High demand for nurses raises threat of human trafficking

Immigrant nurses coerced into filling shortage in U.S.

Nurses today are trained to look for signs that their patients may be victims of human trafficking.

But what if a nurse is herself being trafficked?

“Wages credited against debt. Demand for payment. Deportation. Confiscated passports. Threats of arrest. ... Does it sound familiar?” asked Patricia M. Speck, professor and coordinator of Advanced Forensic Nursing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Speck spoke during an Ohio Human Trafficking Awareness Day event Thursday in Columbus. Normally the annual conference focuses on the scourge of trafficking in the sex trade, in agricultural fields, and in restaurants. But demand is increasing for health-care workers at a time when, as Speck put it, nurses are often still a “line item” in hospital budgets. That has helped to fuel an industry of suppliers who seek to meet the demand by bringing in immigrant skilled nurses from impoverished countries, like the Philippines.

In some cases they even become members of their nurses unions in closed shops.

“It’s not unlike most kinds of recruiting,” said Emily Dunlap, staff attorney with Advocating Opportunity, providing legal services and advocacy to trafficking victims.

“Promises are made ...,” she said. “People are in situations that are not ideal. They may not have the economic opportunity they would like, maybe have families to support . ... All of a sudden somebody comes along and says there’s an amazing opportunity available. I can get you a visa that will bring you to the United States, and you can work in your profession, a skilled profession, and you’ll make a lot of money, and you’ll be able to send it home to your family.”

And then reality sets in after arrival.

“They are away from their support system in an unfamiliar place where they may not be as familiar with their rights and what the law can do for them,” Dunlap said. “Now they’re stuck. Now they’re under control of the person that brought them over.”

They’ve been coerced into signing contracts that trap them into employment, an “indentured situation” as Speck described it.

State Sen. Teresa Fedor (D., Toledo), now in the 11th year of the awareness days she started at the Ohio Statehouse, said she was shocked when she first heard about a sector of human trafficking that had not occurred to her.

“It’s happening here in Ohio,” she said. “Just like we discovered with the commercial sex trafficking, we can go after this . ... I’m still seriously wondering how this can be.”

As America ages but hospital budgets remain stagnant, demand for lower-wage, but skilled health care workers is expected to continue to rise in health care facilities and in the home. That has helped to create a market that traffickers are seeking to fill for profit.

Speck noted there is expected to be a shortage this year of 808,000 nurses.

“Pretty much nurses outside the U.S. are considered a commodity,” she said. “They come to the U.S. and they send their money home. They might as well as be corn or electronics.”

As has become the tradition, the awareness day began with a prayer and the lighting of a candle to remember trafficking victims who didn’t survive.

“We are fighting something that is very evil, absolutely evil,” Fedor said.

A push for more awareness about trafficking began in Ohio with a 2005 federal sting operation in Harrisburg, Pa. Of 177 women and girls caught up in that sting, 77, including a 10-year-old girl, were from the Toledo area.

That event put Toledo on the statistical map with cities like Miami and Las Vegas as a major recruiting hub for sex trafficking.

Over the years since then Ohio has enacted laws to treat those arrested for sex trafficking more like victims than prostitutes, increase access to treatment and assistance, and increase penalties for the traffickers who sell their services and the “johns” who buy them.

Fedor’s current goal is to get a bill to Gov. Mike DeWine’s desk to rid Ohio of a disparity in current law that has a higher burden of proof to prosecute traffickers who specialize in 16 and 17-yearolds compared to those who exploit younger minors.

Also among those participating in the forum were Lucas County Juvenile Court Judge Connie F. Zemmelman; Peter Swartz, detective with the FBI’s northwest Ohio human-trafficking task force; Lucas County Sheriff John Tharp; FBI Special Agent Alex O. Hunt with the task force; and Rachelle VanAken, forensic program coordinator with Promedica North Region.