Alicia Hull describes how governments around the world are increasingly treating ordinary people as slaves.
Author: Alicia Hull
Slavery is the result of three profound losses: the loss of home, the right over one's own body and political status. Once a person's humanity is denied, their body is a commodity that can be exploited or destroyed with impunity. State trafficking is now widespread even in democratic countries, although it directly opposes agreed principles and laws which declare all people equal and asylum a right.
Dr Hyab Yohannes, the UNESCO chair on refugee integration and an author, lecturing at Glasgow University, was once a refugee. He describes ‘unbecoming’ the citizen he was, losing his status and the protection of his country to join an extremely vulnerable group defined by the fear of persecution. Even countries, like the UK, that are legally bound to accept asylum seekers, try to ban all but the very rich and provide intolerable, humiliating and uncertain conditions.
State trafficking was first made legal in Australia. Refugees from Afghanistan were hijacked and detained in detention centres outside the country by Special Forces in cooperation with a UN agency. This was legitimised by the Australian Border Protection Bill. It followed years of propaganda branding refugees as 'the enemy' to make border security an important talking point to the public. The practice and rhetoric became endemic globally in neoliberal policies.
For example, a few years ago, on the Mexico border, US officials separated children from their parents, deported the parents, but hijacked the children. Then Trump cancelled all visas to make refugees in Egypt stateless with no possibility of help. Recently, Trump has taken power over state governments and police to create a large national force, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), to abduct and deport people who had lived and worked in communities for years, to the horror of local citizens. Similarly, across Europe, refugees have faced abuse and torture by state militias and traffickers.
The large increase in migration is a major issue. It needs to be tackled as a necessary expense as parts of the world become uninhabitable or hostile. Governments have the power to provide safe, legal routes to deny criminal activity; the power to help refugees to integrate while respecting their culture; and the power to work with others to stop the need for migration. Instead, closing borders to all but the very rich and treating refugees as enemies has added more brutality to a damaged world and wasted the lives of many gifted people who could have enriched us all.
Some countries, like the UK, are better placed to welcome refugees. We had benefited hugely from foreign labour in the past and still need many skilled and unskilled foreign workers to keep services going. We are a multicultural society in places, but David Cameron encouraged state trafficking across Europe instead of following Angela Merkel’s humane response. UK policy is hypocritical as it welcomes rich migrants. Oligarchs, companies and other governments have been encouraged to steal our land, resources and profits while providing inadequate services and polluting our environment. Rich immigrants have caused our social crises, not the poorer ones who were refused entry.
Neoliberalism returned the West to the exploitation and violence of the colonial era. But it is even more damaging because of the scale of fossil fuelled industries, invasive science and technology, speculative banking and trade rules. Also, the global marketplace and mass communications provide perfect opportunities for culture clashes and tensions.
Before neoliberalism and nuclear states, including the UK, broke international law to hang on to the status of nuclear domination. They destroyed the democratic consensus of 1945, weakened international law generally, ruined economies and started the lies that have corrupted governments ever since. So that today, war criminals control international affairs, are allowed to make speeches at the UN and are supported by other nominally democratic countries. The neoliberal privatisation of conventional arms compounded the problem. Claimed falsely as a national asset, the profits go to companies, but many costs to taxpayers. It has produced countless new weapons and excuses for war. ‘Defence’ policies are a major threat to our survival and a major cause of migration.
Neoliberalism has created countless domestic problems, too, with victims vilified. In the UK, Thatcher’s pursuit of low wages decimated industrial societies and made us dependent on foreign imports. All neoliberal policies are disastrous because they bring capitalism into government. This drives gross inequality between and within countries, and unsustainable consumption to pollute and degrade the environment. Speculative banking brought the crash of 2008 and continues to increase prices. Privatisation’s business practices destroy democratic accountability and, by stealing public assets, it channels wealth to corporations and away from essential services, local economies and people. While stabilising work of planning, monitoring, regulating and supporting families and communities is of no interest.
It can only be sold to the public by lies and tight control of public debate, so lies and corruption are endemic.
Every trick and false assumption is used to persuade and divide. In our scientific world, we do not know how many things work, and so we have to rely on others' opinions. Unfortunately, it is natural to believe that the most common view is true, which leaves us vulnerable to lies. Just as democracies have been in the past.
Policy decisions do not address real problems, but cater for a delusional, parallel world and phoney economy. Kier Starmer counters promises to tackle the very real environmental emergency. Instead, he offers more fossil fuelled development and the dubious technologies that produced the crises in the first place. Nor does his ‘solution’ address the cost-of-living crisis, as results will be long-term.
A tightly controlled media, including BBC news, has normalised violence and genocide, increased religious and racial tensions and a blaming culture in public debate to the distress of many. However, the failures and horrors of neoliberalism are so comprehensive and so visible that a huge proportion of the global population has not been subverted.
Thousands of protesters in a variety of campaigns have informed the public of injustice and incompetence, but failed to change government policy. Instead, oppression has increased. Even harsher conditions for refugees and support for illegal wars go alongside prosecuting protestors as traitors, while violence against refugees goes unpunished and even changes policy.
Countless more people try by individual or community action to counter the effects of policies. Organic farmers, environmentalists, community kitchens, allotments and self-help communities show the principles to follow and have succeeded in transforming local life. But without changing the global economy and trade rules, they cannot avert environmental catastrophe. Both these groups come up against the brick wall of government inaction. Also, representative democracy is too slow to react to emergencies and too short-term to be consistent.
However, the third group, including La Vie Campesine, Diem25 and Citizen Network, could be the solution to ending state trafficking and all the other horrors of neoliberalism. They address policy as the root cause of all our emergencies. Talking directly with each other and experts to avoid the misinformation in the media, their policies give power and autonomy to citizens in a decentralised system. All are supported by a living allowance in an economy that obeys the laws of physics and nature, aims for general well-being, and invests in social and environmental goods using the precautionary principle. This is the sane, humane alternative, but too few people are involved as the media has kept it buried.
The vast numbers in the first two groups could alter the balance by also supporting grassroots policies. (Membership of Citizen Network is free.) The work is ongoing, so they can add to it with their knowledge. All three groups working together could succeed.
Conditions in our world now depend on human choices.
It is our job to ensure the public hears of this hopeful alternative and can voice support. Across Europe, Diem25 is forming political parties. In the UK, our corrupt voting system makes this untenable, but once an agreed public manifesto gets significant support, no government can stand against it, as they rely on our labour.
The publisher is Citizen Network. What is State Trafficking and How Can We Stop it? © Alicia Hull 2025.
nature & economics, politics, social justice, England, Article
