Kein Mensch Ist Illegal: No One is Illegal reads the German pavement art. When I was doing research on migration in Spain, it was understood amongst NGOs and activists that undocumented migrants did indeed have the right to health care from publicly-funded institutions (public health clinics, notably). This right was not advertised anywhere, however, nor did any government spokesperson come out and say it in public. To know that you would be attended if you showed up at a public clinic, someone else had to tell you first – either another, more clued-in migrant or some person in solidarity with migrants.
I have doubts about the concept of rights in general, myself, and in particular that of human rights, but the academic author of an article denouncing Germany’s situation accepts them unquestioningly. The conundrum rests in the fact that migrants don’t legally exist in countries they have entered without documentation. Since they don’t have citizens’ (legal residents’) rights there, human rights to health are claimed, in tandem with arguments that in the country under discussion health care is considered a right.
Germany’s immigration policies focus mainly on combating illegal immigration, without any attention to the rights of undocumented migrants. In principle, there are certain minimal rights available to undocumented immigrants in Germany, including a reduced level of medical treatment. Several studies, however, have shown that in practice these migrants are hardly in a position to avail of their right to seeking medical care. The exclusion from full social benefits stems from the Government’s fear of creating any additional pull factors which might encourage further immigration. Undocumented migrants’ human rights are in no way sufficiently protected in Germany where the access to healthcare is governed by highly restrictive regulations. Medical assistance to this segment of the population is hampered as well as criminalised through the legal framework. Paragraphs 87 and 96 of the . . . Residence Act) . . . require public institutions to report illegal immigrants to the foreigners’ registration office. While hospitals and independent physicians are not obliged to do so, social welfare offices have to adhere to this law. This dismal situation is putting tremendous pressure on healthcare professionals and social workers who often work with limited resources to defend migrants’ fundamental rights to healthcare.
Smuggling migrants from Turkey, often known to insiders as the sheep trade: excerpts from an academic research article describe how smuggling is carried out, which a lot of people don’t know when they engage in anti-trafficking or anti-migration tirades.
The Sheep Trade
In contrast to the well-known tourist destinations along the Turkish Mediterranean coast, Ayvalik is an almost sleepy resort situated only a few kilometers from the Greek island of Lesbos. When we visited Ayvalik in 2003 our host told us right away that only last week a ship sailed out with 23 migrants on board and capsized somewhere nearby. Only three survived. He said: ‘The coastguard doesn’t bother to raise the sunken and stranded ships any more because there are so many of them. I can take you to one.’ The journey did not lead to a stranded ship but to another person who knew the ‘sheep trade’ from personal experience. Just a few years ago the man had helped 800 migrants to board a tanker. It happened the way it always does. He got a call from Istanbul to let him know that his help was needed. He actually succeeded in transporting the 800 people to the sparsely populated coast and from there to the tanker, which was to take them directly to Italy. A day later he got the news that the coastguard had captured the tanker.
The transport service began very small in the late 1980s and in the middle of the 1990s the Kurdish migrants began to show up. In the beginning they all traveled by public transport; then they were brought in minibuses and eventually in three or four big buses —until the police began to notice. Now they are moved in trucks, squashed together like ‘sheep’, as our host put it.
. . . With increasing and more sophisticated technologies of control, the situation has become much more difficult. The main effect was that small smugglers such as the fishermen are losing the race and well-organized smuggler networks are taking over. Another smuggler in Greece told us of his experiences with the practice of border crossings: ‘The payment only comes at the end of the deal.’ That’s the security that the customers or their relatives have. The deal is always a verbal one. When the captain has been contacted and the agreement has been made, the date is set, the ‘heads’ are counted, and finally the price and method of payment are determined. The price varies according to the number of ‘heads’ and the type of journey. The captain can earn up to €15,000 per ‘transport’.
Plus ça change: Smuggling migrants in 1949 I’m reading a lot of older noir fiction these days and noting references to informal migration, however it’s talked about....
