The Naked Anthropologist

Tag Archives: informal economy

False papers and ‘illegal migrants’: Faujis in London

This story comes from Southall, an area of west London often called Little Punjab, but it has a lot in common with a story about mexicanos in the US called Migrant workers wait around for work and another one about algerians in France: The Suffering of the Immigrant.

The migrants are called faujis, Punjabi for unauthorised immigrants. Before coming to the UK in the backs of lorries via Russia and Europe, or overstaying tourist visas, they were mostly poorer farmers from India’s Punjab region.

The following report doesn’t talk about ‘sex trafficking’, but the sense of victimisation is not dissimilar. Although the report shows different ways migrants use false papers and are used by employers, it highlights the latter. Maybe that’s a good thing for readers who think all unauthorised migrants are criminal scroungers. The reporter tells us that most of the migrants knew they were taking risks when they left home, but we need more information about that, particularly what they themselves have to say.

Migrant criminal network exposed

excerpts from BBC News 2008/07/16 By Richard Bilton

More than 40 houses packed with illegal immigrants were identified in one square mile of Southall, west London. The young, mostly male Punjabis are not here lawfully and, although most know the risks, they have few legal rights. They are surrounded by forgers, criminals and ruthless employers.

Vicki said he could get people into the country on lorries, known as donkeys, organised by what he called his “man in Paris”, and told how he could provide a fake “original” passport that had been “checked” to beat security at a UK airport.

Some try to get by without any documents. Others will have cheap, fake documents, and some will pay good money for original passports, for bank accounts, a Home Office registration card or for stolen identities on driving licences.

One reporter went [to a chip shop] for work. The owner said to “never mind” the fact he had no papers, that he would “handle that issue” and that the reporter should not mention it “otherwise you may be nicked”.

I have often recommended that we find a way to talk about this kind of migration without being forced to choose between two contrasting and simplified traps. In trap one, everyone in the story except for the reporters is flouting multiple laws and should be treated like a criminal, even though their labour is wanted and paid for in the country they’ve travelled to. In trap two, the migrants are complete victims, first of a global economy that has led them to desperate, last-ditch solutions, and then of various bad characters who have misled them about what their life abroad would be, overcharged them for fake documents, forced them to live in lousy, overcrowded conditions and underpaid them for unsafe, illegal jobs.

In Forget Victimisation: Granting Agency to Migrants, I address the second, victimising trap and I say

Of course I believe that the world is a place of terrible differences between the poor and the rich, where 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!

I see plenty of possibilities for exploitation in the fauji story the BBC tells, but I also see the kind of opportunities thousands of migrants have told me they want to take advantage of. Even though they didn’t fully comprehend how difficult it would be before they left, now they want to make the best of it. And even though they engaged in something illegal in order to cross the border, many are now eager to become useful, regular residents with both responsibilities and rights. Including some of those who sell sex, which is not mentioned in this BBC article but is not unknown in the fauji world.

There isn’t going to be one legal model for dealing with the many different kinds of quasi-legal, semi-illegal and egregiously illegal migration – of which trafficking and ‘sex trafficking’ are part. Current political rhetoric seems to imagine only two possible ‘solutions’: a hard-line, mean, law-and-order KEEP OUT policy or a soft-line, generous, utopian NO BORDERS policy. Since these reflect deeply contrasting world views, most of the debate about them remains abstract, symbolic and confrontational – as though a fundamental ‘way of life’ were at stake.

This has a lot in common with debates about the sex industry, in which two sides representing two different world views are opposed. What I’d like to see in both areas is more pragmatism about what workable improvements – not solutions, for now – might look like.

Some related posts on the different sorts of irregular migration include:

Not sex trafficking: False papers as a means to migrate

The Shadowy World of Sex Across Borders

Sex trafficking v prostitution: How do we judge the evidence?

The Sex in ‘Sex Trafficking’

Working on ships, Travelling by ship

Growing demand for sex shops, lapdancing, poledancing and escort agencies

Those familiar with my work know how resistant I am to participating in arguments about statistics. In that game, advocates argue, for example, about how many sex-working migrants are trafficked. When people overstay visas and remain in a country they are visiting or use faked documents to get in, they join a category later called ‘undocumented migrants’, but per se their numbers are not recorded.

In the same way, people who work in sex industry businesses not recognised by governments, and thus excluded from formal accounting, cannot be counted. Therefore, when either side claims to know numbers for sex workers, they are only guessing.

The same claims are heard vis-a-vis numbers of sex workers and prostitutes. In places where prostitution is technically legal for individuals and/or where some kinds of sex businesses can register and thus be counted in formal government accounts,

So I was interested to see, in a Guardian article of 17 November 2008, a different sort of statistic. The figures, based on 130 million calls to the UK’s Directory Assistance, compare requests for numbers from January to June 2007 with the same period in 2008. Figures show that requests for the telephone numbers of pole and lap dancing venues went up 469%, of escort agencies 40% and of sex shops 1,312%.

