informal economy

When we study things, we name them, but when we live things we usually don’t.: I had a weird date the other night, I thought the girl was out to get something from me or We have a great relationship; I love to cook and he fixes my computer. Labels potentially applied include transactional sex, barter, survival sex, girlfriends, sugar daddies and sugar mommies, jaboya, something-for-something love, husband-wife relationships, free love, opportunistic sex, exploitation, enjo kosai  - and a lot more, believe me. The other week I used a couple of tags myself whilst commenting on a poster exhorting fishermen not to exchange their fish for sex.

Some wrote to me to say Those women are not sex workers, they are fish traders, but they are poor and can’t pay the fisherman money so they offer him sex in exchange for fish. Well fine, but what’s the motivation for making this distinction? Is it to keep these women free of the whore stigma? Is the idea that, to be properly commercial, transactions must involve coins and bills? And that everything else is barter? And is barter somehow okay because it doesn’t involve filthy lucre? (note barter’s image in a white person’s context, where it’s called the no-cash economy).

Let’s look at this logically: If the fisherman gets money from these women, the transaction is considered okay. Now what happens if he takes candybars for his fish, is that not okay, because he’s supposed to be getting money? Or is fish for candybars okay but fish for, say, a shoulder massage not okay, again because he’s not getting money? Or is a shoulder massage all right, too, because it’s a service that helps him feel better, but fish for sex isn’t because presumably he doesn’t need sex to feel better? You see the problem? You might think that labels and names clarify different actions, but typical comments about transactional sex from cultures where it’s common refer to the blurry line dividing it from sex work or prostitution. On top of that, one commentator says ’some women and men who have sex in return for gifts, money and the like would not classify themselves as sex workers although they might be’. So who is deciding which label applies and for what reason?

The main point I want to make is: To attempt to distinguish these human situations with labels contributes to the idea that there is something about sex-money exchanges that is utterly different (perhaps scary or terrible) and that women who do that are set apart from everyone else. That is a very old-fashioned and stigmatising view we should avoid. Unfortunately it’s also misleading to try to distinguish clearly between wholly involuntary, passive transactional women and wholly free, active sex workers. It’s all much more interesting and muddled than that. 

Now about the fish transactions:

Recent studies in Botswana, Swaziland, Malawi, Zambia and Tanzania have shown associations between acute food insecurity and unprotected transactional sex among poor women. Fish for sex deals are also common in Kenya on the shores of Lake Victoria, where women fish traders meet incoming boats and sleep with fishermen for a favorable price. Healthdev.net

This could be interpreted to mean that fish traders do pay with coins and bills in part but supplement them with sex, in order to pay less out in money. Or it could mean that because they have sex with the fishermen they get more fish in exchange than if they hadn’t had sex with them.

A programme in Uganda calls this kind of transaction Something for Something Love, said to be a relationship where sex is given in exchange for favours, money or gifts. I suppose this name was invented to distance the topic from previous labels, but note that now money is explicitly mentioned - this isn’t just barter. The posters used in this campaign depict a young woman whose real love rejects her because she’s had something-for-something-love, a girl who saves her friend from getting into a car with a man holding out a mobile phone, a man whose wife leaves him because he’s bartered something for money with another female  and so on.

Young people are often pressured to do things that they would not normally do, like having unwanted or unprotected sex. These relationships usually cause problems for young people including unplanned pregnancy, dropping out of school, abortions, HIV/AIDS, and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Violence is common in Something for Something Love, especially if the young person refuses sex or tries to end the relationship. For adults, Something for Something Love often results in broken marriages or violence if the wife or husband learns about it. Something for Something

Others - not surprisingly USAID amongst them - go to the extreme and label transactional sex exploitation

The first phase of the initiative is now underway and focuses on sexual exploitation, including transactional sex. Transactional sex refers to exploitative relationships where sex is given in exchange for favors, material objects or money. PEPFAR message

Health programmes that want to prevent the spread of hiv tend to link this something-for-something love with Young Empowerment and True Manhood. These are all well-intentioned efforts, but the moralistic messages end up excluding a lot of people who don’t experience all this as oppressive or exploitative.

There is also a confusion about whose point of view we are taking and whom we are trying to protect.

• The original poster wants the fisherman to get money for his fish, not sex, the protection sub-text being that if he avoids sex he’s less likely to contract venereal diseases or hiv (and have more money to buy things he needs).
• Others want the girls and women not to exchange sex for fish, for moral and the same health-protection reasons - sometimes assuming that the fishermen are coercing them.