At the End HumanTrafficking event in Luxor, several people attempted to shut me up by claiming that, in their trafficking discussions, they are only talking about the worst, the authentic trafficking cases – not the smuggled migrants and not the voluntary sex workers. It would be nice if that were true, it would be great if anti-prostitution and anti-migration campaigners did not mix everyone up and muddle categories so readily – but they do. That is the point: that is why there is dissent, disagreement and resistance, because those who believe themselves to be in charge of this freedom-seeking social movement do over-generalise all the time so that simplistic labels obliterate the preferences of many people and, often, hide a project to abolish commercial sex. Note how, in this story, one term is substituted for another as though they were all synonyms. The UN Convention on Transnational Organised Crime of 2002 has separate protocols for smuggling and trafficking. I have never been a fan of the distinction these protocols try to make, but it is disappointing that an organisation interested in the issues pays no attention to the distinction and muddles categories up completely. One of the results is that the word trafficking gets used to refer to all sorts of undocumented migration, jobs in the underground economy, jobs held by people under 18, all sex jobs and so on. Everything considered bad becomes ‘trafficking’. Smuggling of migrants is usually construed as aiding undocumented people to cross borders – which does not make them victims according to the law. This is a mess.
1 January 2011, New World Human Security Observatory
Mexico City: Organised crime in Mexico has diversified its methods for smuggling people into the United States, a lucrative business that is growing, along with the number of victims.
Both national and foreign emigrants pay up to $7,000 to reach US territory, through the same underground tunnels the cartels for drug trafficking, La Jornada newspaper commented. The traders also transport immigrants in speedboats that take them to Imperial Beach during the night. Once there, US citizens smuggle them into the country, charging up to $8,000 per person.
The modern detection mechanisms used by US authorities along the border wall in the Tijuana-Otay area have forced human traffickers to deviate the course to other border areas.
The new method of setting up transit camps to offer shelter to the people waiting to cross the border has become a very lucrative business, with profits amounting to $3,000 per person, the paper reported on Friday.
According to UN statistics, 200 million people emigrated from their country of origin this decade, almost tripling the movement of immigrants reported in the 1960s. Of that figure, nearly 10% of emigrants use Mexico as a transit point.
Plus ça change: Smuggling migrants in 1949 I’m reading a lot of older noir fiction these days and noting references to informal migration, however it’s talked about....
I continue to point out that all statistics for victims of trafficking are not only estimates but often irresponsible guesses. Workers in informal-sector jobs, whether they are migrants or not, and no matter what job they do and whether sex is involved or not, have not officially registered their presence as residents or workers, meaning there are no files or databases, to consult. For more on statistical acrobatics, particularly on sex trafficking, check out these articles.
Methods for estimating undocumented migrants do exist (undocumented migrants being the framework in which trafficking victims should be located). In the following example, the Pew Hispanic Center (in Washington DC) publishes its new figure (11.1 million in March 2009), asserting that their method of calculation, the residual method, is reliable and widely accepted because based on ‘official government data’. They explain that:
Under this methodology, a demographic estimate of the legal foreign-born population—naturalized citizens, legal permanent residents, temporary legal residents and refugees—is subtracted from the total foreign-born population. The remainder, or residual, is the source of population estimates and characteristics of unauthorized immigrants. These Pew Hispanic Center estimates use data mainly from the Current Population Survey (CPS), a monthly survey of about 55,000 households conducted jointly by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau. It is best known as the source for monthly unemployment statistics. Each March, the CPS sample size and questionnaire are expanded to produce additional data on the foreign-born population and other topics. The Pew Hispanic Center estimates make adjustments to the government data to compensate for undercounting of some groups, and therefore its population totals differ somewhat from the ones the government uses. Estimates for any given year are based on a March reference date. From U.S. Unauthorized Immigration Flows Are Down Sharply Since Mid-Decade
The Pew says they use the Current Population Survey. That is a census exercise, in which a form is sent to households to fill out. Undocumented migrants have abundant reasons for not filling in census forms correctly (and there are no penalties for filling them in incorrectly). So undercounting is likely. The Pew Center know that and make an adjustment, but the range of adjustment methods is also very wide:
All known users of this methodology correct the foreign born population (about 35–50 million) by 10–40% (3–12 million) to account for this undercount effect. Critics claim this correction is in error no matter which size correction is used. Wikipedia
About the Pew estimate, the Migration Information Center, also in Washington, warns this finding is inconclusive because of the margin of error in the estimates, which are based on data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey of 50,000 households each month. From a December 2010 report from the Migration Information Center (US migration).
