It is easy for the new tide of Socialist Democrats on the Left to demonize billionaires. Many Americans are open to the seductive rationale that their failure to achieve success was the end result of an unfair system of limited opportunity not their individual failure to do what was necessary to reach their personal economic goals. Many are equally receptive to the argument that the billionaires and millionaires deserve to have their wealth redistributed to the masses by a government better suited to determine who is entitled to other people’s monies. Almost everyone across the ideological spectrum readily jeered and condemned the NFL’s evil empire, the Patriots, owner Robert Kraft’s arrest for enjoying the services of a sex worker in an Asian massage parlor. Leftist pundits immediately posited this was not about the immorality or illegality of sex work, it was, instead, about vulnerable women and wealthy powerful men (despite the incident occurring at a $79.00 an hour seedy rub joint). The one unifying theme is that all of this is complete nonsense.
The possibility that the masseuse involved may be a trafficked victim forced into providing “happy endings” is the only reason what Robert Kraft did should concern any of us. In 2019, consenting adults should be allowed to participate in any type of sexual activity they have mutuality agreed to engage in and whether there was remuneration of some type should be of no consequence to anyone but them. I understand that prostitution abolitionists on the Left hold the position that no sex work is voluntary. I also understand that there are those on the Right who believe their deeply and sincerely held religious beliefs create an affirmative obligation to stop other people from engaging in behavior they consider sinful. Even more, I agree that paying for sex is immoral and disgusting. But I place a premium on individual liberty, as we all should, because that concept provided the firmament upon which this nation was built.
An uncomfortable and unacknowledged truth for the Left is the reality of the great number of women being forced into the bondage of sex work is one of the downstream horrors wrought by the United States’ failure to secure its borders and enforce the rule of law in regards to immigration. And everyone who proselytizes the continuing failure to enforce laws, who clamors to abolish Immigration and Custom Enforcement, the Border Patrol, and who demands we tear down existing border structures shares a degree of culpability for their plight. This is a reality ignored by almost everyone on both sides of the political aisle.
It is easy to define the causal connection between the absurdity of California’s sanctuary city policies which culminated with its “Values Act” largely prohibiting local cooperation with ICE and the near death experience of Napa County Sheriff’s Deputy Riley Jareki that forced her to take the life of a felon and illegal entrant armed with a stolen firearm who attempted to shoot her at point blank range (the body cam footage is harrowing and can be found HERE). Prior to pulling the trigger on a rural road, Javier Hernandez-Morales had been deported twice in 2007 and once in 2010. Since 2011, Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement had additionally requested the placement of a detainer on Hernandez-Morales in response to four separate arrests in Napa and Sonoma Counties, including a prior charge for battery of a police officer, but all four requests were denied pursuant to sanctuary policies. The psychological burden of being forced to take a life is the weight Deputy Jareki is now forced to carry, but it is those responsible for the implementation of policies that allowed Hernandez-Morales’s continued presence in the US that should bear that yoke around their necks.
It takes little effort to connect the dots between the violent acts of illegal entrants with multiple prior arrests against American citizens and sanctuary city laws that require local law enforcement to ignore federal immigration detainers. But the nexus between sex trafficking and a nation that fails to enforce its borders, while equally connected, is not as readily apparent. A great number of sex trafficked women who work in massage parlors throughout this country are brought to America illegally and then forced into prostitution by their traffickers. It is their illegal entry that is weaponized to coerce these women into sex work. The appetite of consumers, like Robert Kraft, create the demand that drives this coercion but the failure to enforce the rule of law on immigration and borders is the vehicle that drives the sex trafficking industry. We need to quell the constant tide of illegal entrants into this country while also removing many of the roadblocks to legal immigration that exist. We need to do this to protect both citizens and those striving to emigrate here and grasp at their American Dreams.