If money is scarce, then people may barter. The fishermen ’sell’ the fish for sex, and the women sell the fish for money in the marketplace - and it’s quite possible that some customers who want to buy fish from the women traders could offer *them* something other than money, some other object or service the traders want. Money can therefore be seen as the means to cut through the need to find exactly matching offers. It doesn’t have to become so symbolic that we hasten to say which people are *not* prostitutes. Could the subject get more complicated? You bet.

Activities deemed improper for public space: I’ve published on them several times in Spanish because the trend to formally prohibit particular behaviours is strong across Spain, where selling and buying sex are usually on the list. This is interesting to those who follow ideological debates about prostitution law - which law best ‘controls prostitution’, as the expression usually goes. Such general laws are largely ineffective anyway (ask me for an academic article on that).

Prohibited activities from the other day’s list - see wonderful pictures - are expanded today to include some Italian cities’ prohibitions. Planning policies that favour more regulation of public urban behaviours are frequently described as gentrification, by which middle-class ways of behaving are favoured. Thus drinking seated at an outdoor cafe is seen as all right, but drinking out of a can or cup while standing in the street nearby is not. Indoor activities are clearly favoured, especially when you have to pay to be inside. The behaviours to be prohibited are also often identified as coming from ‘outsiders’, not authentic local natives who know how to live properly. Activities mentioned in news stories like those below mix ways of living with commercial activities.

Some similar occupations are tolerated: rose peddlers to couples in bars, street musicians who aren’t very good, folkoric performers for bored queue-waiters, vendors of umbrellas when it starts to rain. The tolerance suggests that prohibitions are whimsical.  Notice also that some behaviours similar to the ones that get proscribed are idenfied as okay. Residents of Clinton Hill in Brooklyn described changes when mostly black and family residents were replaced by whites to Lance Freeman. The older residents liked to barbecue in the park, whereas the new residents like to sit and get tans or walk their dogs. Newer residents object to cigarette smoke in the street, children riding bikes and scooters and young men congregating for no particular purpose. Freeman said ‘You have on the one hand the more romantic view of public space as a place where people can come together unfettered unrestrained, compared with the view of public space as a place of ordered, controlled recreation. Gentrification is typically associated with the latter, as a place where space is controlled and privatized, with less opportunity for random interaction.’

Don’t miss the photographs from the other day of prohibited activities.

Here are excerpts from two Italian stories:

Roadside window-washers threatened with jail

Stephen Brown, 29 August 2007, Reuters

Rome: Illegal immigrants in Italy earning a few coins by washing windscreens at traffic lights could face up to three months in jail after Florence launched a crackdown and other cities said they might follow suit. Many cities are already taking action against what is seen as “imported” behavior such as tourists taking off their shirts or eating hamburgers in the piazza in Venice, or getting drunk in public in Rome — something image-conscious Italians avoid. Foreigners are also blamed for much of the street crime in a relatively safe country. Most people wielding sponges on street corners are Romanian gypsies, often young women and children. . .

. . . Rome’s Mayor Walter Veltroni, who has taken action against illegal gypsy camps and now vows to clean up rowdy nightlife and public drug-taking and drinking in popular neighborhoods like Trastevere, said window-washers are so pushy “that people are virtually ravaged at every traffic light and street corner.” “People must realize that behind the window-washers there is exploitation of minors, which is a crime. Like prostitution this is a racket that must be smashed,” Veltroni told reporters.

In Verona, Mayor Flavio Tosi, who has previously taken action against people eating sandwiches in public, said he would monitor the experiment in Florence: “If the new regulation manages to deter the window-washers, we will adopt it too.” Some civic groups in Florence applauded the rules which city officials said acted on complaints of window-washers “becoming more aggressive, especially to women alone in their cars.” The city’s public safety officer Graziano Cioni stressed that the aim was “not to punish beggars or poor people” but to combat “arrogant and violent” behavior against motorists. However, leftist groups in the city called the new measure excessive and regional Communist party chief Niccolo Pecorini termed it “unworthy of Florence’s hospitable traditions.” 

Verona mayor set on discouraging prostitution

1 August 2008, Stranitalia

Mayor Flavio Tosi is the first Italian mayor to take advantage of a public security law voted into law last week by the new Berlusconi government and which gives city administrators greater powers regarding urban safety, including the right to increase pecuniary sanctions for clients of prostitutes even to as high as 500 euros, the equivalent of $780 dollars.

