migration

All week people have been sending me a news story whose source is a press release from the Spanish National Police claiming another triumph in the crusade against sex trafficking. In the years I lived in Spain such stories of breaking up gangster networks were published continuously - so often that I wondered why police didn’t soften the claim. The implication was, and is, that endless police actions are necessary against an infinite number of organised trafficking rings. The possibility that police are not actually breaking up rings but rather taking down a few organisers and lots of undocumented migrants is not mentioned. The theory and practice of policing of this social problem is crude and ineffective, like sticking a finger in a leaky dam.

The Policía Nacional, in charge of keeping smuggled migrants and smuggled drugs out of Spain, issue press releases to advertise successful operations. The investigation in question led to picking up both undocumented migrants and people moving them around the country, finding them jobs and making money off them - whether you call them traffickers, entrepreneurs, fixers or pimps. The fixing they do is standard in migration settings and can be done abusively or in a normal, businesslike way, whether the migrants work selling sex or doing some other job and whether they are men, women or transgender. As the police acknowledged, many of the migrants admitted they knew what sort of work they would be doing in Spain.

Of course it’s crap when migrants have been misled about the conditions they’ll have for living and working and feel trapped. The press release referred to the squalid flats some migrants were living in. Look at the police video and judge for yourself ow demonic it looks. The narrator says migrants had to give 50% of their earnings to the people in charge plus pay for food and lodging. It’s a bad deal but it isn’t slavery and it is not unusual amongst undocumented migrants. The debt mentioned, €4 000, is also not a high amount for a trip from Brazil, where most of the migrants were said to come.

This Spanish press release relates how police captured members of a network dealing with (and in) men rather than women. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t such networks before, or that smuggling rings are all gender-specific, or that things are really getting bad when men begin to be treated like women.

It also doesn’t mean something specially demonic is going on because drugs are mentioned -the Policía Nacional are also charged with stopping drug trafficking, remember, so they mention any they find. The presence of viagra makes the scenario sound more titillating and sex-slavey, but I think one can understand that drug in the same way one can understand alcohol, hash and cocaine in these settings - substances some people use to feel better or more capable of performing or enduring unpleasantness or having fun. Without knowing how many of the migrants complained that these drugs were forced on them or that they were not allowed to sleep, we might refrain from getting all het up.

Police interrogations of migrants picked up in raids tend towards fruitlessness and dodgy information. Undocumented people want to avoid being deported at all cost. The police want to find traffickers above all. The atmosphere is conducive to telling a certain kind of story of ignorance and victimisation: interrogations are not moments for the detained to strongly assert agency about buying false documents, selling sex or taking drugs.

This ring-bust might be a significant one, there’s no way to know. The proliferation of the limited, exciting-sounding information from a single press release into all the major media, treating it as Big Terrible Urgent news is about the Internet - not journalism, or not what we used to think of as journalism. An egregious example comes from Diario Vasco: Prostitutos forzosos 24 horas a base de viagra (prostitutes forced 24 hours with viagra), followed by the typical thoughtless cliché Venían con la promesa de ser bailarines o ejercer la prostitución de alto ’standing’, pero vivían hacinados y explotados.

So, could this be a particularly bad trafficking story? Maybe, but I doubt it. Does it deserve all the hullaballoo it’s getting? Definitely not.

If you didn’t read the comments on my recent post about Important Enemies you really should. Nearly every one is interesting, thoughtful or nutty-entertaining, far from the tedious comments often heard at places like the Guardian. No, this was an authentic conversation with drama. My original idea was to have a section on my cv where important slag-offs would be listed, but the latest characterisation of my work is quite wonderful. In a round-up review of several recent books on the sex industry, Ken Plummer has called me an Intellectual Feminist Maverick after finishing up his take on Jeffreys’s Industrial Vagina:

Of course, I think [Jeffreys] is over the top and lacks some subtlety – but that is often what is needed so that the big issues can be seen. . . she would make a great starting point in a classroom and elsewhere for a debate on these issues.

