The Daily Signal - INTERVIEW | Ambassador John Richmond Explains Root Cause of Human Trafficking, Offers Solution

Episode Date: December 8, 2022

Today, there are believed to be more people trapped in slavery than at any other time in history. These are individuals who are victims of sex trafficking and forced labor. They are women, men, and children.  There are “27.6 million people [who] are estimated to be victims of trafficking,” John Richmond, the former U.S. ambassador to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons during the Trump administration, says.  Tragically, governments around the world are “identifying less than half of 1% of all those victims every year," Richmond says. “We are failing to actually identify, protect, and care for the victims of trafficking, and the traffickers are moving around with impunity.” At the end of the day, human trafficking will only be stopped when the traffickers are stopped, he says.  “The root cause of the problem are the individuals who decide to exploit inherently valuable people just because they're vulnerable.” Richmond, who also an attorney and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" to discuss the core issues driving human trafficking today, and what is being done to rescue victims.  To learn more about how to be a part of the solution to solving human trafficking, visit the International Justice Mission or Love Does websites. https://www.ijm.org/ https://lovedoes.org/ Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We have to make sure that people can trust that law enforcement will do its job, do it fairly, do it well, and that they can count on accountability for traffickers if we're going to stop the crime. This is the Daily Single podcast for Thursday, December 8th. I'm Friedan Allen. And that was Ambassador John Richmond. Today, there are believed to be more people trapped in slavery than at any other time in history. These are individuals who are victims of human trafficking and forced labor. These are women, men, and children. Ambassador John Richmond served as the ambassador to monitor and combat trafficking in persons during the Trump administration. And he joins us on the show today to explain how so many people have come to be victims of human trafficking and what the government and what private NGOs are doing and can do to rescue these victims. Stay tuned for our conversation after this.

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And we are also problematic on social media, so be sure to follow us on Instagram. We are joined today by attorney Human Rights Advocate Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and former Trump administration ambassador to monitor and monitor and combat trafficking in persons, John Richmond. Ambassador Richmond, thank you so much for being on the show today. That's great to be with you. So you served under former President Trump to combat human trafficking. Explain to us what exactly is entailed in being the American ambassador to monitor and combat trafficking in persons. What was a normal day for you like in this role? Such a great question. You know, when most people think about United States ambassadors, we think about an ambassador in residence, like an ambassador

to one country that represents the United States on any issue that might come up. But in addition to our ambassadors in residence, we also have six ambassadors at large. So not to one country, but to everywhere in the world, but only on one specific issue. So we have one for counterterrorism, for international religious freedom. And in the year 2000, Congress created the position of an ambassador at large for human trafficking. And I'm so grateful that they did, that they elevated this issue to that level. And so I got to lead on U.S. foreign policy on how we can combat human trafficking and how we can take these promises of law and make them a reality. And it's all about human dignity, recognizing that every single person has inherent value.

And we know that human trafficking, it doesn't always look the same in every case. Would you mind just defining what exactly we mean when we say that term, human trafficking? So human trafficking is both sex trafficking and forced labor. It's selling commercial sexual activity as well as coercing people to work in any industry. And so we have cases of human trafficking that involve obviously pimp directed trafficking that people might think of. of, but also hotel workers, people who are washing dishes and restaurants, people who are working on farms or agricultural facilities. Any time that we're not free to alienate our own labor, that is we're not free to make a decision that we can quit our job if we want and go compete

in the market to work elsewhere, there's likely an indicator that something like forced labor or human trafficking is occurring. Okay, that's very helpful to know. Now, your work to combat human trafficking, caused the former head of the FBI's human trafficking program to call you every trafficker's worst nightmare. That's quite the compliment. You have been involved, I know, in this fight for a very long time. How did that first begin? How did you get involved in fighting human trafficking? And where does this passion for you come from personally? You know, for me, I was practicing law in Virginia, and there was a young NGO that was just starting up called International Justice Mission, and they were trying to build forced labor work in India. And as I heard from them, and as I began to visit India and see with my own eyes what was happening, I honestly just felt compelled.

