Aquí no hay puticlub: There’s no sex club here. This sign was erected by a British landowner along a rural route in Spain where customers in search of a commercial sex venue apparently drive in error. There are many sex clubs, bars and brothels of all shapes and sizes in Spain, where selling sex is not illegal, but key activities surrounding it are. I wrote about the different types of venues years ago when arguing for a cultural study of commercial sex.

I wonder if future historians will track how misinformation about migration and sex work was so willfully reproduced during the present period, how news publications with a reputation for actual investigation began to copy chunks of pseudo news and paste them together, were satisfied to quote only society’s most predictable, official and reductionist sources and failed to admit that the police force of any country is not the place to find out about complex social problems.

Any authentic interest in the topic at hand could not be titled In Spain, Women Enslaved by a Boom in Brothel Tourism – a cartoon-like story full of the most superficial sensationalist cliches, mostly derived from police sources and a few abolitionist advocates. Yet this is the story The New York Times published on its front page the other day, complete with a ludicrous photo of a young woman in high red boots worthy of the cheapest rag. As the story claimed to be about brothels (indoor venues), why did they illustrate the story with a picture of street prostitution – again, on the front page? I know of no serious research that talks about brothel tourism, by the way. On the other hand, men who live in places where no venues are available have always been known to cross borders or travel distances to get to them. There is no news about that.

The issue is failure to investigate and report dysfunctional migration policy and how growing economic inequalities promote the taking of unregulated, unprotected jobs in in underground economies, including in the sex industry. If this article had appeared in the New York Daily News or Britain’s Daily Mail, I wouldn’t even bother to comment, and it would take too long and be too annoying for me to critique the entire article, but here are a few of the most misleading simplifications:

* Young Men Flocking to Spain for Sex With Trafficked Prostitutes: title to a banal set of photos, some taken at a big sex club on the Spanish border near France. Border crossings for all sorts of reasons, sex, wine and rambling among them, have been going on forever in that area not only pottery and leather goods as the article says. How old can these reporters be that they seem to be describing naive tourists from the US in the 1950s?

* Sob story implying migrants’ families are heartless:

The police came across one case in which Colombian traffickers were paying one family $650 a month for their daughter. She managed to escape, he said. But when she contacted her family, they told her to go back or they would send her sister as a replacement.

One police case plucked out of thousands to imply how awful other places are, because there could never be a cruel or desperate family in the US, right? And no mention of the many more family projects that do not involve such melodrama.

* Pretense that something new and different is happening:

…experts say that prostitution — almost all of it involving the ruthless trafficking of foreign women — is booming, exploding into public view in small towns and big cities.

When selling sex is not illegal it may occur anywhere without people hiding, if that’s what they mean by public view – that is hardly surprising news.

* The report says one migrant still owed them more than $2,500, as though it were an egregious amount. In fact, that much can often be paid back in a fairly short time – one, two months – by someone working in a busy sex club. And as I have written many times, migrants pay for a series of valuable services, so without knowing a lot more about this particular story we do not know what this sum means.

* Attempt to cause moral panic about the young.

In the past, most customers were middle-aged men. But the boom here, experts say, is powered in large part by the desires of young men — many of them traveling in packs for the weekend — taking advantage of Europe’s cheap and nearly seamless travel. “The young used to go to discos,” said Francina Vila i Valls, Barcelona’s councilor for women and civil rights. “But now they go to brothels. It’s just another form of entertainment to them.”

All research for a long time has suggested that young men in groups habitually drop into clubs and drive through streets with sex workers as part of nights out. The same evening easily includes both discos and sex clubs. The word packs makes the men sound predatory, of course.

* Then they try to make it a problem of growing demand for sex services from younger tourists, so ignorant about travel outside the US they don’t know that people in neighbouring countries here rarely refer to each other as tourists. In Europe, everyone moves around all the time, the Schengen agreement meaning no border checks. This is not news. And to claim that Spain has also become a go-to destination for sex services is laughable. Spain has been a major tourist destination for decades. Holidays may always include sex, paid or not, and there is definitely a market for men visiting numerous European cities to enjoy stag parties. Spain is not particularly famous for these, but trends may change.

* Ignorance about migration:

Thirty years ago, virtually all the prostitutes in Spain were Spanish. Now, almost none are. Advocates and police officials say that most of the women are controlled by illegal networks — they are modern-day slaves.

Women from Latin America travelling to Spain to work in domestic service or sell sex is indeed a decades-long phenomenon, so that different generations in the same family are involved and networks are mature. Networks are illegal because migrants are undocumented, not because they are sinister. This is just yellow-press exaggeration.

I have to stop here; there is just too much irresponsible rubbish in this article. Toward the end a few interesting facts slip in that indicate the subject is far more complex than the cheesy reporting has so far let on – the reporters must not have realised. I also could provide numerous links to my own writings, many based fundamentally on my own years of living and researching in Spain, but the New York Times will never be interested.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

To those inundated by the same crude message about sex trafficking over and over, two news stories may surprise. In the first, Chinese women who travel to Malaysia are considered interesting not because of any scandal or scourge but because of culture. Not long ago, this story would not have seemed quite so odd – before all women who travel to sell sex were transformed by the Rescue Industry into pathetic victims.