In 2004, Time magazine claimed more dramatic numbers without feeling it necessary to explain how they were arrived at:
It’s fair to estimate, based on a Time investigation, that the number of illegal aliens flooding into the U.S. this year will total 3 million–enough to fill 22,000 Boeing 737-700 airliners, or 60 flights every day for a year. It will be the largest wave since 2001 and roughly triple the number of immigrants who will come to the U.S. by legal means. (No one knows how many illegals are living in the U.S., but estimates run as high as 15 million.)
I hope it’s clear that everyone’s guessing in one way or another!
What’s interesting here is the ordinariness of smuggling as part of the plot. Le Carré wouldn’t think of making such a banal activity The Crime in one of his own novels. Rather, the mechanism of the key character’s getting into the country is just one more detail to be investigated and explained by the spies. Denmark and Sweden as countries smugglers have to cope with are unusual. Note the randomness – the migrant hoped to get to Copenhagen and would’ve liked Gothenburg but ended up in Hamburg. Although this is fiction, it’s a plausible account.
‘Didn’t you know that they treat refugees worse in this town than anywhere in Germany?’
‘Hamburg will be my home, sir. It is where they bring me. It is Allah’s divine command.’
‘Who brought you? Who’s they?’
‘It was combination, sir.’
‘Combination of what?’
‘Maybe Turkish people. Maybe Chechen people. We pay them. They take us to boat. Put us in container. Container had little air’. .
‘We? Who’s we?’
‘Was group, sir. From Istanbul. Bad group. Bad men. I do not respect these men.’
‘How many of you?’
‘Maybe twenty. Container was cold. After few hours, very cold. This ship would go to Denmark. I was happy.’
‘You mean Copenhagen, right? Copenhagen in Denmark, the capital.’
‘Yes . . . to Copenhagen. In Copenhagen, I would be arranged. I would be free from bad men. But this ship did not go immediately Copenhagen. This ship must go first Sweden. To Gothenburg. Yes? . . In Gothenburg, ship will dock, ship will take cargo, then go Copenhagen. When ship arrive in Gothenburg we are very sick, very hungry. On ship they tell to us: “Make no noise. Swedes hard. Swedes kill you.” We make no noise. But Swedes do not like our container. Swedes have dog.’ He reflects a while. ‘”What is your name, please?” What papers, please? You are from prison? What crimes, please? You escape from prison? How, please?”‘ Doctors are efficient. I admire these doctors. They let us sleep. But God willing I must escape. To escape to Sweden is no chance. There is NATO wire. Many guards. But there is also toilet. From toilet is window. After window is gate to harbour. My friend can open this gate. My friend is from boat. I go back to boat. Boat takes me to Copenhagen. At last, I say, In Copenhagen was lorry for Hamburg. Sir, I love God. But the West I also love. In West I shall be free to worship Him.’
‘A lorry brought you to Hamburg?’
‘Was arranged.’
‘A Chechen lorry?’
‘My friend must first take me to road.’
‘Your friend from the crew? That friend? The same guy?’
‘No, sir, was different friend. To reach road was difficult. Before lorry, we must sleep one night in field.’ He looked up, and an expression of pure joy momentarily suffused his haggard features. ‘Was stars. God is merciful. Praise be to Him.’
Wrestling with the improbabilities of this story, humbled by its fervour yet infuriated as much by its omissions as his own incapacity to overcome them, Melik felt his frustration spread to his arms and fists . . .
‘Where did it drop you off then, this magic lorry that showed up out of nowhere? Where did it drop you?’
People-smuggling from Turkey: the sheep trade Smuggling migrants from Turkey, often known to insiders as the sheep trade: excerpts from an academic research article describe how...
Plus ça change: Smuggling migrants in 1949 I’m reading a lot of older noir fiction these days and noting references to informal migration, however it’s talked about....
