Prostitution

Among the left and the Libertarians at least, there seems to be fairly strong, general support for the legalization of prostitution. As such, it seems like an issue worth reviewing and discussing.

The Arguments For

There are essentially two arguments to be used to support the legalization of prostitution:

1) What a person does with their body or with a consenting adult is their own business and is outside the purview of the government. As an addendum or milder version of this view one could alternatively/also say that an unskilled worker should have the right to make money however she wants so long as it affects no one else but her.

2) Legalization of prostitution allows for regulation of prostitution. This allows the government to see to it that sanitary measures are taken, workers well-treated, and so on. Overall, it allows the business to become cleaner and safer.

In the absence of data, I would personally support both of these positions. Beyond not caring about what other people do on their own, I can even imagine people who would fully well enjoy and consider it a legitimate and fulfilling position to work as a high end Geisha-style prostitute. If it’s conceivable that one can make prostitution into an art form with classes and degrees, I can’t say that stamping it out is the first thing on my mind. Nor would I have any compulsion to halt the creation of well-crafted safety and workplace regulations.

But, in spite of that, I must still vote against prostitution because the above arguments are crafted in a bit of a vacuum.

What a Person is Willing to Do is Their Business

Let’s take for example the case of indentured servitude. An indentured servant is someone who has, essentially, guaranteed that he will continue to labor for a particular employer for a specific duration of time (or, in the case of debt bondage, until a monetary value has been worked off). He may not quit and he may not choose to break from laboring outside of granted holidays — if such were part of his contract — most likely on penalty of beating or whatever other coercion the employer might bring to bear. After all, an indentured is of value because service is guaranteed. Firing an indentured servant means that they won’t be recuperating their debt to you. You can’t give them any option to cease service, even if it means forcing them to work via stringent measures.

But at the same time, that this is the case is something that was clearly understood by the person before he signed into indentured servitude. It was his choice to do with his body and his future as he felt to be worth the possible downsides.

The problem was that in a system where a person could not quit and where corporal punishment was part-and-parcel of service, abuse is to some extent encouraged by the system. Foods given to the workers might be more worms, cockroaches, and mold than produce, female servants might be raped, they might be beaten or worked to death (supposedly, only 40% of indentured servants survived to the end of their term), or they might have their contracts extended for misbehavior or by a master who simply ignored the rules. It’s hard to say exactly how bad the conditions were, but the ever increasing number of servants who fled in spite of increasing punishments for doing so makes it seem likely that they were worse than people imagined when they signed on.

Now, I suspect that most servants (of the early American time period) died on the boat ride to the US, creating the high death rate, and that they were were treated more-or-less fairly by their master once they arrived, even if they probably weren’t housed in splendor. Most of them probably worked as they should without needing to be beaten, and beatings were probably mostly undertaken only at need and dispensed according to rules. But, at the same time we have to admit that masters had fairly open license to commit and get away with illegal and immoral behavior. For instance a contract to work in hard conditions is not equivalent to a license to be raped. One might argue that one should be able to write up a contract which, if signed, gives one permission to force himself on a servant regardless of her disposition at that moment in time, but frankly its unlikely that modern US society is going to allow such (which makes the argument pointless) and it’s unlikely that many people would really write up or pass around such a document regardless of their intentions. Point in fact, it’s unlikely that most people intend to commit rape until practically the very moment it happens. This will be true with unearned beatings, or other abusive behavior.

Having worked in Japan, for example, where female workers are often seen as inconsequential and as unable to have proper recourse to authority, within a period of one year I witnessed several cases of stressed out men taking out their anger on some random woman in the office over any slight mistake, going red in the face and screaming at her, calling her the greatest idiot and most worthless human in the planet. I can only imagine that sexual harassment in the office place is widespread and gruesome, though I didn’t witness that (fortunately). And I would still have to imagine that the conditions for abuse in modern day Japan are less open than in the case of indentured servitude.

