Gold, Scams, and Ph(f)ishing: Migrant Trafficking in SE Asia and S Africa

Abstract:

The talk will examine human trafficking for labour in Southeast Asia and South Africa in three sectors: mining (South Africa), fishing (Thailand), and scamming (Cambodia). It will argue that all three reflect intersections of criminality, capital, and labour that are at times comparable and at times contrasting. Trafficking in mining and fishing is facilitated by surplus labour in Southeast Asia and Southern Africa. Fishing and scamming depend on a business model based on high volume and low returns. Criminal organizations control illegal mining and scamming but not fishing. Insatiable consumer demand drives trafficking in fishing and mining, whilst state involvement anchors the scamming sector. Human trafficking in all three sectors depends on extensive high- and low-level corruption.

About the Speaker:

Randall Hansen is the Canada Research Chair in the Department of Political Science and Director of the Global Migration Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School. He works on migration & citizenship, eugenics & population policy, and the effect of war on civilian populations.

He has published five books – War, Work, and Want: How the OPEC Oil Crisis Generated Revolution & Mass Migration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023); Fire & Fury: the Allied Bombing of Germany and Japan (London: Faber, 2020); Disobeying Hitler: German Resistance after July 20, 1944 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), Sterilized by the State: Eugenics, Race and the Population Scare in 20th Century North America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), Fire & Fury: the Allied Bombing of Germany (New York: Penguin, 2009), and Citizenship and Immigration in Post-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) – and numerous peer-reviewed articles.

He has also co-edited Immigration and Public Opinion in Liberal Democracies (with David Leal and Gary P. Freeman) (New York: Routledge, 2012), Migration, States and International Cooperation (with Jeannette Money and Jobst Koehler, Routledge, 2011), Towards a European Nationality (with Patrick Weil, Palgrave, 2001), Dual Nationality, Social Rights, and Federal Citizenship in the U.S. and Europe (with Patrick Weil, Berghahn, 2002), and Immigration and asylum from 1900 to the present [with M. Gibney, ABC-CLIO, 2005].