year. Compared with Thailand these three neighbors are desperately poor, their industries under-developed, and their governments markedly more repressive. They experience relatively little migration inflow, whereas Thailand has more than two million migrants in its workforce. It is one of the world’s most burdened “destination” countries. How can Congress understand human trafficking in Southeast Asia without close attention to such facts? TIP brushes past them all. TIP’s aim is wholly laudable: human trafficking, one of the world’s great and growing evils, should be ended. Countries that permit it should be shamed –so long as the shame is fairly and justly applied. TIP’s tiers –unsupported by cross-national statistics, using few objective metrics for comparisons –are neither just nor fair. If TIP is to be respected as the world’s teacher in this important subject, it needs a better grading system.
Posted on: Mon, 13 Oct 2014 23:58:58 +0000
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