Ultimately, a system which encourages poor and abusive behavior on the part of your common man doesn’t seem like an institution that should be supported, regardless of whether people voluntarily signed into it, unless mitigating circumstances require overlooking this detail. That is to say, unless there is a need to allow it and no other alternatives — like a rigorous method of giving loans and collecting payments over a course of time, as an alternative to indentured servitude — you are still better off to prohibit the behavior. Closing down a particular market in preference of better alternatives isn’t lessening freedom, it’s simply accepting that sometimes people make silly and uninformed choices and acting to prevent that.

Making Prostitution Clean and Safe

The state of an illegally working prostitute’s life is, generally, grim. She has a high chance of being raped, beaten, or even being murdered. She may very well be robbed from, harassed, or otherwise taken advantage of, and have little to no recourse to law. She is almost certain to emerge from her life as a prostitute, if she survives it, with PTSD and/or sexual addiction.

An overview of some of the statistics of illegal prostitution can be viewed at the following page:

http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/factsheet.html

Now, while this is obviously a website which has a political position and could be fairly accused of having a motive to find the surveys that give the most spectacularly negative results, in truth I haven’t found any surveys which give particularly better results.

The mortality rate for prostitutes appears to be something like 39.1 per 10,000 compared to 1.15 per 10,000 for fisherman, the US’s most deadly profession.

Overall, though, that is only an argument for minimizing the amount of illegal prostitution, not against increasing legal prostitution — which would, according to the theory, have means of preventing much of the problems of illegal prostitution.

The Problems of Legalizing Prostitution

Legalized prostitution is not an idea that exists in the mind of social activists, waiting to be tested out in the real world. Several nations, including Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria, have legalized prostitution as has areas of Nevada and England during the 19th century.

But before we look at that data, let’s first consider who becomes a prostitute.

Firstly, roughly 41% of prostitutes become so as minors (which number is probably low, judging by the average age of entry they calculate), for those who start aged 17 or younger, the average age of entry is between 12 and 14. Generally, these children will be either runaways or abandoned/thrown away children. Roughly 1/3rd of street prostitutes are minors, and half of off-street prostitutes are minors. The average age of a prostitute at age of entry is 16.1 years of age.

About 16% of prostitutes entered the profession to support a drug addiction, and somewhere between 48% and 80% are addicted at a snapshot, with 95% having been users at one point.

Roughly 40-80% of prostitutes, at any given moment, have a pimp. About 16% were turned out by a boyfriend/lover via a careful process of seduction and manipulation, and about 12% are sold by a parent/uncle/or other person of authority in the person’s life.

While these aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive groups, it’s a decently good bet that between 50-80% of prostitutes could not work legally, regardless of legal acceptability of prostitution. They are either minors, unlikely to meet the conditions for sanctioned work due to a drug addiction, or are employed as veritable slaves to a pimp who is again unlikely to meet the conditions of a lawful employer nor run his business as a legal entity. His method of business is a regime of using addiction, manipulation, and beatings to guarantee continued service.

From this, it’s no surprise that when prostitution is legalized, the grand majority of prostitution in the country remains illegal. Even if the government established no regulatory requirements like condom use, anti-abuse legislation, or whatever, the one given is that government will ask for tax money, nor will they will ever allow the prostitution of minors. As such, even “legalized” prostitution does not mean that all or even most prostitution will be legal.

Now, looking at the cases of nations which have legalized prostitution, the first thing to note is that after legalization, the number of prostitutes (legal and illegal combined) generally explodes.

The Netherlands as of  approximately1980 had between 2,500 and 8,000 prostitutes. Prostitution was made a legal profession in 1988, and as of 2000 there were between 18,000 and over 30,000 prostitutes. During that same time period, the population of the Netherlands increased by about 114%. The number of prostitutes in 2000, presuming an even growth, should have been between 2850 and 9150, judging by our initial population.

http://sisyphe.org/spip.php?article1596
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_the_Netherlands
http://fleshtrade.blogspot.com/2006/01/statistics.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Population_of_the_Netherlands_1900-2000.png

In Australia, when prostitution was initially legalized in 1984, there were 40 legal brothels. By 2004, this number was 184. During that same time period, the population increase was only about 129%, so we would only expect to see 52.

http://www.rapereliefshelter.bc.ca/issues/Legalization-of-Prostitution-Australia-Mary-Sullivan.pdf
http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=sp_pop_totl&idim=country:AUS&dl=en&hl=en&q=australia+population

I could continue to look up such data for each nation — and I have in times past — and as of yet the only country which didn’t fit this model of explosive growth after legalization was New Zealand, and that was simply because I was unable to find data.