But then, immediately, one needs to read the work of Laura Agustín as a counterpoint. Laura María Agustín is an intellectual feminist maverick who seeks to deconstruct the entire field and challenge much thinking. In Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, she draws from years of researching and thinking about the position of women travelling in the global economy, many of whom engage in various forms of ‘selling sex’. Much of what Jeffreys claims, I guess Agustín would dismiss as myth. At the core of her argument is the idea that migrants often make ‘personal choices’ to travel and work in the sex industry. Her specific interests though are not with groups like street workers but with migration and trafficking. She sees them as a part of a dynamic global economy; and one where often the sex control industry makes the situation worse, not better, for them. Indeed the core of this book is an attack upon the ‘rescue industry’, which ostensibly has a long history of ‘saving women’ while in fact it is driven by a ‘feminist fundamentalism’ which frequently and actually harms women. This book is reviewed elsewhere in Sexualities (Vol. 12, no. 6) and her ideas are developed in a special issue of Sexualities in 2007 (Vol 19, no. 4). But it has to be mentioned again here. She problematizes the whole area of those who work to help these women – and who place them ‘in need’. She advocates listening to the voices of the migrant women. Between the work of Agustín and Jeffreys there is a major and long-standing feminist tension at work on many levels.

The only thing I’d take exception to is Plummer’s guess that I’d call Jeffreys’s ideas ‘myth’. Numerous reviewers of my work use this word, but I personally don’t. To me, myth makes it sound as though I think fundamentalist feminist ideas about trafficking are fabrication, which isn’t right. Instead, I see those ideas as gender ideology and a campaign strategy: change the language, reduce complexity to a simple, quickly comprehensible type, hold fast to the line. I don’t think the world is a happy, unsexist place, that globalisation is fair, that no one is ever made miserable by migration or sex work or any other simplistic thing. The long-standing tension Plummer mentions is between a hard-line reductionist (or totalising) view of women as always exploited and a nuanced and doubting view that wants to recognise as much female agency as possible, on principle.

The excerpt is from ‘A Round Up of Some Recent Books on Prostitution and Sex Work’, by Ken Plummer. Sexualities 13(3): 394-400, (2010).

I chose the one magazine cover that doesn’t show a manly man but rather a manly woman from the collection of Vintage Men’s Adventure Magazines at the Art of Manliness

How times have changed. . .

One-in-Seven New U.S. Marriages is Interracial or Interethnic, from Pew Research Center

A record 14.6% of all new marriages in the United States in 2008 were between spouses of a different race or ethnicity from each other . . .  an estimated six times the intermarriage rate among newlyweds in 1960 and more than double the rate in 1980. This dramatic increase has been driven in part by the weakening of longstanding cultural taboos against intermarriage and in part by a large, multi-decade wave of immigrants from Latin America and Asia.

The Price That We Pay - Undocumented Immigrants and Taxation from Truthout

According to her 2009 tax return, the divorced mother of three . . . made $18,295.68 of which $1,170.41 was withheld for Social Security tax and $273.73 for Medicare - benefits that Rita is unlikely to ever see. . . Reports by the Congressional Budget Office and the Social Security Administration confirm that undocumented immigrants in fact pay many different types of taxes, including sales tax, property tax, Social Security tax and income tax.

Interview with Nadine Gordimer from The New Statesman

. . . ‘It’s a strange thing. While there is great excitement about the World Cup, at the same time, we’ve got these tremendous difficulties. I’m certainly not a killjoy. People need bread and circuses, and this is a big circus. Let it be enjoyed. But what about the bread?’

The Sex Trade and Feminism: An Interview with Ann Russo from Stories so strong they crumble concrete: Women + Prison A Site for Resistance

Why should Google be sexist about just this issue?

Cougar Life accuses Google of sexism

The founder of a Toronto-based dating website for older women looking for younger men is accusing Google of sexism after the web giant labelled Internet ads for “cougar” dating sites as “non-family safe,” while ads for many sites promoting liaisons between older men and younger women remain “family safe.”

West been eating cake too long by HDS Greenway

Europe, with its treasured welfare-state indulgences, is going to find it hard to adjust to leaner times

Smile, honey, you’re on candid camera, by Chris Petit, The New Statesman

The central mystery that remains is why the UK embraced surveillance culture far more enthusiastically than other countries, turning us into perhaps the most watched nation on earth.

Day of Europe, and immigration in the EU, by Bruce Miller

The combination of ageing populations and a contracting domestic labour force is set to have drastic consequences for Europe. Left unchecked, it will translate into unsustainable pressure on pension, health and welfare systems, and into negative outcomes for economic growth and taxation. If Europe is serious about moving towards a knowledge society, efforts to enhance economic efficiency and upgrade the skills of the existing population must be complemented with active measures to address this demographic challenge. Not least, it must include a concerted effort to make the EU an attractive destination for immigrants. Without migration, the EU will not be able to meet future labour and skills shortages.

