Mercosur Parliament (Parlasur) has studied a creation of a permanent commission to follow emigrants’ situation born in the Bloc’s countries. Recent cases, like the murder of 72 people in Mexico, supposedly illegal migrants towards the United States and the discovery of men’s sexual exploitation net in Spain have drawn attention from the authorities to the problems faced for whom having decided to live and work illegally in other countries.

Members of Brazilian Representation at Parlasur have believed that the gravity of the reported facts can stimulate actions at legislative and diplomatic spheres. Among the measures to be proposed, it is the direct interlocution with the other parliaments, like those of European Union and countries as the USA, in order to articulate agreements to minimize illegal immigration consequences.

“We need to think about migration question in a broader manner, and this means to involve UNO at the regulating creation for migratory fluxes”, Deputy Geraldo Thadeu, who makes part of Parlasur’s Citizenship and Human Rights Commission, defends.

According to him, in the USA there is incoherence between the fact Immigration law having turned stricter and the need of work force able to perform kinds of works which none of North-Americans wants to be subjected to. “This implicit demand for cheap manpower opens space for bookies and crossovers’ action that have developed a kind of business exploiting dreams of those who think about building a life abroad", the Deputy affirms.

At a report presented in 2006, a CPMI of Emigration pointed at people’s traffic as one of the main problems coming from illegal migration, with cases involving sexual exploitation, forced labor and drug traffic, among others.

Punishment for bookies
Nowadays, Brazilian law has not provided for punishment for the called “bookies” or “coyotes”. Criminal Code establishes a sentence of 1 to 3 years only for whom, through fraud, recruiting workers to take them abroad. This reality, according to federal marshals and District Attorneys, make arrests difficult once it restricts the criminal behavior to the cases in which bookies act provenly through a fraud, whether selling false promises or promising guarantees.

"The bookie gets immune because what he does is not typified as a crime. He sells dreams and for that, he takes houses, cars and properties from their owners, generating debts which can take more than two years to be paid”, Geraldo Thadeu reports, reminding cases occurred in towns like Poços de Caldas and Governador Valadares, both in Minas Gerais State.

With origin in the CPMI of Emigration, the Bill 6916/06 from the Senate intends to change this situation, when classifying as people’s international traffic any kind of action that promotes Brazilians’ illegal entrance in other countries. The proposal, which is ready to be voted at the Deputy Chamber, alters the Criminal Code and defines a sentence from two to six years of prison. Reclusion is the most severe among all the custodial conviction. It is destined to felonies (with intention to commit them). In practice, there is no essential difference between reclusion and detention. The law, however, uses these terms as indexes or criteria to determine regimes of sentence compliance. If the conviction is reclusion, the sentence is fulfilled in open, semi-open or open regime. At the detention, it is fulfilled in open or semi-open regime, except for the hypotheses of exceptional transfer for the closed regime. There is still the simple prison, scheduled for criminal misdemeanors, being able to be fulfilled in semi-open or open regimes, besides a fine for someone who promotes, intermediates, makes easy or finances people’s irregular entrance in foreign territory, with the purpose of profits.

Favorable to the change, the chief of Foreigners’ Cadastre and Registration Division of Federal Police, delegate Eustáquio da Conceição affirms that the main problem of illegal immigration is the fact that it is associated to people’s exploitation and traffic. “Normally, the bookies offer barman or waitress’s job vacancies; however, the first thing they do is to retain emigrants’ passports and put them to work in completely different activities from those of initially negotiated”, the delegate explains, who defends punishment for any kind of grooming aiming at Brazilians’ illegal entrance abroad.

According to International Labor Organization (OIT), more than 2 million victims of people’s international traffic are subjected to forced labor.