Mayor Tosi, a member of the separatist Northern League party, has been waging a war against prostitution, by women or transsexuals, for some time now. His first move was to ticket the drivers of cars stopping near prostitutes to negotiate prices by accusing them of interfering with traffic. But that fine amounted to only 36 euros and proved effective only with Veronesi men who wanted to avoid having to identify themselves to police on their home turf. People from other neighboring cities such as Brescia, Padua and Mantova, said the mayor, were not deterred.

In Verona, the city of Romeo and Juliet, the critical zone is the neighborhood around the train station, a residential area which every night sees hundreds of scantily clad prostitutes looking for business. So far 42 of the newly high fines have been issued an the mayor says he is eager to see that kind of effect it has. . .

. . . Mayor Tosi is in the forefront of this battle. But this week, Tosi signed two other controversial ordinances, one against begging in public as has already been done in Venice and Florence and the other to increase fines for the consumption of alcoholic beverages on the street. That ordinance also prohibits littering, sleeping outdoors, going shirtless, bathing or washing animals in public fountains, smoking in playgrounds and - once again as in Rome, the senseless law against eating sandwiches while walking down the street.

The link between ‘development’ (a helping industry I really don’t like) and migration is now both recognised and fashionable. This piece from 2006 shows how informal-sector jobs contribute importantly to economies, even when the workers and their jobs are disrespected. When you go to pick up wire transfers, the money’s just money: no stigma, no dirt, no provenance.

Contributing to ‘Development’: Money Made Selling Sex

Laura Agustín

Research for Sex Work, 9, 8-11, 2006.

Earlier this year I was in Ecuador talking with poorer women who sell sex and who might consider travelling to another country to do it. Politicians in wealthier countries talk about ‘economic migrants’ as though their desire to make money were a bad thing, and in many such countries migrants have a better chance of being allowed to stay if they present themselves as victims (refugees, asylum-seekers, ‘trafficked women’) than as people who have just arrived and are willing to do whatever work is on offer.

This prejudice against economic motives is ridiculous, since we live in a world where individuals are not only expected to make money but where success in life is judged on how much money they make. And economic motives are entirely acceptable when migrants find jobs in the so-called ‘formal’ sector of the economy, which refers to businesses that governments have decided to recognise (and regulate, tax, inspect and so on), even if these businesses pay workers miserably and provide neither decent working conditions nor fair workers’ rights. Only jobs said to be in the ‘informal’ economy are considered unacceptable, despite the fact that nowadays there are probably more jobs available ‘informally’ than formally. Note: No one knows the numbers here, since businesses and people that are not registered anywhere cannot be counted.

The term informal economy or sector was invented in the early 1970s to describe income-generating activities not protected by labour legislation in poorer countries. At the time it was presumed that the informal sector was a transitory phenomenon associated with lower levels of economic development, something that would disappear as development occurred. This presumption has however been proven incorrect. A greater number of workers than ever before are now working outside the ‘formal’ economy and they are engaged in an increasingly diverse range of activities and situations (ILO 2002: v).

Now, however, the categories informal and formal are increasingly accepted as descriptions of economies in wealthier countries, too. Businesses said to be formal, simply by being recognised by bureaucracies, are said to be ‘real’, ‘productive’ and normal. Informal economies are called grey, black, submerged, underground and often thought of as bad, undesirable, temporary, not serious or not productive. To workers, however, the technical status of a business may not matter, a secretarial or factory job pretty much consisting of the same tasks in both licensed and unlicensed businesses.

Informality produces unjust working conditions and rampant opportunities for mistreatment of all workers, but at least non-migrant workers may fall back on the basic rights, protections and benefits that citizenship provides. Migrant employees’ safe standing, on the other hand, depends on the personal relationships they are able to develop with owners, managers and other employees. If something goes wrong, these workers cannot appeal to government authorities or ask for help in criminal-justice systems. Why? Because they can be dismissed at bosses’ will and, if they are migrants, easily harassed or deported back to their home countries. Workers who enjoy citizens’ rights are, however, increasingly subjected to temporary and informal contracts and poor working conditions (Precarias 2000-6).