It wasn't that I had some unique talent or unique insight about the issue. it said the need was so vast. And the need for another lawyer and another law firm just didn't seem nearly as vast. There were lots of smart lawyers that could do my job. But there was no one interested in taking this job in India. And so in the early 2000s, my wife and our daughter and I moved to Chennai, India, and we began to meet victims of trafficking and began to meet traffickers and began to understand the brutality of what was happening. And it seemed to me that the most important thing that we can be is free, that free to make our own choices, where we work, when we wake up, who touches our bodies. And if government has a legitimate rule, it is to make sure the protections of law extend and that people cannot harm one another.

And so I did that and then shifted to the United States. I was a federal prosecutor and was a founding member of the Human Trafficking Prosecution Unit, at the Department of Justice and got to try and investigate sex trafficking and labor trafficking cases all over the United States for a decade. And how does America compare to other countries like India or various nations around the world when it comes to the issue of human trafficking? Well, I think we compare well, not because we're better, but because I think we've acknowledged that we have a very problematic and troubled history with slavery in the United States. And we've recognized that that was wrong. It was fundamentally wrong. We've revised our Constitution. We passed the 13th Amendment to abolish slavery. We've realized that we cannot treat other people as if they are chattel, as if they are property, and that everyone has inherent value. And we've built a system now of laws in order to protect people, and we need to get better at implementing them. But the United States is doing quite well as the leading advocate globally to help other. countries reach that same place. Because the United States is not unique in the practice of slavery from a historical standpoint. Slavery has been happening throughout human history. All 4,000 years

of recorded human history, we've had some sort of slavery or human trafficking on every inhabited continent in every culture, Aztecs, Incas, Mayans, Greeks, Romans, Chinese, India, and everywhere. It's been ubiquitous. What's unique is not the presence of the problem. What is unique are people who are willing to work on that problem and change it. And when it comes to the root core issues and it comes to actually addressing the problems, what are some of those first core issues? And then what is the reality of what individuals are fighting against in order to end the trafficking of persons? You know, I think that when we think about root causes, people often get confused. And I think it's because we often end up looking at vulnerabilities.

So people who are migrating, people who are refugees, people who are in foster care, are often more vulnerable. And the more vulnerable you are, the more likely you are to be the victim of crime. And it's because economically motivated criminals, even more than the random criminal, is going to target vulnerable individuals. Think about economically motivated con artists, targeting elderly people to cheat them out of their money. Economically motivated traffickers, and every trafficker is primarily motivated by money. It's an economic crime. They're motivated by money, and so they're going to target the people that are easiest to coerce.

And so we could think about all the vulnerabilities that make people likely to be targeted by traffickers and think the solution is we need to end all vulnerability. But trying to end poverty or end discrimination or end or fundamentally change the educational system in a country can feel quite overwhelming. What I would suggest is that vulnerabilities are really root correlations. The root cause of the problem is traffickers. The root cause of the problem are the individuals who decide to exploit inherently valuable people just because they're vulnerable. And we're not doing a good job. Virginia, we have had a 45% drop in global prosecutions of traffickers since 2015. A massive collapse of accountability.

Right now in Germany, 64% of all the convicted traffickers got a suspended sentence. That is, they walked out of the courthouse after, after having been convicted with absolutely no punishment. A majority of traffickers in South Korea suspended sentences. A vast majority in Chile suspended sentences. What we're saying to traffickers is that you can commit this crime and we just don't care. And traffickers see that and therefore the crime's growing. We know this because just in September, the United Nations issued their new estimate of the number of people that are victims of human trafficking.

globally, and it went up by millions. It's now 27.6 million people are estimated to be victims of trafficking. And governments around the world, they're identifying less than half of one percent of all those victims every year. We are failing to actually identify, protect, and care for the victims of trafficking. And the traffickers are moving around with impunity. As you're talking, I'm remembering that when I was in college, the international justice mission actually came to my campus and did a presentation. And I remembered that they talked about the fact that through all of their work, they realized that the criminal justice system in any country is essential to protecting individuals from human trafficking. So where is the accountability in this? Why aren't

prosecutors prosecuting those to the full extent of the law who are taking part of the, in human trafficking? From a global perspective, for a long time, we've said there are three P's, our prosecution, protection, and prevention. We want to do all three of these things, that they're mutually reinforcing, and they need to be prioritized. For some reason, we've started to de-emphasize accountability and prosecution. We've put less resources towards that.

