ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how US politicians were able to pass The Trafficking Victims Protection Act allowing for the creation of the T-visa, an immigration benefit. The chapter posits that Democratic and Republican lawmakers were able to do so through ideologically converging around notions of racial difference. Through a close reading of congressional hearings and debates around the trafficking bill this chapter shows how lawmakers framed their arguments to pass what would become the Trafficking Act in the context of anti-immigrant sentiment. Analysis reveals that lawmakers relied on the ideal trafficking victim—European sex trafficked women—to position the law as a human rights law. At the same time, it used non-white trafficking victims to advance the punishment prong of the Act. This chapter argues that lawmakers used racial difference to position the Trafficking Act as a human rights-based bill rather than an immigration bill, which ultimately works to uphold the racial regime of immigration law and has implications for racialized and gendered notions of national belonging.
