Every year, an unknown number of foreign guest workers in South Florida and the rest of the nation disappear into the worlds of sexual slavery and domestic servitude.
A broad coalition of liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, in both the U.S. Senate and House, said Thursday its proposed Visa Transparency Anti-Trafficking Act would help solve the problem by providing much more information to law enforcement and victim advocates.
"Human trafficking is our society's modern-day slavery, and unfortunately is one of the most profitable criminal enterprises in the world," said U.S. Rep. Lois Frankel, a Palm Beach County Democrat. She described South Florida as a trafficking "hotspot."
Increased awareness has gone in recent years to American children, who run away or are lured from home, and end up trafficked into sexual or domestic slavery.
But, said several experts on a telephone news conference with Frankel, it's a major problem among foreign workers who get temporary work visas to work in the country. U.S. Rep. Ted Deutch, a Democrat who represents Broward and Palm Beach counties, who also was on the call, said it could involve "hundreds of thousands" of people who come to the country for work and then are forced into slavery.
Contributing to the problem is the way the government handles information about the people who get visas to come to work in the United States, Deutch said.
"The process for issuing visas across the government is messy. And because of that, right under our noses, human traffickers are able to exploit major gaps in our visa program," Deutch said. "We're failing to detect human traffickers who are abusing the system."
That's not just the view from South Florida Democrats. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, one of the most conservative lawmakers in Washington, said the proposed new law is designed to "shine a light on the practices of these slave traders and human traffickers."
The proposal would take information the government now collects about the temporary work visa applicants, the people who help them apply, and their employers, and make it much more widely available. Right now, Cruz and Deutch said, the information is tightly held, and not even law enforcement can comb through the data to figure out patterns: who's disappearing, which unscrupulous employment services brought them to the country, which employers were involved.
They want to the data published so law enforcement and victim advocacy organizations can identify and stop problems at the sources _ and prosecute people responsible for human trafficking.
