I’m going to begin with Carmen’s story. Carmen came to the United States with an Ecuadorian family for whom she had been working as a childcare provider and domestic. Although they had treated her fairly in Ecuador, “the wife,” explains Carmen, “turned into the devil once they got to the United States.” They did not pay her, took her passport, forbade her from leaving the house, kept food from her and forced her to sleep in the children’s room. A neighbor suspected Carmen was being held against her will and contacted the police. Carmen was sent to a shelter for battered women after the police arrested her employers. ICE, which is the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, which is now part of the Department of Homeland Security, ICE determined that Carmen had been trafficked. She received a T-Visa that allows her to remain in the United States and today she lives and works in New York City.

After being under the care of counselors through her social service provider for a couple of years, Carmen’s life today resembles that of so many other migrants. Her daily concerns are like those of her migrant roommates—how to pay bills while also sending remittances home, how to find time to earn her GED while she works the night shift cleaning hotel rooms, and how to make new friends so far from home. As someone who has received the designation trafficked however aspects of her life are different from those of her roommates. She enjoys benefits they do not such as legal status through a new visa which is the T-Visa, health care and the support of a case manager with whom she stays in touch at the social service organization that has overseen her care and resettlement. Yet even with the benefits Carmen and other T-Visa recipients receive, many, if not most, still live hand to mouth. Like many migrants, they work in low paying and insecure jobs within the service economy. These positions are in general the only work that they can find with little formal education and flawed English.

Life after trafficking, particularly after the first year or so, is similar to the life of any other migrant who is struggling to recreate home in a new country. These T-Visa recipients often tell stories that many migrants tell about the challenges of the daily mundane struggles to build a new life in a new place. It is an ongoing story that is much less flashy than the story more often told in the media, one of trafficked person’s escape or rescue. Although the media have paid significant attention to trafficking, this coverage often seems disconnected from discussions on migrant labor, particularly when trafficking becomes synonymous with sex trafficking. As a corrective, this paper situates stories of T-Visa recipients within a larger discussion of the many kinds of exploitation faced by migrant women and men in many forms of labor.

The current legislation that offers trafficked person the possibility of staying in the United States with the TVPA which the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 with a T-Visa is based on a binary conceptualization of labor in which one is either trafficked or not. This project instead takes a broader view of migrant worker exploitation. It seeks to spotlight a more nuanced understanding of the kinds of work sites in which a spectrum of abuse exists and in which slavery can flourish. Contemporary servitude exists because a range of other exploitative labor conditions exist and consequently I argue that successful strategies for both combating and studying forced labor and servitude only can emerge by placing slavery practices on a continuum of migrant labor exploitation. The TVPA defines trafficking as sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act in induced by force, fraud or coercion or in which the person induced to perform such an act has not attained 18 years of age, or the recruitment harboring transportation provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage or slavery. Under 600 persons to date, around that number, have received T-Visas but presumably more exist. This number is remarkably low since the TVPA allots 5,000 T-Visas per year. Now, the TVPA was passed in 2000, so even allowing for two years of start-up time for investigations and processing, in theory 15,000 visas could have been given out by now. This comparatively low number contrasts dramatically with the Bush administration’s own claims that 14,500 persons are trafficked to the U.S. each year.

This paper is part of a larger book project in which I’m interviewing both persons who have gotten T-Visas as well as other migrant workers who have experienced exploitative working conditions that may not qualify them as trafficked under the TVPA. I’m also interviewing social service providers, attorneys, law enforcement officials, union organizers, labor advocates in sites throughout the U.S. to begin to construct a big picture of both forced labor or servitude and then a range of migrant worker exploitation. I meet T-Visa recipient through their social service provides and then either they have come forward to their case managers requesting to be put in touch with journalists or researchers or their case managers have identified them as psychologically and emotionally ready and interested to speak with researchers and I should note that one big flaw in this research is that, rightly so, I don’t have to access to folks who have ongoing court cases or who are very traumatized, so some psychiatrists have pointed out to me, trauma specialists, that I’m seeing a very highly resourced bunch of folks, but what we’re going to find out is that they’re doing well, but they still have a lot of bodily signs of trauma. That will be for another paper and this conversation will be continued definitely within the trauma community.

