CMA Celebrates it’s 10th Year Anniversary Last December 2012

Our Intern Chandra Merry made a Newsletter.

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

University degree must to obtain UAE visa

B’deshi manpower sector to face fatal blow

FE Report, Dhaka

Tourists from South Asian countries including Bangladesh that export labour to the UAE (United Arab Emirates) will require a university degree to get a visa, reported an international news agency quoted the Gulf News daily Tuesday.

Electricians, pipe fitters, masons, farmers, drivers, tailors and cleaners from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Philippines are now banned from obtaining a tourist visa, said the daily citing a senior immigration official. The new measure sets a university degree as a prerequisite to obtain a visa, the official said.

“The Federal Residency Department has decided to adopt stricter regimes for tourist, visit and conference visas to curb the influx of blue-collar workers from many labour exporting countries,” said the official. “This would help significantly reduce the risk that individuals engaged in organised crime or the trafficking of persons could gain entry to the country,” he said.

Bangladeshi migration experts said following the measure adopted by the UAE, the malpractice of labour sending process will be reduced significantly. But the people who are non-graduate and intend to go to the oil-rich country for job or business purposes are going to face big setback due to the recent restriction, they also said.

Tourist visas are usually arranged through hotels or airlines and travel agents. Tourism grew rapidly in the UAE, especially in the glitzy emirate of Dubai, where the number of tourists increased to 9.3 million in 2011, up 10 percent from the previous year.

The UAE has millions of foreign workers, mostly from South Asian countries. The expat-dominated population is estimated to have grown to around 8.2 million by the end of 2010, with UAE nationals making up only 11.47 per cent.

Thanks for your patience

published in race-talk, a blog hosted by the Kirwan Institute for the Study of race and ethnicity of the Ohio State University

By Grace Chang,

Recently in U.S. media and public policy discourses alike, the term “human trafficking” has become synonymous with “trafficking into sex work,” and this in turn has been equated with “sexual slavery” and “prostitution.”  Human trafficking, while primarily an issue of coerced labor–and sometimes coerced movement–is rarely seen as a labor issue.  Instead, it has been framed almost exclusively as an issue of “Violence against Women” or “Sexual Violence.”

Yet in trafficking cases the labor involved is not predominantly sexual labor, nor does the violence encompassed in trafficking always involve sexual violence.  The forms of violence enacted in human trafficking are numerous and varied:  racial, economic, imperialist, and sexual (and then, not just against women).  It’s no wonder that the American public has missed these “subtle nuances” of human trafficking, with the kinds of stories that have dominated our media.

Also, the federal government has focused its efforts almost exclusively on prosecution within the sex industry, even though the second clause of The Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) defines “severe forms of trafficking” as:  “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 subjecting that person to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.”

In my research in the United States, I have found that this second clause could be applied to every sector where immigrant workers are prevalent, and their race, class, gender, immigration status, and lack of worker rights make them vulnerable to extreme labor exploitation. Yet U.S. media and the American public are generally either unaware or uninterested in anything but the sensationalized issue of trafficking into sex work.  This is despite the fact that anti-trafficking advocates across the country consistently report that in the United States the industry people are most commonly trafficked in and into is domestic work, not sex work.

The U.S. government itself has questioned the effectiveness of anti-trafficking policy, with a 2006 State Department report noting that in the first five years since the passage of the TVPA, only 616 people benefited from the law through receiving T-visas (a form of immigration status offered to some trafficking survivors), while in 2002 the State Department estimated that 50,000 people are trafficked within and into the United States every year.

Advocates say that this gap can easily be accounted for by people trafficked in industries other than the sex industry, who are not recognized or treated as such under the law.  I’d argue further that the government’s true goal in the intensive focus on trafficking into sex work is not to serve victims of trafficking but instead to serve its own agenda to:  a) criminalize sex workers and b) divert attention from forms of trafficking that could be identified as U.S. government-sponsored.  These include instances of labor trafficking that are tolerated by the government or, worse, directly orchestrated through U.S. policy and practice, such as guest worker programs dating back to the Bracero era, in which primarily Mexican men were imported and exploited as temporary low-wage workers to fill WWII labor “shortages.”