My old friends at my old job at the human trafficking prosecution unit could use a lot more people, a lot more funding. They're doing incredible work, but they're small. If we're going to take this seriously, creating specialized units that can focus on this problem where their primary task is to stop traffickers, we would see an increase. The number one recommendation for the United States in the state department's trafficking in persons report for the last seven or eight years has been to increase labor trafficking prosecutions in America. And we have failed to do that. We failed to create the specialized investigative units for forced labor at the FBI and at Homeland Security. And we don't have a specialized prosecutorial unit just for forced labor cases. And so where we don't put the resources towards the problem, we're not going to see a change. And I think it's got to become a priority. We have to recognize that it's true you're never going to prosecute your way out of this problem. But I think that's a straw argument. You're also never going to educate your way out or shelter your way out. I would say that prosecution is a

necessary but not sufficient condition of success. We have to make sure that people can trust that law enforcement will do its job, do it fairly, do it well, and that they can count on accountability for traffickers if we're going to stop the crime. Has the Biden administration changed its policy at all from the Trump administration when it comes to the issue of human trafficking? You know, it's interesting when we think about administrations. You know, I've been working on this under the Bush administration, the Obama administration, Trump as well as currently. And I would tell you that I think that the administrations have had very little impact as they've

changed from one to another. I think we'd like to think they changed dramatically. Obviously, we saw a push under the Bush administration to establish the human trafficking. trafficking prosecution unit and to put more emphasis on this. And during the transition to Obama, many were worried that he would not prioritize trafficking because it was a George W. Bush initiative. But he did. He gave the first full-throated speech about slavery since Abraham Lincoln during the Clinton Global Initiative in 2012. And then as we moved into the Trump administration, I think people were wondering if he would prioritize it. And indeed he did. He made it a priority.

Fortunately, we now have a nominee for the trafficking person's ambassador. She just had her confirmation hearing on Wednesday. We're hoping she'll be confirmed quickly and that she can get in her seat to continue to lead on this issue. But I think our challenge has been less about whether an administration will talk about prioritizing this. But will they match their rhetoric with resources? Will they actually go beyond just speeches and move towards? action-oriented, measurable improvements. Do you think that we actually have an understanding of the scope of the issue?

I mean, do we really know how many people are victims of human trafficking in America currently and across the globe? Well, we don't have a national prevalence estimate of the size of the trafficking problem. And I think that's okay. And the reason I say that is because it's very difficult to come up with an estimate of the scope of a hidden problem. We also don't have an estimate of the number of kilos of cocaine that exist or the number of gigabytes of child pornography that exist. What we know is that it does exist. We are finding it and we need to do better at prioritizing it. You know, we do have estimates. I mentioned the global estimate of 27.6 million for your listeners, just so they know, that's more people than ever before in human history.

It's twice as many as were trafficked during the 400 years of the transatlantic slave trade. And so while I want to have great numbers about the prevalence, I don't want the absence of prevalence numbers to inhibit action. I don't want to wait around for a better data scientist to come up with a better algorithm to figure out the number of people, while there are individuals right now throughout the United States and across the world who are being, traumatized and abused by traffickers for profit. We want to stop that because we believe that that is the role of government, that that is necessary to value and affirm human dignity. In all of your work around the issue of human trafficking, are there certain faces or names that you carry with you that remind you of why you're doing what you're doing every day?

Yeah, you're so kind to ask me that. There are several. One is an elderly Indian man named Narcolapah. He, one time when I was, we were doing a operation in southern India with the government, they were releasing people from an agricultural plantation and he was sleeping under a tree. And his grandson was liberated that day, given a release certificate, declared to no longer be property of another person. and he said, hey, what about my grandfather? And so we walked over under this tree and we met Narc Lapa who had been there as entire life. He had never lived a day as a free person. He was so old that he wasn't really working much. They just sat him there as sort of a security guard to monitor the entrance, but he was too old to really even do that effectively. And I watched as Narc Lapa, got to take a trip as a free man with his grandson to the ocean to actually see the waves for the first time in his entire.

