John R Miller

John R Miller was an American who was recruited to the State Department by President George W Bush. He ran the trafficking office. He allied himself with Evangelical Christians and Radical Feminists to try to stop sex work wherever he found it.

He caused a lot of harm to women around the world. Perhaps the best example of the harm he did to women is when he put pressure on Japan to deny visas to women from the Philippines. He even boasted about it in an article he wrote.

"Clarity about what is going on before our eyes, I discovered, can be a potent weapon. On a visit to Japan in 2004, I held a press conference to highlight the peculiar fact that Tokyo had issued 85,000 visas to female “entertainers” from the Philippines in 2003. The Japanese government quickly re­sponded, and by 2006 the number of visas was down to 5,700. Not all governments are as sensitive to American opinion as Japan’s, but the State Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons Report, which rates the efforts of 170 countries to suppress slavery, has been a useful ­attention-­getter on many occasions."

These women were not sex workers. He has stopped poor women earning the money they need and has ruined their lives. Consider what Professor Rhacel Parreñas, who studied and befriended them, wrote here.

"Filipina hostesses sell drinks, not sex,” she said. “None of the hostesses I encountered wanted to be rescued. The story is much more complicated. These are the breadwinners of their families. They were proud of themselves and respected back home."

Miller was a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute in Seattle. The Discovery Institute (DI) is a politically conservative think tank, that advocates the pseudoscientific concept of intelligent design (ID). Scott S. Powell, a senior fellow of the Institute, has promoted the false claim that the 2020 United States presidential election was stolen. The Discovery Institute website has posted articles denying the scientific consensus on climate change.

These people are political and religious extremists. They harm women. Anyone who wants to understand trafficking needs to understand about them and their falsehoods.