Malaysia just like home for prostitutes from China
28 February 2012, Borneo Post

Kuala Lumpur . . .influx of ‘freelance’ prostitutes from China. . . they liked the climate here which was not far different from China’s. . . They speak Mandarin, which makes it easy for them to mix with the local Chinese community and their food back home is almost similar to the Chinese food here. The availability of budget flights and Internet access are also catalysts for them to come to this country. . . preliminary investigation found that these women who worked through syndicates would return to Malaysia [after being sent home] on student visas and resume working as freelance prostitutes as the earnings were lucrative. . . most of the Chinese nationals interrogated used student visas to enable them to enter the country unimpeded.

. . .Chinese nationals made up the most number of people arrested for prostitution at 653 from January to February 15. This was followed by those from Vietnam (367), Thailand (300), Indonesia (177), the Philippines (55), Uzbekistan (19), Myanmar (14), Cambodia (10), Bangladesh (nine), Mongolia (six), Nigeria and Sri Langka (four each), and India (one). The highest number of arrests involved Chinese nationals at 5,753 in 2009, 6,378 in 2010 and 5,922 in 2011.

That’s a lot of arrests, so it’s not a good story, but notable that the women are not described as trafficking victims. The reference to a syndicate may be to agencies who process visas for students, including students who do not intend to study.

Why would women from China travel to Malaysia to sell sex, given this arrest rate? Consider how they are treated in China.

The oldest profession seeks respect
9 September 2011, The 4th Media

Lin is just 17 . .  Although she knows nothing about cutting hair, she’s employed by a hair salon that can be spotted from the street by a sparkling pink barber pole that glows through the windows at night . . .she has already suffered the humiliation of being handcuffed and detained by police several times.

The salon owner surnamed Wang and an employee surnamed Li get worked up as they rant about the treatment they receive from the police. Li said police have raided her shop twice in the last four months. . . Wang jumps in with angry tales of frequent visits by the police that cost her 600 to 800 yuan in fines to retrieve her employees from the police station. . . A day or two after the raid Wang’s salon is back in business. Wang said she would rather pay for a license, get legal protection and follow required health regulations. “I offer a service that I’m not forcing anyone to take. I’m doing a good thing. It’s not easy making money these days,” she said, adding that one of her four employees was abandoned by her husband, and another has several children to feed. Wang takes a 20 percent commission from the women who average little more than 100 yuan per day [12 euros].

. . .The ubiquitous salons mainly employ women from the countryside, who have little education, few opportunities at home and little chance of doing well in a cosmopolitan city. . . many of the salons operate on the fringe of the law and provide sex services to some of the millions of migrant men who leave home for many months at a time. . .

Young teen Lin resisted becoming a full-time sex worker. She felt disgraced and uncomfortable with her coquettish colleagues. She went home to her village but there was nothing for her to do and soon returned to Yulin and sex work and now supports herself and her family. She moved to another salon that treats her better and says she actually enjoys the job.

. . .A xiaojie, which is a euphemism for sex worker, is treated with disdain by open society. . .the police who often publicly humiliate the xiaojie in hopes of deterring others from entering the profession or in an effort to be seen to be cleaning up a neighborhood. The main targets of the police are the migrant xiaojie who work in small salons or massage parlors. The high-end call girls working out of big nightclubs and luxury hotels are seldom harassed. Prostitution in China is punishable by a maximum 15 days in detention and a fine of 5,000 yuan [600 euros].

For more information see Migrant sex workers in China: massage parlours, hair salons, hotel rooms.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Once, after I’d given a talk, an academic feminist geographer became very upset while trying to get me to admit that the poor of this world are victims objectively, by definition, because of ‘global structural inequalities’. I replied that I understood how she, coming from her position of middle-class person identifying as socialist, produced poorer people this way. I went on to say, ‘But if you move over to the poor person’s place and ask them how they see their situation, they may well not produce such an image of themselves.’ I thought the woman was going to go through the roof with outrage at my refusal to accept her point as objectively true.

This planet is rife with terrible differences between the poor and the rich, men mostly have more power and money than everyone else and things are getting worse. But given the injustice, I prefer to listen to how people describe their own realities rather than create static, general categories like Exploited Victims. It is also not smart to claim that poor people only leave their countries because they are forced to, with no possibility for their desires and abilities to think and weigh risks. Most poor people don’t leave their countries.

I published Forget Victimisation: Granting Agency to Migrants in 2003, but several people have written to me recently about how up-to-date and useful it is. In the mainstream media, two reductionist visions are common: one that blames migrants as grasping criminals, the other that sees them as sad victims. Unfortunately many people with leftist sympathies and visions fall into the trap of victimisation.  Click on the title to get the pdf or read the whole thing below. What I say applies to all migrants, whatever jobs they do, including sex work.

Forget Victimisation: Granting Agency to Migrants

Development, 46.3, 30-36 (2003)

Laura Agustín

There is a growing tendency to victimise poor people, weak people, uneducated people and migrant people. The trend, which began as a way of drawing attention to specific forms of violence committed against women, has now become a way of describing everyone on the lower rungs of power. Routinely, supporters position them as victims in order to claim rights for them, but this move also turns them into victims, and victims need help, need saving—which gives a primary role to supporters. Much rhetoric about migration has fallen into this pattern: migrants, it turns out, are not only vulnerable to exploitation, a patent truth, but they are ‘victims’.

