Here’s a good piece from John Miller, former head of the State Department’s trafficking office.  He didn’t work with cars and highways.  He worked to eradicate something most of us thought ended in the 19th century: slavery.

Because slavery is universally ­illegal-though ­it was banned in Saudi Arabia only in 1962 and in Mauritania in 1981-its existence is subterranean. There are no reliable estimates of the number of people held in bondage. The U.S. State Department and the International Labor Organization put the figure in the millions. The State Department estimates that as many as 17,500 slaves are brought into the United States every year, from many different countries, and it is likely that trafficking within the United States involves several times as many people. As is the case elsewhere in the world, most American slaves toil in brothels, massage parlors, and other sex businesses, or as domestic servants. A large proportion of those who come from abroad arrive by perfectly legal means, often in the company of “handlers” who help them obtain tourist or business visas.

His imperative thesis is: Call it slavery.  It may not mean that people are hauled off en masse and in chains, but it’s still slavery, and in this article at The Wilson Quarterly, he looks to William Wilberforce for ideas about how to eradicate it globally.

In most countries, what distinguishes the victims is not their color but their foreignness or otherness. Most of the survivors I talked to were attracted by the promise of a job in a distant land. Once there, they found themselves in unfamiliar surroundings and unable to escape. It is difficult to flee when you know neither the local language nor the geography, and when you have no friends or family outside your small world to turn to for help. I rarely met survivors who had been enslaved in their own community. Moldov­an women are enslaved in Dutch brothels, Indonesian men on Malaysian construction sites, and Filipinas in Saudi Arabian ­homes.

And he closes by reminding us that the United States has “probably done more than almost any other country to eradicate this scourge at home and abroad.”   But as of yet, there is no 21st-century Wilberforce to champion the problem.