Which then leads to the question of how a market can have 4-10X growth in a span of a decade or two? And that answer is sex trafficking.

If you look at the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Australia, or other nations, you’ll find that anywhere from half to 80% of their sex workers are immigrants, largely trafficked into the country by organized syndicates.

http://www.uri.edu/artsci/wms/hughes/netherl.htm
http://www.uri.edu/artsci/wms/hughes/germany.htm
http://www.uri.edu/artsci/wms/hughes/austria.htm
http://www.uri.edu/artsci/wms/hughes/switzer.htm
http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/laws/000022.html

Adding this to working minors, and other women (and men) who cannot legally work as prostitutes, you end up with 90% of all prostitution in a nation with legalized prostitution being illegal. And again note that this is after expansion of the number of prostitutes by several factors. So if the goal was to prevent abusive behavior towards illegally working prostitutes, then we have severely made the wrong choice.

The question of why the market grows so much, one can only speculate. That legalizing prostitution removes any stigma of patronizing one is almost certainly a given. But I think that more importantly than that is that once a person starts seeing prostitutes, the illegal workers offer more to the client. Condoms are optional, treating the woman carefully is optional, and of course the price is cheaper. I read one report from, I believe, Sweden some years ago where they surveyed the patrons of prostitutes to determine why they came, and the answers were something along the line of machismo: You had a sense of ownership, control, and conquering when you had a prostitute. Most of the men had a girlfriend or spouse, so they were seeking a particular experience more than they were seeking sex, and apparently illegal prostitutes are either the right price or have the right lack of limits to provide that experience. Though, I don’t particularly ask you to by into that view since the reason for market growth isn’t as important as the truth of that growth.

Conclusion

There is practically no sex trafficking into the US at the time being — except of course, Nevada — nearly all prostitutes are American born. If prostitution were to be legalized across the nation, it can be considered a given that Mexican and South American import of women and children will explode massively as the demand for illegal prostitutes grows the total number of prostitutes by several times.

One might argue that this would be to the benefit of these women and children — though I would personally doubt it — but even if you did so, that’s still not an improvement versus direct intervention and investment in Latin America to improve the quality of life. And I can’t say that I would rather encourage American misbehavior, regardless of whether it’s better than foreign misbehavior.

Otherwise, the only argument that prostitution is necessary is to provide an income for minors without a home. At the moment, this may be true, but the solution is almost certainly not going to be to legalize  prostitution, but rather probably to find ways of legitimizing self-supporting minors if the issue is felt large enough to respond to.

Further Reading

http://static.rnw.nl/migratie/www.radionetherlands.nl/currentaffairs/ned061031mc-redirected
http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/Report%20on%20NZ%2010-29-2008.pdf
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1eFvvWuq078J:www.uri.edu/artsci/wms/hughes/prostitution_spain_july04.pdf&cd=6&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/pdf/EkbergVAW.pdf
http://justsalvos.com/userfiles/file/Bestpractisesdonnahughes.pdf
http://www.drpetra.co.uk/blog/men-who-pay-for-sex-often-have-partners-but-its-sex-workers-who-pay-the-price-for-poor-press-coverage/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16200336?dopt=Abstract
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119445402/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

Illegal Immigration

Illegal Immigration to the US

Illegal immigrants come from many countries, though Mexico and Cuba probably constitute the majority due to proximity. They come because their home economies are awful and because a hard worker cannot achieve success. The come illegally because the US bureaucracy cannot process enough applications to admit them properly or because there are hard limits defined. They are felt to be desirous by American businesses because these are people who have a desire to work hard for a low wage, cannot sue the company, cannot complain about long work hours or few breaks, nor can they collect many of the benefits that a company would usually have to provide. So far as a business is concerned, they get a better worker, for less money.