The other choice, according to sensationalist media treatments, is criminal. Since news on migrants is reported only when disasters befall them, or when they are caught in something ‘illegal’, they can only be positioned in one of these two ways: as past victims of poverty or conflict in their home states and present victims of criminal bands, or as criminals who take advantage of such victims. The victims need to be saved, and the criminals to be punished. This reductionism encourages the idea that there is something inherently dangerous about being a migrant. Since migrants are usually seen as people from the third world, the positioning of so many of them as victims—of economic restructuring if not of criminal agents—harks back unsettlingly to the old category of the ‘native’. And since migrants nowadays are so often women, these natives are constituted as backward, developmentally less than first-world women. This is most overt, of course, in ‘trafficking’ discourses (for example, in Barry, 1979) but can now be heard in general talk about ‘illegal’ migrants.

Ratna Kapur shows how this victimising tendency began in the early 1990s with the project to reveal the widespread, routine nature of violence against women:

In the context of law and human rights, it is invariably the abject victim subject who seeks rights, primarily because she is the one who has had the worst happen to her. The victim subject has allowed women to speak out about abuses that have remained hidden or invisible in human rights discourse (Kapur, 2001: 5).

This strategy has led to many benefits for women. The problem is that the person designated a victim tends to take on an identity as victim that reduces her to being seen as a passive receptacle and ‘encourages some feminists in the international arena to propose strategies which are reminiscent of imperial interventions in the lives of the native subject’ (Kapur, 2001: 6).

The category ‘migrant’, awkward and ambiguous to begin with, becomes more so when it is victimised. In this article, I want to look at what we think we mean when we call someone a migrant, and then suggest that there are both class and postcolonial analyses to be made of this constructed identity and the passivity assigned to it. To do this, I will call on my own research with migrating people in various parts of the world. What I recount is widely known, but not often included in formal studies of migrations.

Conventional travellers

On the surface, there seem to be patently different kinds of travellers: tourists, people whose work involves travel, refugees and migrants. Tourists are generally defined as people with time and money to spend on leisure activities who take a trip somewhere to do it: they are ‘travelling for pleasure’. Tourism is defined by an absence (work), and tourists are believed to have left their jobs behind to indulge consciously in not working. In the literature, the tourist is someone from the North (the tourism of Southerners is invisible). Some people oppose a status of ‘traveller’ to that of tourist, saying their trips are unplanned, open-ended, longer and more appreciative of the ‘real culture’ of a place. ‘Interacting with the culture’ is the goal for many of these, and this interaction most likely comes about through getting a job. ‘Working’ does not exclude pleasure, then, for first-world subjects.

People who travel in the course of carrying out their jobs are at first glance also clearly identifiable. Whether sent on trips by companies or undertaking them on their own, business travellers are obliged to be on the road. Their trips may be long or short, involve familiarity with the culture visited and the local language or not and require sociability or not, but they have in common that this is not supposed to be ‘leisure time’. But is this true? Many businesspeople also engage in tourism during their trips, using their ‘expense accounts’ to entertain clients, much of this money going to sites where tourists also go (theatres, cabarets, sex or gambling clubs, restaurants, bars, boat trips, sports events). The trips taken to attend conferences, do field work or provide consultations by academics, ‘development’ and technical consultants, missionaries and social-sector personnel also feature tourism. Sports professionals, singers, musicians, actors, salespeople, sailors, soldiers, airline and train personnel, commercial fishermen, farm-workers, long-distance truck drivers and a variety of others travel as part of their professions. Modern explorers search for oil, minerals, endangered species of animals and plants and ‘lost’ archaeological artefacts. Many of these people spend a long time away from home, and their work life is punctuated by leisure and tourist activities. Some of these people have homes or ‘home bases’ in more than one place. Students who take years abroad or travel to do field work are combining tourism and work. The main goal of a voyage for religious pilgrims is not work, but they may work and engage in tourist activities on the way to and from the pilgrimage. And then there are nomads whose traditional way of gaining a livelihood includes mobility.

The dichotomy working traveller/work-free traveller is misleading, and many forms of travel have aspects of both. So what makes a ‘migrant’ different?

This other kind of traveller

Some people distinguish between all the above types and ‘migrants’, on the grounds that the latter ‘settle’. According to this distinction, migrants move from their home to make another one in someone else’s country. They are not positioned as travellers or tourists, since they are looking not only to spend money but earn it. The word migrant is nearly always used about the working class, not about middle-class professionals and not about people from the first-world, even if they also have left home and moved to another country. Instead, the word rings of a subaltern status.

Theories of migration have tended to concentrate on what causes people to move to new countries, focusing on structural conditions such as recomposition of capital or globalisation of markets, national policies and the rational decisions of ‘household units’. Discourses of ‘push-pull factors’ at the point of origin and the point of reception centre on causes such as wage differentials between countries, loss of land or crop failure, recruitment by employers abroad, family reunification projects, favourable immigration policy, flight from violence, persecution and armed conflict and the ‘feminisation of poverty’. None of these conditions excludes the others, and migrations are obviously best thought of as having multiple causes, since no single condition guarantees that migration will take place.

