Recent concern in the United States about human trafficking has been directed primarily on the foreign victims that are brought into the United States rather than on U.S. citizenship who become involved. However, the topic has broadened and has significant impact on the daily lives of U.S citizens. Taking a human rights perspective, this dissertation explores how human trafficking has been used as a “brand” to achieve political and/or economic objectives. Human trafficking has taken away the human rights for individuals and threatens their security. This dissertation is grounded in Critical Theory and uses narrative analysis as a methodological framework. Using 99 public documents from Global Report on Trafficking in Persons by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, International Labor Organization, and Office for Victims of Crime and other Departments of the U.S working on human trafficking issues, with the support of Nvivo software, the dissertation insists that human trafficking violates human rights, has no capacity to support human emancipation, and causes human beings to be treated as animals or objects or commodified a brand. Even though a brand is a mark and logo in economic development and refers to objects, not human beings. Human development is the objective that everyone wants to achieve. Regardless of development, the welfare of all human beings must be the chief concern; every effort to halt all human emancipation must be initiated immediately. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2016. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

International workers are a vulnerable population within the hospitality industry. Their challenges, and needs have an impact on productivity, loyalty and satisfaction of international workers towards the organizations that employ them. The social and cultural impacts of labor migration are felt in their new environment by both domestic and immigrant populations. It is important to understand international workers’ acculturation process in order to provide them with tools necessary to succeed; it is also important to create responsible practices that translate into positive migration outcomes for both domestic and foreign populations. This study collected data on the motivations, processes, challenges, and alternatives experienced by international workers when relocating to the United States. It documents the cultural adaptation process followed by international workers laboring in the hospitality industry, and based on the data collected from interviewers’ responses, it creates new constructs intended to assist hospitality organizations in their operations. By providing tools to support international workers in the acculturation process, and by providing new understandings of the cultural adaptation process undertaken by international workers when relocating, it is plausible to convert a challenge and limitation into an opportunity for hospitality organizations to create value out of their international human capital.

This work addresses to what extent businesses in the United States and the European Union have a moral obligation to participate in social integration processes in areas where they operate with the use of migrant laborers. It begins with the presupposition that a common framework as to what constitutes ethical behavior in business is needed and beneficial. It argues that the very industry that creates a need for migrant labor ought to also be involved in merging this labor successfully into the existing community and specifies that a discourse on business ethics and migration is gravely needed. This must be one that considers how businesses can become more engaged in resolving the social issues that arise both for the migrants and for the local community in which the businesses operate. The purpose would be to fill a social and humanitarian need that government alone cannot. More importantly, it will be to exercise beneficence and display responsible and sincere corporate citizenship. It is claimed that businesses that fail to encourage and participate in integration processes display a moral flaw. Cosmopolitan business ethics are proposed as a way to look at ethical business conduct and it is claimed that businesses that act as cosmopolitan citizens are morally praiseworthy.