I had one of the oddest experiences of my life last Sunday night providing ‘dissent’ on trafficking for a BBC television world debate held at the kind of end-trafficking campaign event best compared to a religious revival meeting. Everyone else seemed happy to meld trafficking with sex trafficking with prostitution with slavery – at least they did not object to others who did it. We heard about disreputable women and sleazy motels without a peep from Gender Experts attending.
At the BBC debate, held outdoors in the Temple of Luxor, a sandstorm was just abating, it was freezing, armed security men abounded. One movie actress challenged my right to speak – I hope editors left that bit in, and my reply to her, which politely explained what the word debate means. She is UN goodwill ambassador for trafficking, Mira Sorvino (needs the word goodwill explained to her as well).
I went because it will be televised this weekend and eventually uploaded to the BBC World Debates website, about which I will advise. Meanwhile:
Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist, on BBC World Debate: Can Human Trafficking Be Stopped?
held in the Temple of Luxor, Egypt, 12 December 2010, will be televised on the BBC World Service this weekend:
Times are GMT, although blocked from the UK (…) Available in rest-of-world for people whose cable television provides it; check programme guide for your country.
09:10 Sat 18 Dec 2010
22:10 Sat 18 Dec 2010
02:10 Sun 19 Dec 2010
15:10 Sun 19 Dec 2010
If anyone happens to see it, do let me know – I have not. Will be writing more about the experience anon. Here’s that wonderful setting again:
I wonder if my stamina will hold out to the end of a very demanding schedule. Last week, talks on different subjects in Neuchatel and Fribourg, then a flight to London to participate in the Battle of Ideas, then a flight back and the next day a talk in the Swiss capital of Bern, followed by a 3-day intensive course for MA students called Migration and Globalisation: phew! Tomorrow is the last day of that and then I plan to remain prone all weekend before leaving Monday to give a talk in Lausanne followed by a talk in Basel on Wednesday! I feel like a wind-up toy lecturer at times and suddenly think: oh god, am I repeating myself? Have I already told this story?
Details of my schedule as Visiting Professor in Gender and Migration are at the Swiss Gender Website.
The 3-day workshop is terrific, by the way – combining ideas about globalisation with different theories and experiences of all sorts of migration and, especially, how the need for low-wage labour and informal-sector work is a positive element in everyone’s economic development. I’ll soon be selling it and not just to students.
Although most academic book reviews are not interesting to read, some of the 20-some academic reviews of Sex at the Margins are really worth the effort. Elizabeth Bernstein, of Temporarily Yours fame, published this review of my book in 2009 in Gender, Place and Culture (Vol 16, 3). I delay reprinting these things for copyright reasons, and then suddenly and arbitrarily I decide it’s been long enough, as in this case.
________________________________________________
Sex at the Margins, a new book by scholar-activist Laura Agustín, is equal parts social theory, cultural ethnography, and political polemic. In a slim yet richly narrated volume, Agustín offers a deft, lively, and challenging account of the politics which currently circulate around ‘prostitution’ and ‘trafficking’ within the context of global migration.
In Agustín’s book, the scare quotes that she places around these and other terms are essential to one of her chief aims: to denaturalize the taken-for-granted and widely disseminated assumptions of so-called ‘helpers’ and ‘experts’ (including NGOs, social workers and, of course, researchers) who are commonly tasked with shaping policies around people and practices that they do not understand. As Agustín notes, an entire rescue industry has evolved in the West which paints migrants (particularly female ones who exchange sex for money) in monochrome as hapless victims in need of protection and assistance, rather than multi-faceted individuals with ‘a range of interests, occupations, and desires . . . who count themselves as activists in any political or social cause’ (p. 6).
Agustín already has a large oeuvre of published writings on sexual labor and migration, which this book builds upon. As in her earlier work, Agustín’s perspective here is unique and refreshing, precisely because she so frequently and so sharply challenges the very terms of debate that so many other commentators have simply presumed – calling into question the clear dividing line between ‘migrants’ and ‘tourists’ for example, as well as the lines between ‘leisure’ and ‘work’ and between ‘sex tourism’ and other recreational as well as practical forms of travel. As Agustín writes, ‘it is impossible to separate this kind of tourism from others; many who seek out interludes of paid sex have other agendas, such as ecotourism or seeing cultural monuments. The activities exist everywhere, not only on sunny beaches’ (p. 82).