That such factors exist is unarguable, but they envision human beings as being acted upon, leaving little room for more subtle issues of desire, aspiration, frustration, anxiety or a myriad of other states of the soul. ‘Push-pull’ factoring, which sounds like something that happens to less-than-‘civilised’ people, is not usually mentioned when Euramericans are the migrants; these are more likely to be described as modern selves searching actively for better situations in which to realise their identities.

We know that choice is always at work, even with the poorest migrants, simply because everyone does not migrate from places having ‘push’ factors.

If it were true . . . that the flow of immigrants and refugees was simply a matter of individuals in search of better opportunities in a richer country, then the growing population and poverty in much of the world would have created truly massive numbers of poor invading highly developed countries, a great indiscriminate flow of human beings from misery to wealth. This has not been the case. Migrations are highly selective processes; only certain people leave, and they travel on highly structured routes to their destinations, rather than gravitate blindly toward any rich country they can enter (Sassen, 1999: 2).

Since the media, many governments and numerous supporters of migrants tend to talk as though the proverbial ‘avalanches’ of migrants were actually occurring, it seems important to underscore this point.[1] Even in the most trying situations, there are people who prefer to remain at home, while other people prefer to leave. Both are acted upon by world forces, yes, but they do not lose their ability to think through their options. Individual personalities play their part, differences such as degree of self-confidence, willingness to take risks and adaptability in the face of change. Being in a structurally less powerful position than people in the first world does not mean that one is not making decisions, and those decisions are influenced by a vast multiplicity of circumstances, including individual desire. Being poor does not make people poor in spirit.

In the same way, it does not follow that people who have decided to leave home, travel abroad and look for work, even in the most arduous conditions, never have leisure time, engage in tourist activities or look for pleasure. Combining business with pleasure is a concept available to the poor as well as the rich, to those with a false passport as well as those with a real one, and to those working in stigmatised occupations such as sex work as well as those doing what societies call ‘dignified work’. Saying migrants are people exclusively dedicated to work makes as little sense as saying business travellers are—it means rendering them one-dimensional, less than human.

A good deal of the fault for this reductionism goes to the media overload on the issue of how people migrate.

The manner of arriving

Until recently, the way people migrated was not a central issue in migration studies. They were assumed to have got the money together somehow, taken a bus, train, boat or plane and landed somewhere. Until they tried to make money, asked for help or presented some kind of social problem, they were more or less invisible. But now that the focus is on people getting past border controls to work in the sex industry, questions of how people get out of their own countries are on the agendas of numerous national and international governments.

Without a job offer, work permit and associated documents, entrance to the first world and many other countries is legally out of the question. Entering with a tourist visa is therefore a conventional solution, the idea being to overstay the time allotted and ‘disappear’ from authorities’ control. But obtaining a tourist visa can also be next to impossible for citizens of many countries with destinations in the first world, or may require long waiting because of quotas. Or the potential tourist-migrant may indeed be able to get a visa but not have the money to buy tickets and survive while looking for work. For these and other reasons, would-be travellers commonly seek help from intermediary agents in the travel process. These intermediaries sell services and documents that many travellers cannot afford to buy, so loans are a common feature of these trips. Those who help (in this context selling the service is helping) are often family members, old friends, tourist acquaintances, independent entrepreneurs or any combination of these, and they may play a minimal part or offer a whole travel ‘package’ which links them closely to the migrant at every step of the way.

Services offered for money may include the provision of passports, visas, changes of identity, work permits and other documents; advice on how to look and act in interviews with immigration officials (at the border, in airports, on trains and buses, in the street); the loan of money to show upon entrance with a tourist visa; pick-up service at the airport or car transportation to another city or country or to pre-arranged lodgings; and contact information for potential employers or other intermediaries at the destination. These services are not difficult to find in countries where out-travel has become normalised over time, and in certain countries, formal-sector travel agents offer such informal services.

Once in the destination country, travellers continue to need help and advice if they are going to get safe jobs with decent pay and without egregious labour abuses. They need contacts who can provide transport schedules or transport, addresses of safe places to stay, translation services, information on labour and cultural norms, medical references and other, conventional travel advice. In short, the creation of an economic niche for outside agents is a normal development in the informal economy facilitating migrations. That part of this economy turns to criminal exploitation does not mean the entire network does, nor that the clientele are all its ‘victims’.

I remember one day in a café in the centre of a Caribbean town. While Europeans were enjoying typical tropical holidays on nearby beaches, everyone in the café was talking about how to get out of the country. A young waiter discreetly chatted me up, soon asking if I could help him travel to Europe, in exchange for any kind of services I liked. Many vacationers who have been in poor countries have had this experience, and some will still remember the sympathy they felt, and the desire to help. Some will, in fact, have helped with money, ideas or contacts, thus becoming part of the informal networks that assist migrations, but few of these think of themselves as ‘traffickers’ or ‘smugglers’, no matter what job a migrant is destined to do.

