Promises and Pitfalls: Civil Society’s Imperfect Efforts to Address Trafficking and Displacement

Abstract

Civil society plays a vital role in providing services and advocating for vulnerable populations.This dissertation includes three papers that examine how civil society actors aim to fill in the gaps left by governmental and market failure to address social issues. These studies address human trafficking and environmental migration, complex human rights issues that suffer from a lack of precise definitions and entail providing services for displaced individuals. The findings highlight ways potential donors, NGOs, and labor unions offer promising avenues for combatting these issues. However, the results also illustrate different types of failures within civil society, highlighting areas for improvement in how these actors should better serve marginalized people. Following an introduction, the first paper examines dominant narratives of human trafficking in the United States. Sensational stories of human trafficking perpetuate a narrative that often misrepresents the true nature of the problem. These stories typically depict a young girl or woman who is sex trafficked and overshadow other cases, such as the labor trafficking of boys and men. The widespread dissemination of these stories from the media, news, and political discourse shapes the public’s understanding of what it looks like. Do these stories also affect who donors perceive as most deserving of their aid? This is an important question because civil society is essential to anti-trafficking efforts in the United States. Furthermore, civil society plays a critical role in anti-trafficking policymaking. Thus, it’s necessary to understand if donor preferences align with these dominant narratives. I conduct a nationally representative survey experiment of potential U.S. donors to examine this. I ask individuals to choose between two fictitious charities to donate to, each serving a different type of trafficking survivor. I theorize that donors will be most likely to support legal services for young girls who are sex trafficked and are non-U.S. citizens. I find support for three out of five of my hypotheses. Overall, donors are most likely to support housing services for young girls who have been sex trafficked and are U.S. citizens. The second paper takes a closer look at labor trafficking in the United States. Labor trafficking remains a concealed and pervasive issue in the United States, overshadowed by the more recognized problem of sex trafficking. A recent analysis revealed that 80% of labor trafficking victims were migrant workers, underscoring the urgent need for attention. Employers often do not face pushback from migrant workers due to issues such as their fear of deportation, visa revocation, language barriers, and lack of community support. Thus, community activists and civil society play an important role in advocating for this population. In response to the prevailing human rights and carceral frameworks to address human trafficking, the paper advocates for a labor rights approach, positioning labor unions as central protectors of workers. I argue that labor protections warrant a collective voice because individual workers, especially migrants, lack the structural power to confront employers. Through a qualitative analysis of 100 U.S. labor union websites, this study explores whether and how these unions address labor trafficking and provide specific migrant protections. I find that unions in sectors with high immigrant salience, such as agriculture, construction, and hospitality, are more likely to include online programming and information directed to migrant members and to protect members from labor exploitation. The third paper turns to environmental migration to assess how migration and refugee organizations in the United States engage with this issue. Climate change is causing widespread environmental degradation and increased frequency and severity of natural disasters, leading to displacement and migration. However, limitations in international refugee law and growing xenophobia decrease the likelihood of sufficient state action in providing environmental migrants with essential services necessary for everyday living. In response to government failure, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) will likely emerge as crucial actors in providing services for and advocating on behalf of environmental migrants. What factors are associated with migration and refugee organizations expanding their work to invest in the link between climate change and migration? This question will only become more significant as climate change worsens. Using data from organization websites and public tax forms, I analyze this question by creating an original dataset of 110 migration and refugee organizations in the United States. This study focuses on organizations that serve cross-border environmental migrants rather than internally displaced persons. I further analyze the driving mechanisms by conducting four in-depth interviews - two with organizations that do indicate investing in environmental migration on their website and two with organizations that do not. My findings support a supply-side theory that suggests that more revenue significantly influences whether an organization actively invests in programs and advocacy focused on environmental migration. I theorize that organizations with more significant financial capacity can go beyond low-cost virtue signaling about their commitment to environmental justice and instead invest resources in this issue. On the contrary, I do not find support for the demand-side theory, where I posited that organizations working in countries more vulnerable to climate change are more likely to invest in environmental migration.