Two recent cases of extreme labor abuses of immigrant workers in construction and meatpacking industries illustrate this phenomenon well.  These cases are examples of the way violations of labor rights can become a trafficking situation.  In 2006, Signal International, a marine construction company, hired 500 skilled metalworkers from India under the H-2B guest worker program, to repair oil rigs off the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. The workers paid recruiters $20,000 each and were promised green cards to work legally in the United States.  They suffered deplorable living conditions, including 24 people to a room in work camps, for which they had $1,050 deducted from their wages.  They began organizing, including staging a hunger strike, and turned themselves in to the Justice Department, hoping for assistance.

Recent evidence has emerged that a government agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), had helped and advised Signal how to remove workers who had organized, in particular.  When the workers began to complain, the company retaliated and received guidance from ICE on how to remove “chronic whiners” who were threatening to organize broader protests, “if for no other reason than to send a message to the remaining workers that it is not in their best interests to try and ‘push’ the system.”

Similarly, a case involving workers at the Agriprocessors kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa were subjected to more than just a raid in May of 2008, when 389 people were arrested and detained.  Of the mostly Guatemalan migrants, about 30 were women and about 18 were children between the ages of 14 and17.  Despite these gross violations of labor and child labor laws by Agriprocessors, the migrant workers arrested at the plant were treated as criminals rather than victims and targeted to be “made examples of” by the U.S. government.  They were charged with aggravated identity theft, with a minimum sentence of two years in prison. (Even though the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in May of 2009 that this charge cannot be applied unless a person knowingly uses the identity of a real person, this ruling came too late for the Postville workers.)  Many of the detainees served prison sentences for 5 months, while some of the managers at the plant (with 9,311 identified counts of child labor violations) were able to flee the country shortly after the raid.

These two cases represent labor exploitation of workers certainly fitting the definition of trafficking.  In the Agriprocessors case, teenaged children were employed in the slaughter of animals with power machinery yet because they were not engaged in commercial sex, they were not identified as trafficking victims.  Nor were the children who were separated from their parents who were arrested, detained, and deported.  The media barely picked up these stories, yet we are bombarded with stories of child sexual slavery every day and told that this is the central story, the “face” of human trafficking.  While U.S. media and policymakers distract us with the smoke and mirrors of combating trafficking worldwide, the U.S. government plays more than an incidental role in violations that could well be identified as trafficking here in the United States.

—-

Grace Chang is a writer and activist in struggles for immigrant, labor and welfare rights of migrant women and women of color in the United States. Her essays have appeared in Radical America, Socialist Review, and several anthologies.  She was a co-editor of Mothering:  Ideology, Experience and Agency (Routledge, 1994) and is the author of Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy (South End Press, 2000).  She serves on the research advisory board for a project with the National Domestic Workers Alliance and works with Lideres Campesinas, Coastal Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE), the Applied Research Center and the DataCenter on a research project with immigrant women farm workers.  Currently, she teaches Feminist Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara and is working on a book, Trafficking by Any Other Name:  Transnational Feminist, Immigrant and Sex Worker Rights Responses.

When you register, please be reminded of the following:

• A nominal registration fee is required to ensure your participation to the WSFM. The fees will be paid on-site in Manila, Philippines. For information on registration fees please see: http://www.wsfm2012.org/participation/costs
• Ensure that the required fields are completed to avoid further delays
• Those who are interested to join the field visits, please do not forget to signify your interest by completing the appropriate fields. The deadline for registration for the  field visits is on 20 October 2012. For more information on the field visits please see:   http://www.wsfm2012.org/program/fieldvisit
• The deadline for online registration is on 15 November 2012.

We will be very grateful if you would circulate this information to your colleagues, friends, partners and networks.

Courage, Peace and Power in a life full of meaning,

William Gois

Regional Coordinator

Chandra Merry, our intern from CAPI/ Canada and I witnessed this fruit of our years of lobby with other OFW organizations, migrant NGOs, trade unions, Visayan Forum and domestic workers’ organizations, etc. The gallery packed to the rafters included domestic workers themselves. We also saw the DOLE Secretary, the Administrators of both POEA and OWWA, the DFA, ILO and some LGU officials.The DFA has to deposit the instrument of ratification to the ILO Director General in Geneva.

For us in CMA, we call on ILO Member States to likewise ratify the Convention 189. We also call on our partner organizations in these States to  continue lobbying for the Convention.

Likewise, we call on Congress to pass our Domestic Workers’ Law (Kasambahay Bill). 

In addition, there should be close and strict monitoring of their implementation…