Washington, D.C. (July 13, 2022) – A new report by the Center for Immigration Studies outlines a strategy to combat human smuggling by making the fight against it a foreign-policy priority. The report argues that placing the State Department in the lead of a high-profile international diplomatic effort to change the attitudes of governments around the world toward the crime of migrant smuggling is the key to ending such tragedies as occurred recently in Texas, where 53 illegal migrants died in a trailer.

This approach would use the global fight against human trafficking as a model. Trafficking and smuggling both exploit vulnerable migrants, but are not legally the same; trafficking entails coercion, often involving forced labor or prostitution, whereas migrants themselves pay to be smuggled.
 
Congress launched a highly successful international effort to fight human trafficking with passage of anti-trafficking-in-persons (TIP) legislation, the “Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000”, changing U.S. diplomatic priorities overnight. Today the State Department pushes TIP issues in nearly every country.
 
Phillip Linderman – author of the report, a Center fellow, and a former Foreign Service officer who worked in the anti-trafficking campaign – writes: “For the past 20 years, policy-makers have consistently sidelined concerns about clandestine migration and its abuses, while shining all the policy attention on human trafficking victims. But the time is now right for Congress to look again at international migrant smuggling as a criminal activity that both undermines the rule of law and border security as well as exploits desperate migrants.”
 
Linderman encourages Congress to address smuggling by replicating the three-pronged approach that was used to lead an international campaign against TIP. Congress mandated that the State Department 1) push foreign governments to undertake robust national policies against trafficking and threaten poorly performing countries with sanctions, principally a cut-off of U.S. foreign assistance; 2) write an annual report to Congress on the TIP situation in each country (regardless of its direct impact on the U.S.); and 3) establish within State a special policy office dedicated to this mission.

A similar diplomatic approach would be a powerful tool in the fight against human smuggling.
 

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