The argument for legitimizing illegal immigrants essentially comes down to, “They are already here. They are working hard, they’re not causing crime, our own ancestors came as immigrants, and it’s all part of the national identity to accept the poor and needy from abroad.” Certainly, I do respect that. I think much of the anti-immigration movement is no less racist than the people who tried to keep the Chinese out or the Irish out. Though it should be noted that the Chinese and the Irish generally did enter the country legally and came in small enough numbers to be properly vetted and passed by our bureaucracy.

There is an inherent difference between accepting legal and illegal immigrants. Personally, if we had the people to man it, I’d have no issue with increasing the number of employees of the US immigration service and accepting a greater number into the country. If Mexicans want to legally enter the nation, accept low-paying jobs, and work hard, I have no onus against them.

The problem with illegal workers is that they do not get the basic protections that a legal resident does. Accepting illegal immigrants as illegals is specifically creating a second class citizen who does not have the full protection of law. You are saying that if you are a Mexican, you don’t deserve to work less than 40 hours a week, you don’t deserve social security, you don’t deserve to complain about sexual harassment by your boss. Only true Americans who aren’t willing to work as hard for as little money–who have done nothing more than be born over this bit of dirt instead of that one–deserve all that.

Personally, I have no interest in creating a second class citizen. If we’re going to allow some group of people to not have the full protection of modern society, we should do that to Americans not to Mexicans or Cubans. Why does Billy-Bob the unemployed alcoholic deserve full minimum wage, social security, unemployment, etc. but Pedro, the guy holding down 2 jobs and living in a small room with 20 other guys, not deserve those protections? That’s just silly.

There’s also the issue that, in this case, how does Billy-Bob ever find employment? When the Irish or the Chinese entered the US, there wasn’t any particular difference in education between the immigrants and the locals. Thomas Jefferson, back in 1826, owned about 6,000 books and by doing so possessed perhaps the sum total of all human knowledge at that time. And for nearly all occupations, almost none of that was useful. You could rise to the top of the world with nothing more than common sense and a good work ethic. That isn’t so true today. Mexicans coming into the US have almost certainly never had a computer. They haven’t studied chemistry or physics. Only something like 70% of Mexican students complete elementary school (i.e. under the age of 15). Attendance of school between ages 15 and 19 is between 34% and 55%. All illegal immigrants can only compete at a certain level of income and they can never feasibly rise above that. Their children may be able to, but not the parents. This makes the bottom layer of American income excessively wide compared to any other nation.

If the US was still a factory nation this would likely be a boon–and probably it was previous to the 1950s–but now most businesses in the US need skilled labor who can speak English, work a computer, and do some basic algebra. What low-income jobs there are which don’t require these skills can be adequately done by our own poor. Immigrants from Mexico, Cuba, and other such nations keep poor Americans out of work and prop up dying industries.

The problem with slave labor or any other excessively large body of cheap labor is that it makes it hard to move to modern technologies, which means that the local economy doesn’t advance with the rest of the world. This was a problem for the American South and even ancient Greece and Rome. Instead of seeking better methods of production, expanding the number of workers is seen as easier and more cost-effective, but ultimately hinders actual growth since the limit at which the population or will expand is based on population growth rather than technological. They don’t invest in the development of new technologies, and once other nations or regions have upgraded to newer technologies and surpassed them on the market, you’re left with a large body of useless laborers with nothing to do and no obvious position to put them in, as well as having to go into debt upgrading your production methods at a time when you’re already doing poorly on the market.

So even though we could simply bypass making illegal immigrants a second class citizen and instead make some sort of rule like, “Feel free to all citizenship rights, all ye who can make it here!” The US, being a modern nation, no longer interested in being a factory or plantation nation and knowing it to be harmful to growth to try to do so, still shouldn’t make such a law. Encouraging free-for-all immigration, itself, would probably be harmful as well. There is a rate at which foreign groups can be reasonably assimilated and of course you do want to be able to be a bit choosy about who you accept. That’s simply an issue of feasibility, and it’s the same restriction that we have had since our inception; we’re still the country with the greatest number of immigrant ancestors (without going back thousands of years). We’re not talking about banning immigration nor lessening immigration, we’re talking about protecting legal immigration, just as it has been.