The processes described involve potential migrants in a series of risky judgements and decisions. Each step of the way, they must weigh the story they are being told against what they have heard from returned migrants, friends abroad and news reports. Whether migrants buy a ‘full package’ from a single entrepreneur or make a succession of smaller decisions, only one link in the chain needs to be bad in order for things to go wrong. Obviously, this kind of clandestine market, outside all regulation, is not ‘fair’ in comparison with what people expect to enjoy in the first world. But the people who act within it are real, whole people who do not merit being generalised as ‘victims’. Néstor Rodríguez describes such migrations:

It is important to understand that autonomous migration means more than unauthorized (‘illegal’) border crossings: it means a community strategy implemented, developed, and sustained with the support of institutions, including formal ones, at the migrants’ points of origin and . . . points of destination. Precisely because core institutions (legal, religious, local governmental, etc) support this migratory strategy, undocumented migrants do not perceive its moral significance as deviant. Migrants may see their autonomous migration as extralegal, but not necessarily as criminal (Rodríguez, 1996: 23).

This point demonstrates that the ‘other’ of the victim—the ‘criminal’—is also a misleading notion for describing great numbers of people both travelling and facilitating travel in these immense worldwide networks.

Thinking about migrancy another way

Granting agency to migrating individuals does not mean denying the vast structural changes that push and pull them. On the other hand, granting them autonomy does not mean making them over-responsible for situations largely not of their own making. Global, national and local conditions intervene in individuals’ decisions, along with doses of good and bad luck. Many situations come up during a migration in which migrants have to choose between doing things the ‘right’, or legal, way, or doing them so that they might turn out the way they want. This brings to mind the conversation I had with a Colombian woman through the bars of the detention centre where she was being held in Bangkok after spending a year in prison. Her anguish did not derive so much from her having been in prison as from her own feelings of guilt because she had semi-knowingly broken the law, allowing a fake visa to be prepared for her in order to get into Japan. Her family had helped her with this, and her resultant conflicts over love and blame were tormenting her. While this woman had been a victim, she had also made choices and felt responsible, and I would not want to take this ethical capacity away from her.

Since Manuel Castells proposed the idea of a ‘space of flows’ for human movements in a ‘network society’ (Castells, 1996), migration scholars have used this metaphor in various ways. Doreen Massey emphasizes the ‘power geometry’ of flows:

Different social groups have distinct relationships to this anyway differentiated mobility: some people are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movement, others don’t; some are more on the receiving-end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it (Massey 1994: 149).

The migration-project consists of a vast complex of forces, from the national and global to the most local, personal and serendipitous (whom one happens to meet in a café). How people move, how necessary knowledge moves toward them, how they move their money and how its value moves them, as well as how they encourage other migrants to make similar moves: all form part of these flows. We are surrounded by images and sounds that foment the desire to ‘see the world’, and although we don’t have solid proof that this vision affects the desire to travel, we all know that it does.

In the classic distinction, migrants ‘settle’. So very many don’t, though: because they never (mentally or physically) relinquish a house, village, city or culture they are accustomed to, because they set themselves up to do business between the old and new country or because they find it unavoidable or impossible not to leave and go back. The latter possibility by no means signifies failure of the migration project, which may end up taking the shape of repeated use of tourist visas or simply repeated attempts to cross the border illegally and manage not to get caught while working. Most of these people come to feel they have more than one ‘home’, and that they live in both of them.

Living in more than one place

Take the titles of two texts written about the Dominican diaspora: Between Two Islands (Grasmuck and Pessar, 1991) and One Country in Two (Guarnizo, 1992). In this case, a large number of Dominicans are said to live in both Santo Domingo and New York City, or live between them, on the ‘bridge’ they have built during the past 20 years.

Family arrangements in which one or both parents live in the U.S. with none or some of their children, while their other children live on the island, are frequent. Although having more than one household in two different countries might be a source of emotional stress and economic hardship, it also arms family members with special skills to deal with uncertainty and adversity. They become more sophisticated than nonmigrant people in dealing with a rapidly globalising world. (Guarnizo, 1992:77)

These arrangements may derive from enormous injustices committed against a people in the past but be expressed as great strengths. Take the case of the West Indian island of Nevis:

The global quality of West Indian culture is seen to be related to the circumstances of slavery and colonialism which sought to suppress and make invisible the Afro-Caribbean community within the island society. For this reason the Afro-Caribbean people employed colonial institutions, to which they gained access, as frameworks within which to formalize and display a culture which they saw as their own. After emancipation these frameworks increasingly derived from migration destinations in the West Indies, North America and Britain, where waged employment was available. In the course of these historical processes a global culture emerged which was characterized by its ability to cultivate and promote a locally developed system of values and practices through the appropriation of external cultural forms (Fog Olwig, 1993)

Karen Fog Olwig’s study is called Global Culture, Island Identity, again demonstrating the ‘bothness’ of many peoples’ sense of home. These concepts, so common to studies of diaspora and hybridity, are so far not recognised widely in studies of migrations in general, which makes me ask whether we think diaspora is something more profound or complex than mere migration, and why. Diasporas began, after all, with ordinary migrants, ‘pushed’ or ‘pulled’ by ‘factors’.

Cosmopolitanism should give us another way to position migrants, but Ulf Hannerz, in another classificatory exercise, said:

Most ordinary labour migrants are not cosmopolitans either. For them going away may be, ideally, home plus higher income; often the involvement with another culture is not a fringe benefit but a necessary cost, to be kept as low as possible (Hannerz, 1990: 243).