So, informal jobs sound like something to be avoided, right? But migrants without official permission to work in formal-sector businesses are glad to get them. Companies that are not officially recognised and licensed employ people without official permission to work, which explains the vast number of migrants working in countries that will not issue them visas and work permits. Restaurant, construction, domestic, factory, agricultural, caring and sex workers alike share this ‘clandestine’ situation. Without work permits, migrants cannot regularise their status, become documented residents or enjoy normal rights, but they can make money. The word informal makes these businesses sound small, temporary, unstable or even benign, composed of street traders and vagabonds, but this is far from the truth. Industries that are highly evolved and very large are called informal only because they are not (yet) formally recognised. The sex industry, which takes in both licensed and unlicensed businesses and many operating under non-sex licences (like bars), generates billions of dollars worldwide and uses sophisticated, high-technology equipment and business methods. Informality provides opportunities for businesspeople to operate outside government rules and make large profits, and for workers to accumulate more money than they could any other way, if they are willing to use sex. This applies to legal citizens and undocumented migrants, whether they have a lot or little formal education and whether they are women, men or transgender.

‘Flexible workers’ is a term referring to those who, rather than following a classical career-path or staying within a set profession their whole lives, change jobs according to the demands of markets and the information they receive from personal networks. Flexible workers go where the jobs are, and, if they are to succeed, they need to be adaptable. Sex workers are prime examples, flexible in where they work and what they do. And although some people have no moral objections to selling sex, others do but become morally flexible, suspending their objections in order to make money. This applies to most migrants, whose priority is on making as much as possible as fast as possible—sometimes to pay off debts contracted in order to travel, sometimes to be able to continue travelling and sometimes to send or take home.

Money that migrants send home is called remittances, and in some countries they are a major source of income. Records of these payments, through banks and services like Western Union, show which country the remittances come from but not what kind of work produced them. Given the enormous difference between wages for selling sex and most other jobs, it’s obvious that a large proportion of remittances must come from sex work.

A lot of people have thought that remittance money goes to buy only basic survival and consumer items (food, refrigerators, jewelry, DVDs), but recent studies reveal how money sent home by migrants finances important social and structural projects known as ‘development’ (O’Neil 2004; Sørensen 2004). This goes for money made picking strawberries, carrying building materials, giving babies baths and selling sex. It doesn’t matter whether this money comes in the form of coins, bills or credit lines, the amounts mean the same no matter how they were earned, and they are used to finance construction projects, small businesses and cooperative agriculture for families, communities and whole regions. Besides, the buying of a consumer item like a stove, which means the ability to boil bad water, can make the difference between unhealthful and healthful lives for people who then are able to work on larger projects.

In Ecuador, a lot of negative comments were made about women who sell sex abroad. I was told they ‘force’ husbands to find other sexual partners, that they withhold mother love from children and that they ruin traditional family life. Read the rest of this entry »

I published Forget Victimisation in 2003, but the more migration is discussed in the mainstream, the more we see two reductionist visions: 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.

Once, after I’d given a talk, an academic 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 subject position of white, middle-class woman identifying as socialist, produced poor 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 inability to see her point.

Of course I believe that the world is rife with terrible differences between the poor and the rich and that men almost always have more power and money. It’s not fair. But given the unfairness, I prefer to listen to how people describe their own realities rather than create static, generalised categories like Exploited Victims. I also don’t agree 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. The same goes for people who get into prostitution or sex work - I prefer to give the heaviest weight to what they say they are doing! Here’s the longer version, and it applies to all migrants, whatever jobs they do.

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. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s become possible to talk about sex work in the same breath as other jobs for migrants, finally - at least occasionally. At a migration conference in Copenhagen called Metropolis, which takes place from 14-18 September, I will give a plenary talk on Friday the 18th for a theme called Irregular Migration and Labour Market Activities. From the programme:

Irregular migration is often linked to the informal labour market, where on the one hand economic gains at times lead to exploitation of foreign workers and on the other hand facilitates opportunities for socio-economic mobility. This rather paradoxical nature of the informal/irregular labour market will be debated and seen in the context of different trades as for example caretaking, domestic work, construction, agriculture, and the sex industry.   

I will mention trafficking in the context of irregular migration in general. By the way, these adjectives - irregular, unauthorised, informal, undocumented - keep changing all the time as people try to find words that are both inclusive and neutral.

David Kyle and Elspeth Guild are the other plenary speakers for this theme.