Thus far I’ve spoken with person with T-Visa recipients in Los Angeles, Orange County, New York City, Florida and Virginia and I’ve met with migrant worker union organizers and labor advocates in California, Oregon, New York, Florida, Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. There are no communities of resettled trafficked persons in the U.S. and even those who were resettled after the largest cases in the U.S. which is the American Samoa case, they’re not living together in any one place in the U.S., although I have interviewed some of the resettled T-Visa recipients in northern Virginia and in California and the American Samoa case was a case of a few hundred mainly Vietnamese workers, men and women, who were locked into a factory on American Samoa owned by a bad guy, a Korean national, and he’s now in jail and one of his thugs on the factory floor killed a woman and poked out of the eye of another and there were rapes and there was both physical and emotional coercion. When possible, however, I keep in touch with some of the T-Visa recipients whom I meet in these scheduled interviews through social service agencies and in this way I engage in participant observation in the traditional anthropological sense by following how they have been settling into their new communities, jobs, and housing as well as how they negotiate trust as they create and maintain new social networks of friends, neighbors and co-workers.

There are tremendous logistical and methodological challenges to conducting field work with trafficked persons in the U.S. They come from a variety of source countries, end of scattered throughout sites in the U.S. They were forced into different forms of labor and servitude. They speak different languages, have different socioeconomic backgrounds, varying education and work histories as well as differences in age, sex, race and ethnicity. They also have different experiences entering and exiting their servitude, including experiences of transit. The length of time they were held in servitude varies from weeks to years and while some experience psychological coercion, others also undergo physical brutality. As Sue Shriner, the victim witness coordinator for ICE describes, “agents ask me for profiles of traffickers and their victims. I tell them there is no one M.O. of a typical trafficker. There is no typical victim and the paths that lead them here are varied. I’ve never seen anything like this before.” So these variations present many methodological headaches for researchers, such that a researcher who works on one site or on one kind of forced labor or T-Visa recipients from one source country cannot easily extrapolate to speak of experiences in other sites, other forms of forced labor or T Visa recipients from other source countries. Certainly there are basic characteristics that cases sometimes share, but some trafficking cases are so vastly different from one another that it may not be instructive to draw many connections among them.

How T-Visa recipients trust and are trusted in their communities are essential to rebuilding their lives after trafficking. Those who were freed following raids of brothels, factories or private homes, which would’ve been domestic servitude like Carmen, by law enforcement almost immediately are asked to trust their liberators. Soon after they may find themselves interviewed not only by the local police but also the FBI, Immigration officials, state and federal prosecutors and then their own lawyers. Julie, an Indonesian woman, who was in domestic servitude in California, worried that the police and other authority figures would exploit her again. She explained, “you don’t know anyone. It’s hard to trust other people. After I got out, everyone was asking me questions. I thought what if they do the same thing to me again.”

With little scholarship on trafficked person, I draw on research with refugees and migrants to explore the process of recreating new lives in new places. I use the term trust in ways similar to E. Valentine Daniel and John Knudsen who analyze how refugees both mistrust and are mistrusted. However, although similarities emerge between these other kinds of migrants and T-Visa recipients, especially on issues related to what Gina Buijs calls the remaking of self, the groups often diverge on the issue of community support. Social service providers report that the larger community of refuges or migrants where T-Visa recipients resettle, usually composed of co-ethnics, may stigmatize or reject them. For example, one T-Visa recipient spoke out about her experiences in sexual servitude at a Haitian community-based organization meeting in New York City. The crowd was unsympathetic, questioned her judgment, and criticized her ruthlessly. Since then, the organization has not heard from her again.

By all accounts, much more outreach and education needs to reach community-based organizations that work with migrant groups. The staffs of which might hold misconceptions or stereotypes about forced labor. Maria Jose Fletcher, an attorney in Miami at the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, describes conducting a workshop in a southern state with a community-based organization where the staff referred to the co-ethnic women in the towns brothels as putas which is whores and was unaware that some of these women might be held against their will. Thus, trust also frames both how social service organizations may view exploited migrants and how these migrants may view social service organizations. While these organizations who attend to the multiple needs of trafficked persons see themselves as trustworthy, there is no self-evident reason why T-Visa recipients would automatically regard them as such. Rather, there are many disincentives for exploited persons to come forward, even to ethnic-based community-based organizations.

I hear over and over from social service providers that their clients who were in situations of forced labor want to work right away regardless of the severity of any trauma they may have suffered. Work is, after all, the reason they came to the U.S. in the first place unless, of course, they were transported against their will and I’m hard pressed to think of a case in the U.S. that looks like that, although that’s the scenario in some overseas situations. Often T-Visa recipient’s families back in their home countries have high expectations that they will send remittances and may have little understanding of how hard it is to make significant earnings in the low-paying jobs available to them. With these kinds of obligations hanging over them, T-Visa recipients often dedicate themselves to making as much money as they can even if it means working under conditions only marginally better than when they were in situations of forced labor. Working also allows them to move beyond their experiences of severe exploitation and to begin to reclaim their identity as they regain control over their lives. Regaining control over one’s life is a refrain T-Visa recipients often repeat. One T-Visa recipient, Maria, who is from the Philippines and who was held in domestic servitude explains, “I make the decisions in my life now. No one tells me what to do,” and Carmen, whose story I opened with, also notes that “no one will ever do to me again.”

