What is slavery?

From David Feingold who founded UNESCO's Trafficking Statistics Project:

The identification of trafficking with chattel slavery - in particular, the transatlantic slave trade - is tenuous at best. In the 18th and 19th centuries, African slaves were kidnapped or captured in war. They were shipped to the New World into life-long servitude, from which they or their children could rarely escape. In constrast, although some trafficking victims are kidnapped, for most ... trafficking is migration gone terribly wrong. Most leave their homes voluntarily - though sometimes coerced by circumstance - in search of a materially better or more exciting life. Along the way, they become enmeshed in a coercive and exploitative situation. However, this situation rarely persists for life; nor ... do the trafficked become a permanent or hereditary caste.

- As cited on p. 201 of Better Angels of Our Nature

As Stephen Pinker asserts in the following paragraph, "Feingold also notes that the numbers of trafficking victims reported by activist groups and repeated by journalists and nongovernmental organizations are usually pulled out of thin air and inflated for their advocacy value."

What these words of Feingold really do is suggest that it might be better to equate contemporary slavery more with the situation of illegal immigrants than the images provoked in peoples' minds of slaves in certain times past.