Perhaps most crucially, Agustín challenges us to think about why so many social commentators consider certain jobs, like domestic service, to be unproblematic while other jobs such as prostitution are consistently deemed to be unacceptable. Over and over again, Agustín urges her readers to look critically at the ever-present assumption that sex must always and inevitably constitute a singular category of experience.
Agustín is a highly effective and humorous writer, able to express analytic and political subtleties through carefully constructed turns of phrase that are a rarity in the social science literature. ‘In the sentimentalizing that occurs around “uprooting”’, she writes, ‘the myriad possibilities for being miserable at home are forgotten. Many people are fleeing from small-town prejudices, dead-end jobs, dangerous streets, and suffocating families. And some poorer people like the idea of being found beautiful or exotic abroad, exciting desire in others’ (pp. 45–6). Although she gleans much of her data for this book from secondary sources, she is skilful at reading others’ texts against the grain, as when she quotes a sex worker who is featured in the book Backstreets (a classic anti-prostitution text) in order to argue that the job of prostitution clearly entails more varied forms of emotional labor than ‘just sex’ (p. 61) (Høigard and Finstad 1986). Agustín’s analyses are also refreshing because she takes as fodder for critique not only the hegemonic ‘antitrafficking perspective’ that currently prevails in both liberal and conservative political circles, but also the more oppositional ‘sex-workers’ rights’ framework which is often reluctant to recognize why migrants might reject it: ‘The interests of migrants who have no right to work and are concentrating on accumulating as much money as they can as quickly as possible may conflict with the interests of Europeans who want to legitimize the industry. Since the most important fact conditioning migrants’ lives is having or not having residence and work permits, they often feel that proposals about sex worker rights are irrelevant to themselves’ (p. 73). Though Agustín’s discussions traverse a wide range of historical and theoretical texts and academic literatures (including Foucaultian and neo-Foucaultian approaches, queer theory, and postcolonial studies), her writing remains clear and accessible to a broad readership.
The second half of Agustín’s book offers a critical genealogy of women’s philanthropic and ‘helping projects’, a contribution that is of particular importance at a moment in which humanitarian efforts and a rapidly transnationalizing NGO sector are on the rise. Yet this is also the section of the book where a number of intriguing questions get raised which may be beyond the author’s capacity to settle. For example, while Agustín aptly demonstrates how humanitarian efforts have historically been an important force in enabling bourgeois women to leave the home (under the guise of endeavoring to assist the less fortunate) it is not clear what precisely is at stake for their present-day counterparts.
From Agustín’s account, we can certainly infer that contemporary efforts, no less than those of their historical predecessors, encapsulate an agenda that is more about the interests, desires, and power struggles of the helpers themselves than those of the purported class of ‘victims’. But what precisely are those interests, desires, and power struggles and how do they compare and contrast with those of prior centuries? ‘Feminist fundamentalists’ as well as feminist progressives (‘progresistas’ in this text) all come out badly here, and the inescapable conclusion of the book is that the best solutions to people’s problems might very well reside outside the social sector. But how, in that case, might problems that are social rather than individual in nature, and massive in scope, best be addressed? If the entire social sector were to vanish overnight, what other constellations of power would rush in to fill the void?
Despite my appreciation not only of the author’s bold upheaval of the fields of sex work and migration studies, but also of her critique of the inherent beneficence of ‘the social’, for this reader at least, these are questions that the text leaves pending. The brevity of the text and the easy, well-written quality of Agustín’s prose are deceptive: this is a tough, challenging, and necessary book.
Reference
Høigard, Cecilie, and Liv Finstad. 1986. Backstreets: Prostitution, money, and love. Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Elizabeth Bernstein
Barnard College, Columbia University, New York, USA
Don Kulick’s review of Sex at the Margins As a longtime appreciator of Don Kulick’s Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes, I am happy that...
