One of the most important criminal activities in recent years in Southeast Asia has been in human trafficking. There are two basic motivations for this: the first is where workers wish to obtain access to another country to work there, illegally because of entry restrictions, contributing some money as a payment to the agent. Large flows of migrants are found from Indonesia to Malaysia, Laos and Myanmar to Thailand and from many countries to European countries or Australia. This leads to the problems associated with unregulated labor (e.g. exploitation, theft from the workers and resentment of local people) and the occasional forcible return of migrants to their home countries. A similar situation occurs with refugees and those wishing to claim asylum overseas since it is very difficult in many cases to separate political refugees from economic refugees who are in no particular danger other than poverty.
The second motivation for trafficking is to take primarily women and children under false pretenses of offering them a better life and selling them into some aspect of the sex trade or other forced labor. Markets for Southeast Asian women and children exist in most countries of the world and are particularly prevalent in Japan, Thailand, Taiwan and in western countries such as Australia and the USA. Since many of the victims involved are poorly educated at best, the actual element of physical restraint is quite low, since they understand the incentive of staying away from the authorities. Nevertheless, safe houses and refuges are being established in many cities where victims are known to be kept. There have also been cases where some women believe that a life of imprisonment in an air conditioned house in California with cable television and plenty of food is preferable to working in rice paddies in their home country.
Human trafficking and movement of migrant workers is organized by a combination of more or less legal labor export agencies and the outright illegal snakehead gangs. "Snakehead" comes from a Chinese term and its use reflects the historical basis of this trade. Snakehead gangs may be composed of a network of people of varying nationality and ethnicity spread throughout the region and beyond, each of which may be involved both with the sourcing of new people for trafficking and the logistics of transporting them from place to place.
