Marco Rubio: “I come to the floor today for a moment to introduce an issue I have become interested in in the last few months, one…”

“I come to the floor today for a moment to introduce an issue I have become interested in in the last few months, one that, quite frankly, I didn't know a lot about--the issue of human trafficking and slavery. For many Americans, for many of us in the 21st century, we think of slavery as a concept of the 18th and 19th centuries, something that happened in other places a long time ago, when, in fact, it exists today around the world. The issue is actually pretty startling. The State Department estimates that there are between 700,000 and 800,000 people in the world each year who are trafficked. The number of people trafficked in the United States is about 16,000 to 17,000. That is a lot of people in the 21st century who are being trafficked and are held in bondage. I saw a special on a cable network recently that outlined this issue. I then started researching it. I was shocked to learn that my home State of Florida is particularly affected by this issue. Recently, I had the honor and the privilege of being appointed to the Helsinki Commission, the group here in the Senate that works, along with the House of Representatives, as Commissioners on that Commission. We held a hearing yesterday on the issue of human trafficking, and it is an issue I am going to be increasingly speaking about over the next few weeks because I truly believe it is one of the great humanitarian causes of this new century.…”