How in the world does Hannerz know this? It’s patently not true of many, many migrants, and anyway—at what point does a person stop being a migrant and become something else? Hannerz fixes migrant identity in an early stage, that of ant leaving, self-protection and wariness toward the new. We can be thankful that most migrants, especially younger ones, do not remain in this stage for long, and they may just as well go on to be cosmopolitans as anything else.

Alejandro Portes et al have proposed a new social field to be called Transnationalism, composed of

a growing number of persons who live dual lives: speaking two languages, having homes in two countries, and making a living through continuous regular contact across national borders. Activities within the transnational field comprise a whole gamut of economic, political and social initiatives—ranging from informal import-export business, to the rise of a class of binational professionals, to the campaigns of home country politicians among their expatriates (Portes et al, 1999: 217-8).

Defining a field means the authors have to delimit the phenomena involved, to avoid the term’s ‘spurious extension to every aspect of reality, a common experience when a particular concept becomes popular’ (219). From the quoted text, it would appear that transnationals are middle class, but I see no need for this. Delimitation is not my project, however.

Beyond labelling

I opened this piece with a complaint: that (unconscious) victimisation is the growing modus operandi of people speaking on behalf of migrants. Obviously, those who work in victims’ services meet only victims, and as long as they speak on behalf of those particular people there is no problem. But the tendency is wider, and it is not solved by trying to distinguish precisely between a ‘smuggled’ person and a ‘trafficked’ one. Possible abuses committed by facilitators of migration know no boundaries; they may happen to men as well as women and to those working in sweatshops as well as in private houses.

I suggest that we re-confirm the idea of agency for migrants, with the emphasis on the process they are going through. Although some migrants may experience a (sad) feeling of being permanently uprooted, many others do not, and the whole theory of social ‘integration’ of migrants depends on their desires and abilities to adapt, assimilate and lose not their own identities but their identification with migrancy. At best, ‘migrant’ refers to a stage of life.

I also suggest that researchers and supporters consider the ‘transnational’ as a way to understand many migrants’ customs, including those that have caused polemic (‘sacrifice’ of animals, wearing headscarves and so on). Perhaps I don’t use the term in a carefully delimiting fashion, but it seems to me that many individual migrants evolve transnational ways of living that show creative adaptation and strength: looking for ways out of bad situations, trying to maintain something of the past while opening to the future.

Notes

[1] According to the director of the external relations department and senior regional adviser for Europe at the International Organization for Migration: ‘The 150 million migrants estimated to be in the world today make up only 2.5 percent of the world’s population’ (Schatzer, 2001).

References

Barry, Kathleen (1979) Female Sexual Slavery. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Fog Olwig, Karen (1993) Global Culture, Island Identity: Continuity and Change in the Afro-Caribbean Community of Nevis. Reading UK: Harwood Academic Publishers.

Grasmuck, Sherri and Pessar, Patricia (1991) Between Two Islands: Dominican International Migration. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Guarnizo, Luís Eduardo (1992) One Country in Two: Dominican-owned firms in New York and in the Dominican Republic. Doctoral dissertation, Johns Hopkins University.

Hannerz, Ulf (1990) ‘Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture’ in Mike Featherstone (ed) Global Culture, special issue of Theory, Culture & Society, 7.

Massey, Doreen (1994) Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge UK: Polity Press.

Kapur, Ratna (2002) ‘The Tragedy of Victimization Rhetoric: Resurrecting the “Native” Subject in International/Post-Colonial Feminist Legal Politics’, Harvard Human Rights Journal, Spring, 1-37.

Portes, Alejandro, Guarnizo, Luis and Landolt, Patricia (1999) ‘The study of transnationalism: pitfalls and promise of an emergent research field’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22, 2, 217-237.

Rodríguez, Néstor (1996) ‘The Battle for the Border: Notes on Autonomous Migration, Transnational Communities, and the State’, Social Justice, 23, 3, 21-37.

Sassen, Saskia (1999) Guests and Aliens. New York: The New Press.

Shatzer, Peter (2001) ‘Illegal migration needs firm but compassionate solution’. Presented at Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe Conference on Illegal Migration in Paris, on 13 December 2001.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

I receive many queries about getting Sex at the Margins (Zed Books) as an ebook, so am happy to announce that it is now available through various outlets. Not for the dedicated hardware readers yet (kindle, nook, kobo) but available!

The best deal in the US is at Books A Million:  ebook $10.32

In the UK the best deal is at Waterstones: ebook £14.39

In Australia the best price is at Read Without Paper: ebook AUD 22.76

Oddly enough in the UK Tesco say they have the paperback for £12.59 but you have to pay delivery unless you are ordering over £15 at a time.

Thanks to all for encouragement and continuing to keep this book on the market. The original reader of the manuscript for Zed Books predicted it would become a cult classic and I guess that’s about right!

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

I will be giving an hour-long lecture in Stockholm on 26 January 2012, covering general ideas about migration and who ‘migrants’ are thought to be, both documented and undocumented, as well as ideas about health and prevention, including for migrant sex workers. The sponsors are Smittskyddsinstitutet (Swedish Institute for Communicable Disease Control), a government agency to monitor the epidemiological situation for communicable diseases in humans and promote protection against them.

It is interesting and progressive that this agency should have me speak at their event: Nuancing of the notion of migrants is taking place. Note that State Feminism is not in charge here.

