When slavery is next door
Human trafficking is called America’s invisible crime.
It’s not invisible; it’s just a crime we don’t want to see.
Claudia Connor has been telling me about her work for about 45 minutes. Connor, a Norwalk resident, is president and CEO of Connecticut Institute for Refugees and Immigrants (CIRI). She offered to meet me in their Stamford branch on Woodland Avenue, but I preferred doing it at the agency’s headquarters, a nondescript house on Clinton Avenue in Bridgeport. Sometimes it’s better to ponder the local view from a distance.
That Connor narrates CIRI’s work without political animus is admirable, given that President Donald Trump is a presence in any room where refugees and immigrants are discussed in 2019. She, along with colleagues Jessica Suarez and Gary Holmes, remain steadfastly poised and apolitical.
The conversation tilts when Connor tries to characterize human trafficking.
“It’s such a ...”
For the first time, she has to pause.
“... profoundly inhumane crime,” she continues. “It’s just unbelievable that in this day and age people are really treating one another like commodities. I just don’t think people can understand that because it seems so hard to believe. It’s like, ‘I can believe people are selling guns or drugs, but are people really being sold?’ ” Yes, they are.
Human trafficking is among the top three crime enterprises in the world, along with drugs and arms. Maybe you still can’t see it. Or call it what it is: slavery in the 21st century.
Connor helps me see it more clearly. It’s hard to focus during those first 45 minutes of our chat due to the gravity of the agency’s other responsibilities. Permit me to distract you for a few moments.
CIRI was launched in 1918 in Bridgeport. Note the timing. World War I was ending and all those new immigrants needed guidance finding work and learning another tongue. The waves of immigrants over the next 101 years offer a Tweet-length history lesson on how Connecticut neighborhoods took shape. Portuguese immigration peaks in the 1920s; Eastern Europeans resettle after World War II; Southeast Asians arrive on the heels of the Vietnam War; the splintering of Yugoslavia sends refugees from Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia and Kosovo to the agency’s doorsteps in the 1990s.
Most of the refugees they assisted in recent years have been from Africa. Consider a new client: A woman flees the Congo 25 years ago. A man does the same shortly after. They meet in a refugee camp and now have six children.
“They’ve been raising a family in a refugee camp and their home No. 2 is in Bridgeport,” Connor says.
That’s a closeup. The wide-angle lens reveals that the quota set by the executive branch will be capped at 30,000 refugees, compared with 110,000 set during President Barack Obama’s last year.
“We remind people it’s not a political activity, it’s a humanitarian endeavor,” Connor says, offering exhibit A that President George H.W. Bush was in office when the figure peaked at 142,000.
Still, you know what she means when she says it used to be easier to reassure anxious clients.
“Now we pause before we say, ‘That will never happen’ because we never know.”
That’s Trump in the room again, admiring the virtual wall he’s already built.
Many of their clients share a “capacity to have hope in unimaginable circumstances,” Connor
“They’ve been raising a family in a refugee camp and their home No. 2 is in Bridgeport.” Claudia Connor, president of Connecticut Institute for Refugees and Immigrants
says.
Holmes, a member of the agency’s board, is more glib: “You can rage on Facebook or you can get involved with something like CIRI.”
Connor apologizes for finding it difficult to shorthand the agency’s mission. When she says, “the work
is hard,” it comes out in italics. We’ve traveled the globe during this exploration. Then Connor brings it back home when I probe for more insight on human trafficking. It’s not just in nail salons, which appallingly remain unlicensed only in Connecticut. It’s not just in spas like the one linked to international human trafficking that hosted the recent arrest of New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft.
She forces me to see.
Many diplomats working in New York City settle in lower Fairfield County. They bring someone from home to serve as nanny or maid. Then they take away their documentation and isolate them so they don’t learn English.
“We have clients who say they never got fed,” Connor continues. “When the family finished eating they would be given that food.” Another pause.
“In Greenwich. In New Canaan. In Darien.”
See it now? It’s right in front of you.