Spiked Review of Sex at the Margins The Spiked Review of Books Friday 25 April 2008 Exploding the myth of trafficking Controversial author Laura María Agustín tells...
Review of Sex at the Margins in American Ethnologist Bronislaw Malinowski’s fieldwork tent in the Trobriand Islands during Europe’s First World War Lorraine Nencel, of Amsterdam’s Vrije Universiteit, published...
This reporting is better. Maybe the operation was even better, I would like to hope so. In the end most of the migrants will undoubtedly be deported, but perhaps without unnecessary trauma inflicted by the police?
New York — Federal officers on Thursday arrested 23 people suspected of smuggling up to 70 men from China to work in Chinese restaurants in and around New York City. “We allege that this was a for-profit smuggling scheme,” said Jim Hayes, Immigration and Custom Enforcement special agent in charge of the investigation. He told CNN that the men were brought into the United States by business owners and illegal recruiters, who would get families to pay a fee of up to $75,000 each.
“The employment agency would arrange for them to be brought into the United States and the restaurant owners would harbor them and transport them after engaging the employment agency to get the type of worker they desired,” he said. None of the illegal workers was arrested, Hayes said. “We’re working through that group of people to determine who were knowing participants, who may have been exploited, who may have desired to leave and weren’t allowed to leave,” he said.
The investigation found instances in which workers were paid as little as $3 an hour and were forced to live in sub-par living conditions in Connecticut, New Jersey and on New York’s Long Island, he said. “Many of these aliens were housed in squalid conditions and unsanitary conditions, certainly conditions they were not desiring to live in.” he said.
The ongoing eight-month investigation is part of a new initiative by the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to target employers of illegal aliens rather than the workers. “It’s different in that we are looking to eliminate the magnet that draws the workers as opposed to focusing on the employees themselves,” Hayes said.
The status of the workers remains uncertain. Some will be witnesses, which could lead to benefits for them, and some may face deportation. All of them, according to Hayes, did not get what they came to the United States for. “They believed they were coming over for the American Dream, but the fact of the matter is, whether their families paid it or not, that $75,000 is not something they are going to be able to pay off in their natural lifetime,” he said. “It’s certainly much, much less than they bargained for.”
Three additional suspects remain at large, according to a statement released Thursday afternoon by the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Plus ça change: Smuggling migrants in 1949 I’m reading a lot of older noir fiction these days and noting references to informal migration, however it’s talked about....
“The real action is in the Emirates, Dubai or Antalya,” says Masha, a stick-thin 19-year-old who teeters a little on her heels. “Don’t be confused,” she says. “Nobody takes us by the hair and drags us onto the ships.” She gestures over at the mouth of the port. “Those are like the gates to freedom for a lot of us,” she says. “Yeah, like the Statue of Liberty,” adds another girl, and the group of them erupts into laughter.
This is not better or happier news, but it adds to our understanding of how some women migrate out of bad situations. The fact that they don’t need to be kidnapped, coerced, lied to and forced doesn’t make their choices any nicer. The point is, given very few options, these women prefer to get into sex work. The figure of the prostitute who’s made it financially and goes – or is sent – back home to show the trappings is a classic one – I have met her myself in more than one country. The story she tells is true – it’s possible to make much more money selling sex – though it is hardly worth it if you can’t figure out how to do it without suffering too much.
This excerpt comes from Time, which means the reporter had better resources and a bit more time to do a decent investigation. I can’t say whether he passed up or missed opportunities to find out about less miserable situations. The thing to understand about all such stories is that the investigator or reporter goes into the field with only one or two contacts (aka gatekeepers) and may never run into people who would tell a completely different story. To talk with all sorts of potential migrants takes a real commitment of time and money, wherever you try to do it.
But the prostitutes who pass through Odessa these days do not harbor the naive dreams of their predecessors from the ’90s. And so the sex trade through Odessa has hardened in the past few years into something more jaded and much more difficult to stop. “Reporters always come here demanding to see the victims,” says Olga Kostyuk, deputy head of the charity Faith, Hope, Love, which provides assistance to Odessa’s sex workers. “They want to see the men, the pimps, the manipulators behind all of this. But things are not so simple now.”