How to Prevent Illegal Immigration

Life in Cuba and Mexico is certainly not ideal but, ultimately, the concern of the US is the US. And as I pointed out in Pax Americana, keeping America competitive and growing economically at an even or greater pace as other modern nations is quite possibly of global importance. But, for every bit that our own nation is a better place than the locally situated Cuba and Mexico, the greater the incentive there will be for Cubans and Mexicans to try and cross over. Expecting to get the number of illegal immigrants down to zero is foolhardy. We’re seeking a reasonable decrease for a reasonable cost, not some sort of all-out preventative measure.

The problems we are facing in this, though, are:

1) At least in regards to Mexico, the border is very large and unpopulated.

2) There are many Americans who see themselves as profiting by the cheap labor–regardless of whether this remains true in a long-scale, macro-economic sense. You are essentially trying to end slavery, all over again. As you might note, resolving that issue took brute force of war to accomplish. Already, several of the largest cities in the US have decided to ignore Federal and State law and not seek to find nor prosecute illegal immigrants.

There are many calls to build a wall or otherwise patrol the border better, but I suspect that these calls are mostly coming from or guided by the people of the second group. They are aware that this is both unfeasible and costly, and hence brings money to the region while in no way preventing illegal immigration. An unprotected fence is easy enough to climb or cut through, and a guard which patrols once an hour is easy enough to watch go by and walk behind. Not to mention that roughly 50% of illegal immigrants came across the border legally, saying they were taking a one week vacation, and then never left. When 50% of everyone isn’t even sneaking in, talking about fences and patrols is silly. Once you start looking at the prices for these endeavors–particularly in light of how effective they will be–the whole thing becomes laughable.

But because of issues like local police ignoring the issue in sanctuary cities, your average citizen turning a blind eye to the lines of Mexicans sitting outside of Home Depot, expecting the passage of laws to “crack down on the problem” is also going to be largely ineffective. Going through every company and double-checking all their paperwork and auditing their books is going to be a very labor intensive and costly task. Once you find businesses which are employing illegals, prosecuting them is difficult since they can simply state that they have no reasonable way of knowing who is and isn’t legal, if the employee had a social security number and other forged documents–not to mention that the fines which can be imposed are not substantive.

As you might guess from my previous blog, I would personally hold that the first step to be taken is to remove the barrier for Americans to compete. If you can legally hire an American for the same amount as an immigrant, you’re fairly likely to hire the American: He speaks the same language as you. You might hire the Mexican instead, because he seems to have a better work ethic or whatever, but the option is at least there. This will, alone, be your most likely weapon to all-but stop illegal immigration, and yet have almost no impact on the US.

Secondly, is to stop letting Mexicans visit. If we know that 50% of illegal immigrants are overstaying their visas charge them for the purchase of a visa until very few people take this route. Yes, this will increase the number of people who sneak over the border, but it won’t be 100% of them. The harder you make anything, the fewer the number of people who will do it. It’s hot and dangerous to cross the border. It costs money to hire a coyote. Some number will choose to not make the attempt if it’s any harder than driving down the highway and lying to customs about your intent. And once you have the income from selling visas, you have money to spend on more people to hire just to search down illegals or expand the bureaucracy that processes green card applications and so forth.

Thirdly, make fines for hiring illegal immigrants larger, so it’s worthwhile for national or local government to pursue.

Fourth, and something I will pursue in a future blog, is to work towards lowering the litigiousness of American society. Even if you lower the wage for an American worker, you still risk his inherent likelihood to sue you when you hire him. By raising the bar for raising suits, the drive to seek illegal employees drops yet again.

All four of these options are free or self-paying, and all will be effective. The long-term result would be an increase to the growth of the US economy, without any decrease in legal immigration, and possibly an increase.

Sources:

http://countrystudies.us/mexico/62.htm

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2008-04-30-mexicoschools_N.htm

http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/982/Mexico-PREPRIMARY-PRIMARY-EDUCATION.html

http://www.oecdobserver.org/news/fullstory.php/aid=190

http://www.history.com/encyclopedia.do?articleId=223811

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0418/p01s01-usec.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration_to_the_United_States