[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Human Trafficking and Its Effects
The Asia Pacific region has been described as the busiest region in the world in terms of illegal migration and organized crime. Every form of criminal behavior associated with human trafficking--including document fraud, corruption, and bribery--has been documented here. Restrictive immigration policies and sophisticated criminal organization create and sustain the demand for illegal migration. As a result, many destination countries have imposed even stricter restrictions on legal immigration and further criminalized irregular and clandestine immigration, exacerbating the problem of illegal migration.
Australia, Canada, and the United States, for example, have responded to increasing numbers of asylum seekers by placing legal and administrative restrictions on immigration and asylum systems. The same policies, combined with the lack of opportunities for legal migration, have led even more people to seek illegal ways to migrate, which they find in human trafficking. When legal avenues of migration to the countries of freedom and wealth are denied, people become more vulnerable to the promises of traffickers. In many cases, traffickers fuel the feeling of deprivation by luring potential migrants with false promises of freedom and employment opportunities abroad.
Over the last decade, human trafficking has become a major source of income for criminal organizations. Every year, thousands of migrants are trafficked throughout the Asia Pacific region and around the world by increasingly sophisticated criminal enterprises, which earn billions of dollars by exploiting those fleeing poverty and persecution.Due to the clandestine nature of illegal migration, it is difficult to get a clear picture of the number of persons being trafficked.
The illegal status of victims prevents them from reporting incidents to government authorities. In addition, law enforcement agencies only very recently began to pay close attention to the phenomenon of human trafficking, so reliable data are scarce. Careful estimates suggest that approximately 10 to 50 percent of illegal migration is organized by criminal groups.......
