Smith bill to combat traffic of humans for labor and sex advances

Flight attendants, hotel clerks and government purchasing officers would join prosecutors and diplomats in the global fight against trafficking human beings for sex or labor under a bill sponsored by Rep. Chris Smith that the House Foreign Affairs Committee approved in a unanimous voice vote Wednesday.

Smith, a Republican from Mercer County, was an original sponsor of the 2000 Trafficking Victims Protection Act, and the latest renewal of that law -- most federal statutes must renewed periodically or they expire -- would be named in honor of abolitionist Frederick Douglass ahead of the 200th anniversary of his birth next year.

The bill authorizes spending $130 million over four years and continues the law's core functions, including the State Department's annual Trafficking in Persons report that grades every country in the world into tiers about how much they do to combat trafficking.

This provision shamed some countries into improving their domestic law enforcement, Smith said, but there were also allegations that President Obama's administration unjustifiably upgraded rankings for such countries as Malaysia and Cuba for political reasons.

Smith's bill would require President Donald Trump's administration to disclose the reasons for any changes to ratings, and for countries to be upgraded there would have to be evidence of sustained improvement.

"If Trump does what Obama did, I will be as critical of him," Smith said in an interview. "Because if you talk about victims, they don't care who's in power, they just know they're being hurt."

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The bill seeks to target labor trafficking by trying to improve enforcement of a 1930 law that bans the importation of goods made by slaves, and making government contractors accountable if they use such products.

"We don't enforce that very well, and we've got a lot of gulag-made, sweatshop-made types of goods coming here, and that's trafficking," Smith said.

Criminal enforcement would also be enhanced by requiring more Justice Department prosecutors be assigned to trafficking cases.The existing law's definitions say any minor involved in prostitution is a trafficking victim, even if the child is not physically transported. The new bill provides grants for school programs to educate potentially vulnerable minors about how to resist being drawn into prostitution, and encourages job training for trafficking survivors.

'There's a special emphasis on when they're 14 years of age," Smith said. "That is the vulnerable age, when they get drawn in."