I have only just heard that pre-registration for this event closes tomorrow, so I supply details quickly now. I would love for some supporters to come to this Stockholm event, and, if you do, please come and introduce yourselves.

Konferens: Migration och prevention

Smittskyddsinstitutet (SMI) och Europeiska flyktingfonden (ERF) i samverkan välkomnar dig som arbetar med frågor inom området hälsa, prevention och migration till en heldagskonferens om migration och prevention. Konferensen vill utifrån ett hälsoperspektiv belysa hälsa och prevention i samband med migrationsprocessen och mottagandet av asylsökande och andra som av skilda skäl söker sig till Sverige.

Forskare från Malmö högskola redovisar nya kunskapssammanställningar på området migration, sexuell hälsa och prevention. Dessutom presenterar SMI med samarbetspartner ett nytt projekt som syftar till förbättrad struktur och samordning kring hälsoundersökningar av asylsökande.

26 januari 2012

Norra Latin, Stockholm
kl. 09.00 – 16.30 (registrering och kaffe från kl. 08.30)

Moderator: Willy Silberstein

Konferensen vänder sig till hälso- och sjukvårdspersonal, tjänstemän, politiker, forskare och ideella organisationer inom området hälsa, prevention och migration.

Konferensen är gratis. SMI bjuder på lunch och kaffe. Antalet platser är begränsat till 200.

OBS! Förlängds anmälningstid: Sista anmälningsdag 10 januari 2012.

Program
09.00 – 09.15 Robert Jonzon, Smi, hälsar välkommen Moderator Willy Silberstein presenterar konferensprogram.
09.15 – 09.45 Inledning av GD J. Carlson, Smi, och tf GD C. Werner, Migrationsverket.
09.45 – 10.15 Migration och sexuell hälsa – Presentation av en kunskapsöversikt från Malmö högskola, Monica Ideström, enhetschef vid Smi.
10.15 – 10.30 Bensträckare.
10.30 – 11.00 Migration och prevention – Presentation av en kunskapsöversikt, Fil.mag. Christina Halling, Malmö högskola.
11.00 – 11.45 Frågor och diskussion under moderators ledning.
11.45 – 13.00 Lunch.
13.00 – 14.00 Migration – Sex at the Margins (föredrag på engelska) – The Naked Anthropologist, Dr Laura Agustín.
14.00 – 14.30 Förbättrad struktur och samordning kring hälsoundersökningar av asylsökande – Presentation av EU-projekt, projektledare Robert Jonzon, Smi.
14.30 – 15.00 Kaffe.
15.00 – 15.20 Förutsättningarna att ge andra än asylsökande m.fl. erbjudande om hälsoundersökning – Presentation av Socialdepartementets utredning, utredningssekreterare Anna Billing.
15.20 – 15.50 Presentation av EU-projektets partners och medarbetare, Robert Jonzon m.fl. Utöver Smittskyddsinstitutet deltar följande partners i projektet: Migrationsverket, Socialstyrelsen, Sveriges Kommuner och Landsting, Stockholm läns landsting, Norrbottens läns landsting, Landstinget i Östergötland och Region Skåne samt Uppsala och Umeå universitet.
15.50 – 16.30 Avslutande diskussion under ledning av moderator

Here is the Migration & Prevention programme as a pdf.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

In a notable cultural contrast, anti-prostitutionists feel it important to constantly manifest their strenuous indignation through yelling and hyperbole, whereas those searching for more nuanced sex-work policy generally employ a calm, reasonable tone, overtly not getting excited. That is a sort of capsule description of the difference between a moralistic stance and a scientific one – not that the science involved here is the hard kind that can produce the indisputable evidence everyone longs for.

Commissario Brunetti, protagonist of Donna Leon’s popular crime series set in Venice, exudes the jaded tone of the pragmatists in this passage from A Question of Belief. Leon, like other contemporary novelists of Europe, now includes the everyday realities of undocumented migration routinely as background and often enough as part of the main plot. The presence of exploitative networks is simply not something to get wound up about anymore, even though acceptance involves stereotyping migrant groups. The fact is, though, that undocumented migrants operate through networking, and first networks are with people whose ways they are already familiar with (their families, neighbours, friends).

In this excerpt, the air temperature in Venice is overwhelming the commissario’s will to work:

Brunetti wondered at the possibility of making some sort of deal with the criminals in the city. Could they be induced to leave people alone until the end of this heat spell? That presupposed some sort of central organisation, but Brunetti knew that crime had become too diversified and too international for any reliable agreement to be possible. Once, when crime had been an exclusively local affair, the criminals well known and part of the social fabric, it might have worked, and the criminals, as burdened by the unrelenting heat as the police, might even have been willing to cooperate. ‘At least until the first of September,’ he said out loud.

. . .how to convince the Romanians to stop picking pockets, the Gypsies to stop sending their children to break into homes? And that was only in Venice. On the mainland, the requests would have been far more serious, asking the Moldavians to stop selling thirteen-year-olds and the Albanians to stop selling drugs. He considered for a moment the possibility of persuading Italian men to stop wanting young prostitutes or cheap drugs. (pp 15-16)

For more world-weary novelistic depictions of sex work see posts on novels by Lawrence Block, Ian Rankin and John Rechy.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Although there are two protocols on migration attached to the UN Convention on Transnational Organised Crime, trafficking is increasingly the word used to describe any undocumented migration. The reporter of this story from South America has no idea whether the migrants involved were being badly exploited or not (which would make them trafficked), since the only information available is that forged documents were detected – which may simply mean that the migrants paid to be transported to Suriname (which would make them smuggled).

