A better curator of “Modern slavery” would have been Karen E Bravo or Julia O'Connell Davidson.

This movement and it’s ideas are based on anti blackness and devaluing slavery

Thread https://twitter.com/SlaveryMuseum/status/1278300322964934658

I’ll start by saying the curator in question didn’t come up with these ideas. It‘s from Kevin Bales who was a consultant for the UN treaty on trafficking from 2000 (hence why she claims this concept is only 20 years). She also alludes to his book “disposable people”.

Modern slavery or trafficking is not a new concept. It’s been around since the late 1800s, the first anti trafficking treaty was signed in 1904.
This narrative that prostitution by white citizens is worse than chattel slavery was, and continues to be, very popular.

This narrative is resurrected every time there’s a wave of mass migration into wealthy nations. The narrative tends to go: “slavery is being imported into our ‘free’ societies from poor countries, and it’s bigger and worse than the slavery our societies are built on!”

These countries humanize and celebrate slave owners as heroes and founders of their “free and democratic” societies.
Smugglers & traffickers on the other hand are imagined by the state, police, and the media to be foreign men and or men of color.

Keep in mind that anyone who is a third party or helping with illegal immigration or sex work (regardless of abuse, or arrangement) falls under the category of smuggler/trafficker by law.

This article is mostly about undocumented immigrants. The “expert” claims that it’s like chattel slavery except it’s not race based oppression and...that our lives are more disposable (our lives matter less & we’re more likely to die) than chattel slaves (black people).

I was smuggled to the US when I was 5 years old and despite the suffering it caused, it’s not comparable to slavery. If I have a child, that child gets to be a citizen. I’m viewed as a human being, not property in the eyes of the law. The differences are huge.

This quote from this article is so offensively bad:

“In the transatlantic slave trade, the focus of slave traders was on Africa and the high cost of transporting these people meant that once they were enslaved they were often maintained and reproduced”

You have to have a really warped idea of what it means to be maintained and to not be disposable in order to think that chattel slaves were better off then undocumented immigrants. Many Black people died on the voyage alone. Unlike us, they weren’t even allowed to read.

A list of Kevin Bales ideas can be found here:
http://gorhistory.com/hist420/DisposablePeople.html

He claims that chattel slaves were too expensive to kill.
He claims the cost of a “modern slave” today is $100 - 500. This is a funny number because it’s obvious where he got it from.

It’s pretty clear that what’s being described isn’t slavery but a job. Hence why we’re “used over and over again”.

The average undocumented immigrant does not make $100-$500, most wage workers don’t either.

This is the amount sex workers usually charge per hour.

Here’s a another big difference between the transatlantic slave trade and undocumented immigration.

We pay thousands of dollars to our smuggler to help us cross the border that’s these governments want us out of. Most of us agree to pay off the debt these journeys cost.

So it becomes even more interesting that the price of a “modern-day slave” when talking about immigration is put at $100-$500 because the debt from crossing illegally is always in the thousands. My trip cost 10k.

Kevin Bales & anti trafficking “experts” consider sex workers to be the most profitable workers. Which doesn’t make sense.

The most profitable businesses pay workers the least.
Meaning immigrants getting less than minimum wage & chattel slaves paid nothing are more profitable

Now that you know that this is on sex work.
You can guess what I think about the idea that we’re used over and over until someone new comes along. Or that we’re only functional for a few years before “being thrown away”. Basically we’re only valuable when we’re really young

One of the main issues with this article is that it places the blame for all the violence & death that immigrants face on our smugglers and employers.

And not on the fact that the US and UK purposely created deadly policies against us. The goal was that we would die/suffer.

In these comparisons the use of the words “undocumented” or “illegal immigration“ is avoided.
The obvious comparison of being denied voting rights & citizenship is left out.

Karen E Bravo says these narratives don’t challenge power, it exploits slavery to gain public support