Photo by Jon Gresham

This story from The Times of India is about Sonagachi, a very large red-light district in Kolkata, India, and home to the Sonagachi sex workers’ cooperative. Like the story from Malaysia the other day, this one gives financial details on how a commercial sex economy works and adapts to a recession. Note the complex structures and the different ways workers may depend on intermediaries. It’s not a simple economy. NB: 1000 rupees = 14.7 euros

Slowdown bug hits sex workers in city

Devjyot Ghoshal, 10 July 2009

Kolkata: The economic slowdown has affected nearly every profession, and the world’s oldest is no exception. Thousands of commercial sex workers in Sonagachi have been singed. A contracting clientele, coupled with spiralling real-estate prices in the area, has driven them to reduce rates and spend more time on the streets.

The worst affected are the approximately 1000 Category A workers, who charge minimum of Rs 1,500 per hour. Restricted from going on to the streets to lure customers and completely dependent on pimps to get business, these workers are slashing their rates.

“Till a few years back, we got five customers a day. Now, it is rare to get three. As a result, Category A girls, who charged up to Rs 8,000 per hour earlier, now hardly ask for more than Rs 4,000,” said Rekha, herself a Category A worker.

For Sonagachhi’s elite, the paucity of patrons is especially difficult to contend with, as most either have to pay a flat 50% to their mistresses or shell out a substantial amount for renting a room.

With profits plunging, those under mistresses are increasingly moving out of that system, despite room rents having doubled in five years. High-end rooms in Sonagachi can now cost anything between Rs 10,000 to Rs 15,000 per month.

“Since Category A girls can’t leave the brothels to get customers and have to give half of whatever they earn to the mistresses, many are moving into Category B, where they pay a fixed amount,” Rekha explained.

While the services of about 2,000 Category B women in Sonagachi start at Rs 500 per hour, a customer has to pay 25% of the entire charge to the pimp separately. Additionally, the sex worker has to pay the landlord a commission per client on top of a pre-negotiated sum for booking a room.

Starved of clients and facing incremental hikes in the prices of contract rooms, Category B workers are being forced to charge less and work longer hours.

“Earlier, few Category B girls used to stand on the streets before 4 pm. But now, you can find us standing from as early as 10 am. We are having to work much harder,” said Shanta, another worker. Some Category B girls are also charging less to build long-term relationships with customers. “We have to depend on our existing customers to come more often. Giving a discount of Rs 100 is hardly uncommon. It hasn’t been this bad since I started over a decade ago,” she adds.

In recent years, the steady movement of women into the area from the districts and elsewhere has resulted in a space crunch. Consequently, landlords are being able to hike prices at will, while the women must either conform or stop working.

“Though new girls keep coming here, the space available is limited. Under the contract system, one room can be used by up to three workers. Still, the rents are constantly increasing,” says Kohinoor. “And if the landlord can’t hike the rent, then we are charged for other facilities. Keeping a television costs Rs 700 a month and a mobile phone charger Rs 500,” she added.

There is little optimism lost, however. “As long as there are men in this city, there will be business for women here. After all, this is Sonagachhi,” declared a sex worker.

Here are excerpts from a report published by the Institute of Race Relations in the UK. You could say it is a catalogue of proper applications of the law in cases where people knowingly infringe it. But are these sorts of draconian raids and labour-intensive, costly efforts to catch small-time infringers really worth it? People are beginning to realise just how much public money they require. Granted that there might be some connexions between illegal migration and state security, is an overall policy to conduct searches for undocumented workers like high-risk terrorist operations justified? I think we all know it is not. Targeting ethnic restaurants  - their owners, workers and clientele - is an easy way for immigration personnel to demonstrate that the government is Taking Things Seriously. When undocumented migrants manage, as in the cases described below, to find a way to work for low wages and begin to integrate marginally into society, why come down on them so bloody hard?

Because the Law is the Law? But what of all the white-collar infringements that are not handled like these operations, which resemble cop- and spook-style raids on terrorists and gangsters? No such stormings are seen on office buildings and other (white)’ sites. Do people imagine there are no undocumented workers there?

For details, more examples and documentary notes, see the report itself.

Crusade against the undocumented
By Frances Webber, 5 February 2009

Every day, somewhere in the UK, immigration officers, often with police, frequently wearing stab-proof vests, surround High Street restaurants, takeaways and convenience stores, seal exits and storm in. . .. . . generally at the busiest time, to demand that workers prove their right to be working there. Sometimes they carry hand-held fingerprint terminals to perform instant identity checks on those they find working there.  .  .