Many don’t understand smuggling processes or the devious routes sometimes used. In another story involving Schiphol Airport, women defined as from Eastern Europe were arriving in Amsterdam possibly to sell sex. In a comments-discussion afterwards I pointed out that being legally attached to a country does not mean one is travelling from that place, whether one is a tourist or undocumented migrant, so the women in question could have been arriving from anywhere. They also might have been acting fully on their own, buying tickets online, or smugglers or traffickers could be involved – there was no evidence to illuminate this in that story, either. Since most smugglers are individuals belonging to small networks (as opposed to large mafia-type organisations), routes depend on contacts and opportunities known to smugglers at the moment and thus change all the time.

The route used in the story below began somewhere in China, passed through Tanzania and was supposed to navigate Amsterdam in order to arrive in Suriname. I suppose the Chinese leader had jobs lined up in Suriname and provided documents acceptable to Tanzanian border officials (if they checked transit passengers at all). Attempting to go through a hyper-aware European airport like Schiphol seems dim: Forged documents are more likely to be recognised in such a city, and transit passengers may also be scrutinised. The smuggler did a bad job, whether he was planning to exploit migrants or was a nice person or not.

Smuggled Chinese detained in Holland en route to Suriname

Stabroek News (Guyana) 30 November 2011

Paramaribo – The judicial authorities in Suriname have not been officially informed yet by the Netherlands about the detention of a group of Chinese who wanted to travel to Suriname with forged documents. This is said by coalition Parliamentarian Ricardo Panka, chairman of the committee for Foreign Affairs in Parliament. Last week, officials at Schiphol airport detained six Chinese in connection with human trafficking. They had arrived from Tanzania and were on their way to Suriname. One of them, a man from Hong Kong, was the leader of the other five. They were caught when their documents turned out to be forgeries. Dutch media reported this event last Friday. Panka says that the Surinamese government has not given an official reaction yet, because an official report from the Netherlands has not received yet. . .

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

PLEASE NOTE CHANGED VENUE BUT SAME TIME

Maggie’s Sex Workers Action Project is hosting my talk in their home town, Toronto. Last night’s Sex Work Café at Stella in Montréal was a great success; thanks to everyone who helped that happen. Before the Toronto event I will be in Ottawa.

Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry

Thursday 24 November 2011
7:30pm
The Raging Spoon
761 Queen Street West
Toronto, Canada

Map

Endorsed by No One Is Illegal–Toronto

Books available for purchase, courtesy of the Toronto Women’s Bookstore

Maggie’s Toronto Sex Workers Action Project is proud to host Laura Agustín, an internationally renowned sex worker rights advocate and an expert on undocumented migration and informal labour markets. She will be giving a talk based on her book, Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry.

We’re delighted to announce that No One Is Illegal-Toronto is endorsing this event and that the Toronto Women’s Bookstore will be selling copies of Sex At The Margins.

Jorgenson Hall

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Grassroots activists have raised money for me to go to Vancouver, British Columbia. If you come to this talk, you get to pass through this beautiful space downtown, on the West Coast of Canada.

Here is the announcement from the organisers:

FIRST is proud to host Laura Agustín, an internationally renowned sex worker rights advocate and an expert on undocumented migration and informal labour markets. She will be giving a talk based on her book, Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry.

Sunday 27 November 2011
7:00pm – 9:30pm (1900 – 2130)
Vancouver Public Library Central Branch
350 West Georgia Street
Alma VanDusen & Peter Kaye Room (lower level)
Vancouver, British Columbia

Map

Admission by donation – no one turned away
Wheelchair accessible room and washrooms

Other sponsors
The Women’s and Gender Studies Program, UBC
The Naked Truth
PACE
BC Coalition of Experiential Communities
Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women – Canada

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

My signature talk Sex at the Margins comes to Ottawa, which possibly will not look so white when I arrive in a few weeks. It is many years since I’ve been in any part of Canada and I have never visited Ottawa before. There are events in Montreal before this one. Please come meet me if you can, to talk about sex work, Rescue Work and the troubled relationship between them.

21 November 2011
1900-2100

University of Ottawa Law Library
Fauteux Hall Room 351
57 Louis Pasteur Private
Ottawa, Ontario K1N6N5   Map here

Free and open to the public. The talk will be in English, but you may ask questions in French if you like. Vegetarian snacks and beverages provided.

Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry

The Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa and Students for Sex Worker Rights are proud to host Laura Agustín, an internationally renowned sex worker rights advocate and an expert on undocumented migration and informal labour markets. She will be giving a talk based on her book, Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry.

Sex at the Margins questions several popular beliefs about migrants who sell sex: that they are all passive victims, that the job of selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín argues that the label ‘trafficked’ does not accurately describe most migrants and that a Rescue Industry  disempowers them. Based on extensive research amongst migrants who sell sex as well as social helpers, Sex at the Margins demonstrates how migration policy marginalises informal-sector workers and how anti-prostitution campaigns turn sex workers into casualties of globalisation.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist