ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores human trafficking within the global context that is encouraging its proliferation, and shows how its manifestation in the United States (US) Mexican borderlands is assuming its own distinctive shape reflecting regional conditions. The steady stream of news about the border violence mostly focuses on drug trafficking and gun running, the better known forms of the illicit border trade. Mexico's role in the human trafficking chains that increasingly blanket the globe is not simply as a transit site for victims from Central America or elsewhere in the Global South attempting to enter the US, either as their final stop or before being trafficked somewhere else. Human trafficking dwarfs most kinds of crime in creating public disdain and igniting punitive impulses. Both globally and regionally, human trafficking reflects a broad range of causal conditions that are allowing it to flourish in the 21st century.