. . . The raids frequently involve large numbers of police and immigration officials and sometimes resemble military operations. 

The article gives examples:

Seventeen UKBA officers and three police officers descended on Makbros, a cash and carry warehouse in Stanmore, Middlesex, and detained and questioned five men, all of whom turned out to be lawfully employed. An eye-witness said that it was ‘quite scary with all these people running up’.[2]

Thirteen immigration officers raided the Unique Spice restaurant in Burnham, Buckinghamshire, to arrest two Bangladeshi men.[3]

A convoy of five vehicles descended on the Waverley Hotel, Yarmouth in a raid in which two Mauritian men and a Brazilian woman were arrested.[4]

Shabul Muhth’s two restaurants in Kent were raided by around eighteen uniformed officers and the restaurants closed at around 6.30pm on Friday and Saturday nights, the peak time for his business. No arrests were made. ‘Come in like gentlemen’, he said. ‘We’re not drug dealing, we’re selling curry.’[5]

A full-scale search with dogs and a police helicopter were deployed to hunt for two men who ran out of the kitchen at Thariks Indian restaurant in Paignton during a raid. An immigration officer fell through the roofof a building in the chase, in which the two men got away.[6] Read the rest of this entry »

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Below are exceprts from a migration story in the Observer. There’s quite good information here but also note the confusion about the word trafficking: much of what’s described here should be called smuggling, according to UN protocols. Note particularly:

Though many immigrants travel independently, others use organised criminal traffickers for at least some of the journey

If migrants ‘use’ people to help them cross borders illegally, these are meant to be described as smugglers. It’s a hard distinction to maintain consistently, but in this story people are clearly travelling because they chose to and sometimes paying for help. The help can end up being abusive, of course.  The word refugee is also used. Some of the people interviewed might have a case for asylum but many do not. Also the word criminal is peppered around unnecessarily.

Gender note: Everyone mentioned in the story is male, but what’s described applies to women who migrate without documents as well, and illustrates why getting into a ‘protected’ situation can be tempting, why getting into sex work may be a temporary solution, and so on.

I’ve highlighted in bold some common realities known to those who study or hobnob with undocumented migrants, and removed some material you can read on the original site. Note the immensely pragmatic attitude shown by those interviewed: they are going against legal policy, they know it, they will keep trying, they are not crying about it. It’s not a victimising article.

Why do I want to get to Britain? It has to be better than everything else

Jason Burke, Norrent-Fontes, France, 8 March 2009

The three tents are clustered in a ditch, beside a field, in the middle of nowhere. . . .A tractor bumps past, a crow flaps across the grey sky, the traffic on the A26 Paris-Calais motorway 500 yards behind a small wood is barely audible. It is an unlikely place for a refugee transit camp, the last stop before the UK. The nearest town is two miles away: the grubby two cafes and post office of Norrent-Fontes.

But the ditch is a temporary home for 26 young Eritreans and Ethiopians trying to get to Britain by hiding in the lorries that stop in the layby every night. And their situation is far from unique. An investigation by the Observer has revealed scores of such makeshift settlements containing an estimated 1,500 people, including women and children, scattered across a huge swath of northern France.

There are camps as far west as the Normandy port of Cherbourg. . . and as far north as the Belgian ports of Zeebrugge and Ostend. In Paris, an estimated 200 young immigrants who are on their way to the UK sleep in parks every night. . . Read the rest of this entry »

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The UN recently released yet another report on trafficking which says:

a disproportionate number of women are involved in human trafficking, not only as victims (which we knew), but also as traffickers (first documented here). Female offenders have a more prominent role in present-day slavery than in most other forms of crime.

Sillies . . . if they only had listened to what some of us were saying from the beginning, they wouldn’t find themselves so surprised now. By which I mean that those who help move people around in informal networks are very often friends and relations of the people doing the moving, so why shouldn’t they be women as often as men? If you take away Crime as the framing of this sort of movement, then you don’t have to expect the criminals to be men. The work of smuggling does not require particular physical strength. As an article about coyotes on the Mexico-US border shows, women can be highly adept at people smuggling and trafficking.