As Marcelo Suarez-Orozco describes, “migrants to the U.S. often settle in areas of deep poverty where they may not find well-paying work opportunities.” Some of the Vietnamese workers from the American Samoa case who were resettled in a Vietnamese community in Orange County, for example, have capitalized on Vietnamese networks but not those in the low-income community in which they were originally settled. Rather, although they are working in Vietnamese-owned nail salons, they’ve had to move to non-Vietnamese communities to find nail salons that have a steady clientele. Since these T-Visa recipients were resettled through a Vietnamese social service agency, they had immediate access to coethnic social networks. Carmen was not so lucky. Rather, she was resettled through Safe Horizon which is the largest social service provider in New York City and it’s not affiliated with any one ethnic group, so she began building new social networks the day that she was released from domestic servitude. She landed her current job at a hotel and was introduced to her current roommates through a woman she met in a domestic violence shelter in which she was placed the day of her release. Without any family or friends from Ecuador, Carmen has had to create a new community.

Gregarious, lively, and kind, she has built a network of Spanish-speaking friends over the past couple of years, including of domestic workers through which she learns of other openings at other hotels. She is willing to try new experiences and radiates so much good will that it is easy to see why many friends have gravitated toward her. Her photo albums document holidays, weekends and vacations spent with new friends. Whether Thanksgiving at a boyfriend’s family’s house, the beach with her roommates, cousins visiting from the Dominican Republic, Carmen has built has an extensive network of friends. Similarly, Maria has tapped into an established network of Filipino domestic and childcare workers through a Philippine community-based organization in Queens, a well-run organization that counts of hundreds of members. It serves as both a social outlet with potlucks and other festivities as well as an information swap center for its members like Maria. This community organization’s activities also have helped to ignite Maria’s political consciousness. She now speaks out about her experiences in domestic servilities at different events sponsored by this organization. Yet, even with all of Maria’s support through this organization, luck still plays a major role in her working conditions.

Accepting childcare and eldercare jobs in people’s homes meaning hoping that employers stick to the contract and when Maria’s employers recently reneged on their oral agreement that they would pay her while they were on vacation—Maria was providing childcare for their daughter—Maria asserted, “I well not be taken advantage of again.” She began looking for a new job through her social networks at this Philippine community-based organization. She was willing to work in any number of jobs, she explained. “You know me, I can do anything. Clean, elders, kids, this is my life. I know I have to work.” As Alba and Nee explore in their research on contemporary migrant incorporation and mobility, not all who capitalize on coethnic networks necessarily find themselves on a path to mobility. Rather, working with ones coethnics where one learns little English, can track migrants, not just the T-Visa recipients with whom I spoke into low paying jobs with little chance for mobility.

Nancy, a woman from Mexico who had been forced into sexual servitude and now works in a factory, was frustrated that her coworkers in the factory including her manager speak Spanish. She has to seek out opportunities to use her English and proudly explains that she only speaks English when she’s out of her workplace and running errands around the neighborhood. She also takes English classes and spends most of her evenings after work studying. And I heard similar frustration expressed by two Vietnamese women who were resettled in northern Virginia from the American Samoa case. Working in Vietnamese-owned nail salons with other Vietnamese women, they have little opportunity to expand their knowledge of English beyond a few questions to customers about their nail preferences.

Here, again, research with migrants who have experienced forced labor adds to discussions in migration scholarship on social networks of coethnics. While working with one’s coethnics with whom one can speak one’s language can help prevent those traumatized by their experiences in forced labor from sinking into patterns of social isolation, it also can limit economic mobility and as much help social networks of coethnics can be during the resettlement process, in the case of T-Visa recipients who have been exploited by coethnics, coethnics can be a source of stress. Fear of reprisals at the hands of the exploiters’ associates or shame amongst one’s coethnics can be especially acute when the exploiter is a well-known member of the community.

This was the case in Berkeley, California with a fellow named Lakireddy Bali Reddy who was a well-established and well-respected restaurant owner. Reddy’s victims, young girls from his home village in India who were forced to work 14-hour days in his restaurants and apartment buildings and whom he also raped on a regular basis, were stigmatized and ostracized within the local Indian community. Thus, as they seek to put their situations of abuse behind them, T-Visa recipients may avoid working or living with coethnics.