Photo Clarence H. White

This Sunday’s sex is all about the idea of ethnicity. Did you know that the state of Arizona is now banning the field of ethnic studies? These attempts to keep migrants out or, in case they’ve got in, as unnoticeable as possible, are so crude, so infantile, so little comprehending of the complexities of culture and desire.

Borderlanders: What Jews Know about Immigration by Debbie Nathan

Houston, my hometown, had many Mexican Americans when I was young but few Jewish Americans. As a member of the second group—darkish skinned, dark haired, brown-eyed–living among blonde, blue-eyed Baptists and Methodists, I was frequently asked, “Honey, what are you?” by my friends’ parents. . .

Before I was white by William Easterly

Nell Irvin Painter is an African-American historian at Princeton. I just finished her fascinating History of White People. The big story is what a slippery category “White” is, and how many today considered “White” used not to be. My German and Scots-Irish ancestors, some of whom probably arrived as indentured servants (i.e. temporary slaves), were called “guano” (birdsh*t) by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1851. Emerson of course placed Anglo-Saxon English at the top of the racial hierarchy.

What’s Left of Queer? Immigration, Sexuality, and Affect in a Neoliberal World by Yasmin Nair

The rhetoric of “family reunification” erases the labor issues that are integral to how families work within their adopted neighborhoods and cities. By rendering the family in affective terms, we’re allowed to forget that neoliberalism increasingly deploys entire families as labor. Take, for instance, the popular mythology of immigrant-run family stores that help to revitalize neighborhoods. In fact, these, like the low-paid immigrants who live in the surrounding area, help to prepare neighborhoods for gentrification. Eventually, the better-off immigrants might join the ranks of the gentrifiers, while the rest are pushed further into the outskirts of the city, bused in for construction work in “better” neighborhoods.

How the Dreyfus Affair Explains Sarkozy’s Burqa Ban by Ruth Harris

Militant secularism has a long, troubled history in France, from paranoia over nun’s wimples to the Dreyfusard anti-Jesuit campaigns. Where will it end?

This article was the ice-breaker for migrants who sell sex. Before this, anything that touching the subject was disqualified from Migration Studies and shifted over to what we might call Feminist Polemic Studies. The journal I submitted to, JEMS, took over two years to find reviewers who would take it seriously: I submitted it to them in mid-2004 and it came out in 2006. This delay confirmed the point of the article nicely - the subject was supposed to disappear!  Now it’s not so hard to get these studies published, although the idea that migrants who sell sex ’aren’t really’ migrants because they are all victims of trafficking persists.

The Disappearing of a Migration Category: Migrants who sell sex, was published in 2006 in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 32(1), 29-47.

Note I’ve added a Share button for every post, so please do send on news of anything you like!

This poster was made by migrant sex workers (by their own definition) in Chiang Mai, Thailand, at the EMPOWER centre. I have posted it twice before but so many people are still ignorant about this point of view that I’m going to keep re-running it. See for yourself the reasons workers at Barn Su Funn Brothel gave for denouncing raids and rescue operations intended to liberate them, whether rescuers are police officers, ngo employees or charity workers:

• We lose our savings and our belongings.
• We are locked up.
• We are interrogated by many people.
• They force us to be witnesses.
• We are held until the court case.
• We are held till deportation.
• We are forced re-training.
• We are not given compensation by anybody.
• Our family must borrow money to survive while we wait.
• Our family is in a panic.
• We are anxious for our family.
• Strangers visit our village telling people about us.
• The village and the soldiers cause our family problems.
• Our family has to pay ‘fines’ or bribes to the soldiers.
• We are sent home.
• Military abuses and no work continues at home.
• My family has a debt.
• We must find a way back to Thailand to start again.

The poster brings us close to a situation many people doubt: that poorer migrants selling sex often prefer to continue what they’re doing to being forcibly rescued by people on anti-trafficking crusades. This is not to cast doubt on many helpers’ good intentions or the genuine rescue of some individuals. But it shows how rescue agents haven’t consulted the prostitutes they want to save first, to find out whether they want to be helped and, if they do, what kind of help would actually be helpful. The poster makes it clear that cutting migrant women off from their source of income has drastic consequences for themselves and their families.

