This research compares the Mit’a system, a communal pre-colonial migration, the exploitative colonial migration, and today’s criminalized coerced migration. I compare characteristics such as source of compulsion, ownership of labor and resources, and legality. Under the Inca Empire, conquered people forcibly labored in the Mit’a to benefit the overall community. Under Spanish colonization, the Mit’a required larger amounts of labor to serve in a more sporadic fashion and exploited colonized labor for privately owned economies. The working conditions of the Spanish system created a generational debt that did not allow workers to leave. In the case of death, their offspring would carry the burden. After the decolonization of Hispanic American countries, this Andean system of migratory labor that benefited empires continued and was reflected in many more areas.After legal colonization, farming alone could not sustain indigenous people and they were forced into the wage labor of industrialization. In many ways, the Indigenous labor that openly fueled the Western world continues to covertly fuel the Western world. The global north continues to exploit the labor of Indigenous and Indigenous-descended people by controlling their movement based on the fluctuating demands of the labor market.