The Guardian article predictably ties the increases to sexist culture ‘fuelled by a loophole in the law that enables the clubs to be licensed in the same way as cafes.’ But the article goes on to say that calls requesting the numbers of other leisure activities, such as karaoke bars, also increased.

These figures only indicate interest in sex businesses, not definite buying of services, but they are better than the fantasies often spouted irresponsibly by all kinds of serious commentators. Since they tally the telephone numbers of businesses with landlines, they will take in both informal and formal businesses and blur the line between them – which I consider a good thing.

Migrant workers wait around for work: a description by Ana Castillo

The Guardians, by Ana Castillo (2007, Random House), is about the lives of Mexicans living near the border in the US. In this excerpt, two of them make a tour with a photograph of someone who’s disappeared.

[We went] to Paisano to ask if any of the laborers recognise him. Pero nel. No luck. Young and old men alike shake their tired heads. IT’s six in the morning and they already looked tired out.

So we go walking around downtown, over by the Stanton bridge, up and down Paisano and down and up Oregon. We go by the Tiradero as the merchants are setting up their puestos and all los hombres are out there already. That flea market’s open all year long. Across the street you got the KFC-Taco Bell combo in one lil building-men are waiting there. They’re waiting in the McDonald’s and Church’s Chicken parking lots, too. Across from my old parish, El Sagrado Corazon, where Lola used to make me go to Mass, you got them waiting. ‘Maestro,’ they call out, ‘take me. I’ll work hard for you. See”‘ They flex a muscle or try to. They flash a smile at us.

Me and Oso make our way down to all the bus stations with Rafa’s picture that’s falling apart from so much passing around. The one closest to my house is on Santa Fe and Overland. Then over to Los Angeles Limousines. I understand that some women take that one all the way to LA to get clothes deals at the garment district there. Then they come right back on that bus line and take the clothes to Juarez to sell. I go to the Plaza de los Lagartijos where all the women housekeepers wait to be picked up by patrones. The city used to keep live alligators in the fountain but the animals kept getting killed.

Once I even asked a couple of Migra parked on the street. ‘Let me see your ID, sir,’ one tonto said of answering me about the photograph I was trying to show him. N’hombre. La perrera anda brava. They’ll take anybody in.

LATimesBlogs 17 April 2008

Another time, me and Oso asked some puchucos standing around waiting-not for work but to make dope deals. I knew who they were-los Mexika Tres Mil. Pretty bad pachucos, but they still ain’t the worse. The Mexika Tres Mil or the MTM like they call themselves, come straight out of federal prisons. They operate inside the prisons, too. Maybe they’re tied to the big narcos. I ain’t claiming to know nothing. Just like my neighbors never hear nothing, I walk around but I don’t see nothing…The MTM ain’t no lil ganga, neither. They’re spread all the way down to Centroamerica. Matones mostly. I ain’t afraid of them, though….

All up and down now there are los day laborers who cross over every morning, the skilled and unskilled, good workers and not-so-good ones. The borracho types hiding cuartos in paper bags underneath the muebles they’re leaning against. You gotta look behind the tires to check for a hidden half-pint to make sure you don’t pick up un tipo who’ll be pie-eyed by noon.

It almost looks like something outta the Depression era, so many men needing work. But back then, they couldn’ve waited all darn day and no one wouldn’ve come for them. Then again, back then they weren’t allowed to cross over precisely ’cause there was no work. Now, during the child harvest season, La Migra turns a blind eye at all the men that come to be picked up.

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Ambiguous refugees: Blackbirding in 1943

Here’s another example of smuggling of migrants in the informal economy, from Dorothy B. Hughes’s The Blackbirder, 1943. The conversation takes place at a bar in New York, between two ‘refugees’, one a Frenchwoman pursued by Nazis in France and the other a German man who was living in France. The woman has tried unsuccessfully to avoid him, because she thinks he may be a Nazi and also because she herself travelled via Portugal and Cuba, where she bought a false passport to enter the US. The man takes her to a ‘rathskeller’ in Yorktown, on New York’s Upper East Side. The discussion centres on how to get in and out of the country using ‘informal’ methods.

‘You say it is simple. But you are a German.’

‘A refugee,’ he said smugly.

She pressed it. A German would not be admitted. ‘How did you come into this country?’ […]

‘If you can pay for it, it is easy. There are planes every week from Old Mexico into New Mexico. A regular tram line. You pay for your seat, in you go! Or if you like – out you go. So simple.’

‘Who runs this? Not – not the Gestapo?’

‘Oh no!’ Now he looked over his shoulder as if he sensed a listener. Now he did drop his voice. ‘It is not run for governments – not for any governments, nor by any governments. It is a business venture. In Mexico and New Mexico. I ask no questions. A passenger does not question the carrier which transports him. Certainly not.’ The line of his mouth was greedy. ‘It is a good business, this blackbirding. A big business.’ Again he winked. His thumb and forefinger made a round. ‘I wouldn’t mind having a little slice of it.’ His eyes were slits of obsidian. It is like the American prohibition. No taxes to pay. You pay no tax when there is no business, no registered business. Certainly not! The receipts – some are very large – are all for you.’