Note in the following excerpts that the words trafficking and smuggling are used interchangeably. The original story was published in Spanish, where what English-speakers are calling trafficking is often called la trata and smuggling el tráfico or el contrabando. The article is not about that dread term sex trafficking, and as you’ll see, those trafficked are not seen as victims. I’ve highlighted some suggestive quotations in bold.

Women Are the New Coyotes

La Opinión,  Claudia Núñez, 23 December 2007

Gaviota has six phones that don’t stop ringing. Her booming business produces net profits of more than $50,000 a month. She has dozens of customers lining up for her in a datebook stretching three months ahead.

“The old story of the man who runs the ‘coyotaje’ business is now just a myth. It’s finally coming out that the big business of human trafficking is in female hands. As long as they make it known that they are women, they have lots of business all along the border,” explains Marissa Ugarte, a psychologist, lecturer and founder of the Bilateral Safety Corridor Coalition of San Diego, Calif.

Female coyotes tend to employ other women – most of them single mothers – to line up customers, arrange food and lodging for the undocumented, and participate in cross-border money laundering.

“A real ‘coyote’ organizes everything for you. From who and where to take the ‘goats’ across, and where they will stay on this side of the border, to who will deliver them to the door of the customer (the immigrant’s family). The other ones who just take you across the river or through the desert – those bastards are just sleazebags . . .  says Gaviota, whose smuggling network operates in Laredo, Tex. and transports migrants into the United States at border crossings or across the Rio Grande, depending on the customer’s budget.

“The business is a real money-maker,” says Ramón Rivera, a DHS spokesperson in Washington, D.C. “These women inspire confidence in the immigrants and when the authorities stop them and take them to court, they give them shorter sentences because they are mothers, daughters, because they are women. . . . Read the rest of this entry »

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The simplification of complexity is well illustrated by the idea of putting physical obstructions at national borderlines to keep people out. The stereotype of illegal migration imagines three clear roles: the migrant trying to cross, the smuggler or trafficker helping to flout the law and the police officer attempting to stop them. The reality is often much more complicated. The other day a story from Moldova pointed to corruption as a major problem in controlling migration there, and now here is a more tightly focussed account from the Mexico-US border.  I understand corruption to mean, in both cases, that those on the police and government side of the equation - who are paid to prevent people from getting in - take money in exchange for making entry easier. This can happen whether the activities in question are labelled smuggling or trafficking.

The below excerpts are from a news report about Lowell Bergman’s documentary on smuggling; his comments were made during a recent briefing at the University of California.

Corrupt U.S. Agents Aid Human Smuggling at Border

New America Media, Annette Fuentes, 6 Feb 2009

‘Building a fence and wall at the border and putting more border agents down there creates a bigger pool of potential corruption targets.’

The build-up of security agents on the border, especially since Sept. 11, 2001, hasn’t slowed illegal migration . . . Those who would have tried crossing alone are more likely to pay a smuggler to shepherd them across. ‘If people try to get across the border, they eventually get across . . .  Part of the fee to the smuggler is the guarantee that they’ll get you across. If they fail the first time, they’ll try again.’

. . . Proponents of the militarization of the border have used the threat of terrorist attacks in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001 to justify the build-up. But Bergman noted that there is no evidence that terrorists have ever entered through the Mexico-U.S. border. Of all those apprehended at border crossings, there is no record of non-Mexicans. . .

. . . there has been no effective internal oversight of border agents since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Multiple agencies, each with some responsibilities for immigration, customs and law enforcement, have meant no coordinated approach to investigations. ‘They completely lost any idea of what was going on . . . Only now are they beginning to find out, and they are overwhelmed by the number of leads and cases to follow up on.’

The FBI . . . now has about 200 open cases of human smuggling involving corrupt border agents. But the agency is swimming against the tide. ‘People coming through checkpoints . . . is still a growth industry.’

Here the whole black and white, law-and-order idea loses ground, and we see instead a multi-national social setting. Placing people at a border to enforce it provides them with opportunities to make money doing exactly what their formal job pays them to prevent. This is, of course, a widespread phenomenon amongst police of all kinds. Many people take law-enforcement jobs not out of an inspired devotion to the State but because they can get those jobs.Maybe they perform many aspects of their jobs correctly, but they don’t believe in ‘the law’ enough to resist opportunities to freelance. 

Here are three more examples of specific cases where those with power were paid to smooth crossing the border: a Dominican diplomat in New York, a filipino in New Jersey and a US customs officer and Chinese smuggler of people via Ecuador.