Migrant Domestic Workers, Asylum-Seekers and Premonitions of Anti-Trafficking in Hong Kong

For researchers and advocates who are all too familiar with the impact of the anti-trafficking framework in North America and Europe, it can be unsettling to see the enthusiastic promotion of a nascent anti-trafficking framework by NGOs and donors in Hong Kong in recent years. The emergence of the anti-trafficking framework in Hong Kong presents an opportune context to analyse the experiences of trafficking and anti-trafficking that are recognized or obscured for two groups of women – African asylum seekers and Filipino domestic workers. This chapter offers (1) an activist-informed reflection of the analyses developed by domestic workers on human trafficking and (2) an empirical analysis of asylum-seekers’ experiences of trafficking. The experiences of domestic workers and asylum-seekers reveal that moving towards racial justice may not necessarily require focusing on race as the determinative variable, and that a critical analysis of race in anti-trafficking also includes gauging the potential of migrant rights frameworks in contributing to racial justice.