Rosa, a Mexican women who was forced to have sex in Mexican-run brothels in New York City that catered to Mexican clients now works, for example, in a restaurant owned by a family from India but still a former customer recognized her and told one of Rosa’s best friends that he had met her in a brothel.

Consequently, as some T-Visa recipients actively look for work in housing outside of their ethnic communities while others depend and capitalize on social networks of coethnics, their resettlement process raises new questions within migration scholarship on the role of ethnic solidarity and ethnic enclaves. Although unfortunately there are cases of servitude that are so extreme that they can be mapped easily at one end of a continuum of exploitation, there also are many stories that are not so clear-cut. Rather, many of the cases of migrant worker exploitation beg the question of how to evaluate one exploited practice against another or weigh one individual’s trauma against another. Indeed, there is an absurd quality to parsing out different degrees of exploitation.

One service provider for domestic workers, Joy Zarembka of the Break the Chain Campaign in Washington, D.C., often tells workshop audiences of fellow service providers that even though trafficking is defined as coercion, often it can be easier to prepare a client’s case to get a T-Visa when a client has been physically abused by her employer. Moreover, it also can be difficult to draw clear distinctions between the settlement struggles of T-Visa recipients and their coworkers and neighbors whose experiences may not rise to the occasion of trafficking under the TVPA. Joyce Zarembka has observed that the settlement process in fact for both groups parallels one another even if the women have suffered severe abuse, so if a range of migrant workers experience a range of workplace protection violations, how does this relate to understanding the scope, the numbers game, of trafficking to the United States?

One of the most remarkable aspects of the TVPA is that it was passed without reliable data on how many individuals are in situations of forced labor or servitude in the U.S. With servitude cases slow to surface and virtually no rigorous scholarship available on servitude in the U.S., I am skeptical that there are tens of thousands of labor cases in the U.S. There is serious scholarship, however, on migrant exploitation in various sites where migrants labor. Scholarship on sweatshops, domestic work, agriculture, poultry processing and day laborers and there are model advocacy organizations that call attention to and fight widespread abuses, large and small, of labor migrants.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, an agricultural workers membership-based advocacy organization located in Immokalee, Florida is a model of how to combat a range of migrant worker exploitation. They combine both labor organizing and investigative work. The CIW Coalition of Immokalee Workers has members, for example, who have gone undercover to different farms as laborers to gather information on forced labor cases, several of which have been federally prosecuted under the TVPA and some of the folks who have done this have been trafficked themselves and they’re recipients of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award. And van drivers who ferry laborers from farm to farm also have served as sources of information. These kind of ground-up streams of ongoing documentation of exploitation are critical to bringing more cases of forced labor and servitude to light. They also are essential since migrant workers, even those not severely exploited can be fearful of speaking out about abusive pay practices, safety violations or other illegal labor conditions.

Migrant worker union organizers emphasize that exploitation is an inevitable part of migrant workers’ experiences. With an atmosphere of fear and intimidation prevalent in work sites even when there are no practices of severe exploitation, it’s not hard to imagine other factors that may discourage brutally exploited workers from coming forward. These factors help illuminate why the numbers of officially trafficked persons are maybe so low. Of course, these jobs may pay below minimum wage and violate safety and other workplace protections, but for some migrants fleeing even more severely abusive conditions, a job that pays poorly is still better than the risk involved with going to the authorities. In their calculus, low pay trumps the risk of deportation or the threat of retaliation for speaking out.

Ethnographic research that documents the every-day struggles of T-Visa recipients and of those who work in situations of forced labor who did not receive T-Visa counters the sensationalistic tenor of trafficking stories in the media with on-the-ground details on analysis of these migrants’ daily mundane concerns, goals and successes. Yet as much as research with migrants who were in situations of forced labor or servitude, echoes the stories of so many other migrants, it will also pose new questions for migration scholars.

As some T-Visa recipients turn their back on their communities or their communities turn away from them, research with migrants who were in situations of forced labor challenges assumptions about migrants’ use of coethnic networks and desire to live or work in ethnic enclaves. And they seek to return to work right away and build new networks of friends and colleagues, they also counter media portrayals of trafficking victims as passive dupes, easy prey for traffickers. At the same time, their post-trafficking work experiences exposes them once again to exploitation.

More future ethnographic research with these migrants not only will highlight the range of exploitation that permeates work sites for migrants’ labor but also underscore their courage and resiliency. These migrants, after all, had sought to migrate to the U.S. for new jobs and new lives.