life. And I thought no one should be subjected to this. No one should have a life where generationally they are exploited. Or I think about a young woman that came to the United States on a visa from Eastern Europe, ended up being out of status. Her visa had expired. And then a trafficker targeted her just because she didn't have immigration status and knew that she'd be easy to exploit and forced her to work in a massage parlor, ultimately forced her to engage in commercial sex. And all she wanted, to do was to go home. She wanted to be back with her family where she could be restored and safe and protected from evil. And in each of these situations, people from vastly different circumstances exploited in very different economic systems, the one thing was current throughout both those

stories, and that is that people have value. And I think that one thing, particularly for your listeners, I'd love for them to know, is that human rights and civil rights are inherently conservative concepts. This idea that we do not want the state to abuse people. And one of the largest abusers of people through forced labor are governments. We're seeing millions of people being forced to work by China, by North Korea, by Cuba. There are so many, we have a list within the trafficking in persons report of state sanctioned forced labor. Currently, there are 11 countries that have been designated by the U.S. State Department as not just failing to enforce laws against trafficking, but where the government itself is the trafficker. What an abuse of the privilege

of power that people give to a government. And so we want to make sure that governments and individuals and companies are not exploiting people for profit. And you hear those stories and your heart just breaks. And I know for myself, you find yourself asking that question of, well, what can I do? How can I be a part of the solution? And for private citizens, is there a way, Ambassador, that we can be a part of the solution? Absolutely. I think there are a number of ways. One is we can elevate the conversation about this.

We can become more informed ourselves. We can make sure that we have a textured understanding of what coercion looks like of how to prioritize survivors and survivor voices in the conversation and elevate survivors to leadership. I think that we can think about our own buying patterns. Are we supporting companies that are profiting from forced labor? And sometimes that's hard to do, but we could ask questions of companies. We could ask ourselves questions about fast fashion. Like, is this $5 shirt from Indonesia?

Is that even possible to have been made in a fair market situation? Can we prioritize capitalism? Can we understand that forced labor is a direct threat to free markets? That is if you're forcing people to work to produce a product and then competing in a market with companies that are using fair market labor, you have an unfair advantage. And so we do not want to support companies that are knowingly benefiting from having forced labor in their supply chains. And we certainly want to think about how do we talk as individuals about commercial sector? activity. How can we actually look at people who have been trapped in commercial sexual activity, not as tainted or spoiled or just people who have done bad things, but as potential victims,

people who need care, people who need to be known by their actual name, who need to have value imputed to them? And how can we address the issue that people are purchasing commercial sex? And how do we talk to boys and men who are the largest consulate? consumer of commercial sex about do they want to objectify? Do they want to commoditize the women in their lives? How do we address that? How do we deal with the fact that purchasing sex is illegal? And yet almost no one gets prosecuted for that in the United States. Instead, sellers of sex are the ones who most often get prosecuted. And they're the category who are most likely to be the victims of sex trafficking. And so I think we can address this from a sex trafficking standpoint, from a

forced labor standpoint. And people can just be aware. What I encourage groups to do are think about how do we build a culture of justice in our communities? How do we think about making wrong things right? Big things and little things, global things and local things. How do we decide that we are going to improve the world, whether it's a small thing like just picking up some litter or it's inviting that kid who's new at school to the lunch table so they have a place. or it's actually engaging in our community, our school board, our civic group about the fact that there are people right here in our town who might be victims of human trafficking. How can we care for them? And just asking the question is going to put us in a position to find the answer.

Well, I do want to highlight for those who are listening who think I want to do something. I want to get involved. A couple great organizations to check out our international justice mission, which we have mentioned in this conversation. and then, Ambassador, you serve as a senior advisor to Bob Goff's organization, Love Does, which I know is so involved in many countries across the globe, really bringing support and meeting those practical needs of individuals who are vulnerable to human trafficking. So, Ambassador, we thank you so much for your time and thank you for the work that you're doing to truly defend and protect the most vulnerable among us.

It's great to be with you. Have a wonderful day. Again, if you want to learn more about how you can be a part of the solution, a part of ending human trafficking, check out the links in today's show notes. But that's going to be it for today's episode. Thank you so much for listening to The Daily Signal podcast. If you haven't had a chance already, be sure to check out our evening show right here in your podcast feed where we bring you the top news of the day. Also, make sure to subscribe to the Daily Signal wherever you get your podcast and help us to reach more listeners by taking you. just a moment to leave a five-star rating and review. We love hearing your feedback. Again,

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