This does not mean that they or I deny the existence of abusive practices inflicted during smuggling and trafficking operations. It means that an ideological stance that claims all migrants doing sex work have been victims of such practices is wrong.

During my 15 years of researching this subject, I have met migrants of myriad nationalities, in many countries, in bars, brothels, shelters, ngo offices, streets, clubs and houses. Some had had bad experiences, some had not recovered from them yet, some were getting on with the next stage of their lives, some enjoyed doing sex work, many had adapted to it as the best option of the moment. For those who want to read more about it, my book Sex at the Margins has lots of details.

Thanks once more to the Asia-Pacific Network of Sex Workers for sending this photo.

I will be Visiting Professor of Gender and Migration for three months (September-November) at the Maison d’analyse des processus sociaux (MAPS), at the Université de Neuchâtel, working with Janine Dahinden. I’m invited to give lectures at universities round Switzerland and two classes detailed here. For more information contact the emails given below.

1-Migration, Feminism and the Sex Industry
Lecture/Workshop
University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland

15/16/17 September 2010

Open to PhD students, researchers and post-docs in gender studies in Switzerland.

Compulsory Registration Deadline: 15 August 2010.

Migration has transformed feminists’ ideological conflict about the meaning of prostitution. From being a two-sided debate about whether ’sex work is work’ or ‘violence against women’, the discussion now must consider migration policies that favour ‘highly skilled’, white-collar and technical professionals over those willing to take less prestigious jobs in the informal sector, including the sex industry.

Researchers working in the realm of migration and sex work and wishing to present a paper (15 minutes, followed by a 30 minutes discussion) are asked to send a title and abstract before 15 August to: Janine.dahinden [a] unine.ch

Maison d’analyse des processus sociaux - MAPS
Université de Neuchâtel
Faubourg de l’Hôpital 27 CH-2000 Neuchâtel

2- Migration and Globalization: Gendered Perspectives
MA course open to all students in gender studies in Switzerland
University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland

Maximum 40 participants (5 ECTS)

3/4/5 November 2010

What does globalisation mean in terms of people’s movements across borders? Who leaves home and why? How do ideas about Gender Equality help us understand undocumented migration and illegal jobs? What are human trafficking and smuggling?

(Compulsory information meeting: 20 September. Texts and references will be given, that students will be asked to read before the workshop.)

The teaching is in English. Registration and information: francois.spangenberg [a] unine.ch

Open to the public

Managing vulnerability: The rescue industry and the struggles of female migrants

Danish Institute for International Studies - DIIS
Strandgade 56, 1401 Copenhagen

5 May 2010
1430 - 1700

Seminar with Laura Agustín, author of Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, Jo Doezema, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex and Sine Plambech, The New School for Social Research, New York.

If you’re in New York, try to come to tonight’s event at 66th Street and York Avenue - a lot of fantastic people will be in attendance.

I’m giving a talk at a good evening hour on 10 March, on the East Side in the 60s, and welcome anyone interested to come along. The lecture is part of the Pugwash series of conferences ‘examining the relationship between science and society, to ensure that research benefits humanity.’ This is a good opportunity to consider what social-justice advocates and social scientists consider to be evidence of a problem and what it means when proofs conflict. So many trafficking conversations consist of ideological battles that I don’t wonder most people feel confused about what’s going on.

Trafficking, migration and the sex industry: Framing the questions, providing the proofs

Lecture by Laura Agustín, author of Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry

Rockefeller University
Weiss Building Room 305
York avenue at 66th Street
New York NY 10065
Enter the campus at 66th Street

Wednesday 10 March 2010

645 pm (refreshments) - 9 pm
Lecture begins 7 pm, Questions 8 pm

Subway: Lexington Avenue Local #6 to 68th Street/Lexington Avenue Station; walk east
Buses: M31 (York Avenue/57th St crosstown) and M66 (68th St crosstown

Contact: pugwash [at] rockefeller.edu

Laura Agustín studies cultural, sexual and postcolonial issues linking commercial sex, migration, informal economies and feminist theory. Her research amongst migrants and social helpers challenges several contemporary myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work; that migrants who sell sex are always passive victims; and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Agustín argues that the label ‘trafficked’ does not describe migrants’ lives and that a Rescue Industry disempowers them. Frequently, says Agustín, migrants prefer to work in the sex industry to their other options, and, despite being treated like a marginalised group, they form part of a dynamic global economy.