Later in the book the protagonist is in a position to help US authorities catch the real bad guys but won’t, in case she is deported, since she has no legal entry visa. Does all this not ring a large bell loudly?

-Laura Agustín, The Naked Anthropologist

Manifesto against new EU migration law

Perhaps this is less Border Thinking than calling a spade a spade. Europe made itself through imperialism and now passes a law allowing detention of undocumented migrants, even if employed in European-owned businesses, for up to 18 months. Original Spanish follows.

ALAI, América Latina en Movimiento

2008-07-24 – Available in: English Español Portugues Français

Manifesto against the European migration law

Honorable European Governments and Parliamentarians

Some of our ancestors, a few, or many, or all of them, came from Europe.

The world received these immigrant workers from Europe with generosity.

Now, with the new European Directive on Forced Return of Migrants, dictated by the looming economic crisis, Europe is criminalizing the free circulation of people, despite this having been consecrated as a right in international law since many years ago.

There is nothing strange about this, because foreign workers have always been used as scapegoats for the periodic crises of a system that uses them when necessary, and then discards them in the in the dustbin when no longer needed.

It is not strange, but it is shameful.

It seems that a convenient amnesia prevents Europe from remembering what Europe would be like without cheap labor from abroad, and without the services that the entire world has provided her with. Europe would not be Europe without the massacre of indigenous peoples in the Americas and without the enslavement of the sons and daughters of Africa, to mention only a few forgotten examples.

Europe should apologize to the world, or at the very least give thanks for what the world has given her, instead of legalizing the hunting down and punishment of hard working people who have come to Europe, fleeing the hunger and the wars that the masters of the world have sent them.

From the Americas,
Cordially,

ARGENTINA
– Adolfo Pérez Esquivel – Premio Nobel de la Paz
– Atilio Boron, escritor
– Hebe Bonafini, Madres de Plaza de Mayo
– Osvaldo Bayer , escritor
– Hermana Martha Pelloni – Derechos Humanos
– Diana Maffía., filósofa feminista
– Rally Barrionuevo, cantautor
– Claudia Korol, periodista, Clacso
– Luis E. Sabini Fernández, periodista, editor y docente
– Bernardo Buonomo – agente pastoral – Pastoral Social Moron
– Lydia Pallavicini.- DNI 3873951
– Virginia Sol.- LC 6.239.888
– María Virginia Parodi.- DNI 25.294.793
– Ana Barousse.- DNI 10859344
– Rodolfo Martín Pavesi.- D.N.I. 21.670.512
– Marta Tomé.- DNI 3604943
– María del Carmen Pessani.- DNI 6264778
– Andrea Castaño.- DNI 17108310
– María Celina De Paula.- DNI31723004
– Mariela Grisel Battaglia.- DNI 33080296
– Eduardo Grandin.- LE 64443858
– Ana Pastor. Coordinadora General, Asociación Civil Madre Tierra
– Gabriel Nosetto. Presidente, Asociación Civil Madre Tierra

BOLIVIA
– Eduardo Paz, profesor universitario Continue reading →

Australian National Radio: Counterpoint interview

ABC Radio National – Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Counterpoint – 5 May 2008 – Sex at the Margins

Monday 4pm repeated Friday 1pm

Presented by Michael Duffy and and Paul Comrie-Thomson

Claims are often made that large numbers of migrants are trafficked around the world for sex. Laura Maria Agustín has looked closely at the evidence for this and concludes that the figures are exaggerated. She says that the West’s obsession with migrant sex workers is a moral panic produced by concerns about immigration in general.

Transcript : This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Michael Duffy: We often hear claims that large numbers of migrants are trafficked around the world for sex. Well, our next guest, Laura Maria Agustin, has looked closely at the evidence for this and she concludes the figures are hugely exaggerated. She says the West’s obsession with migrant sex workers is a sort of moral panic produced by concern about immigration in general. Her new book is called Sex at the Margins, and I spoke to her last week.

Reading some of your work, it strikes me that a very important thing you bring to this issue is your familiarity, your knowledge of the actual people involved, whereas often people who write about migrant sex workers and so on seem not to know a lot about them, they seem to regard them sometimes as symbols for their fears or even their fantasies. Can you tell us a little bit about your experience? How have you come to understand and know these people?

Laura Maria Agustin: Yes, I considered them my friends. I was working in the NGO world in different parts of the Caribbean and Latin America, and people migrating to go work somewhere else, to be maids or do construction or sell sex was quite well known and conventional and we all understood why it was happening. And then I found out that people in Europe particularly at the time (this was the mid 90s, the late 90s) considered this a terrible tragedy and talked about it in a completely different way. That was my original research question; why should they be talking about them in such a different way? And I naively asked; haven’t they spoken to them yet? Continue reading →

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