For one thing, there aren’t many pimps left in this city of one million people, at least not the men who engaged in the most vicious forms of sex trafficking. As recently as 2006, their most common method of recruitment was to send scouts into the nearby towns to lure girls back to the port with false promises of work abroad — as a dancer in Paris or a waitress in Dubai — and then force them into prostitution. But most of these modern-day slaves traders are gone — these days, few of the prostitutes who pass through Odessa have been tricked into joining the trade. “Now the typical situation is that an experienced girl gets off the plane from Turkey covered in gold, diamonds and furs, and goes back to her home village,” says Svetlana Chernolutskaya, a psychologist who has counseled prostitutes in Odessa for years. “She finds the girls who are in a tough spot, and tells them how much money they can make turning tricks in a foreign country.”
The poverty and general hopelessness in many villages of eastern Ukraine, Moldova and Romania now run so deep — especially in the wake of the financial crisis — that the promise of a job as a prostitute abroad is enough to get the vast majority of trafficked women to sign up voluntarily. They follow the Mamachki to foreign resorts or big cities in western Europe. . .
A reporter from the US, Laura Ling, investigates prostitution in China, finding many of the sex workers have migrated to cities for work. Whilst filming from a taxi, the group are stopped and threatened by local men, presumably because since the sex venues are not legal. I am always a little suprised at reporters who do these ‘covert’ investigations into illegal prostitution settings. Do they feel daring and brave when people running illegal businesses get upset? The confrontation with guys she calls ‘thugs’ provides melodrama that wasn’t there when women are being questioned about their motivation to sell sex. Because of the illegality, they creep around and try to guess what they are looking at in doorways and windows. It’s not uninteresting but it isn’t real reporting.
Here is the programme of Laura Agustín’s lectures in Switzerland, as Visiting Professor in Gender and Migration, from now until the end of November (Geneva has already taken place):
26 October 12:15 – 13:45 University of Neuchâtel
28 October 1315-1500 University of Fribourg
2 November 1815-2000 University of Bern
8 November 1730-1900 University of Lausanne
10 November 1415-1800 University of Basel
24 November 1815-1945 University of Zürich
All details are on the Swiss gender network website. The lectures will also appear on the Agenda page of the website as their dates approach.
With the academic, media and ‘helping’ gaze fixed on women who sell sex, the great majority of phenomena that make up the sex industry are ignored. People who sell sex tend to be examined in terms of ‘prostitution’, focussing on transactions between individuals and personal motivations. A cultural-studies approach looks at commercial sex in its widest sense, examining its intersections with art, migration, ethics, service work, consumption, family life, entertainment, sport, economics, urban space, sexuality, tourism, informal economies and criminality, not omitting issues of race, class, gender, identity and citizenship. The object is to study the everyday practices involved, to reveal how our societies distinguish between activities considered normatively ‘social’ and activities denounced as criminally and morally wrong and to look for ways out of a seemingly intransigent social conflict.
La portada del libro original, publicado por Zed Books, expresa perfectamente lo que yo quería, mientras la de la versión castellana es todo lo contrario (no me consultaron a mí desde Editorial Popular). El contenido es lo mismo, sin embargo!
Los siguientes distribuidores no van a tener ejemplares disponibles siempre pero se puede pedir de ellos sin pagar enormes gastos de envío.
Colombia:
Siglo del Hombre
Tel.: 3377700
comercial@siglodelhombre.com
y
Editorial Reverte
tel.: 244 5192 / 268 5929
edireverte@etb.net.co
Ecuador:
Librería Studium
plazamayor@studium.ec
El Salvador:
Universidad Centro Americana de José Simeón Caña (librería)
carteaga@buho.uca.edu.sv
México:
Alejandría distribuidora
Av. Universidad 1953 Edificio 22L-3
Col. Colpico Universidad
México DF
Tel.: 5616-1319
alejandria@alejandrialibros.com.mx
y
Gamma Cultural
Tel.: 573 30681
gammacultural@avantel.net
Trabajar en la industria del sexo This article started everything. Little did I know… Este articulo fue el comienzo de todo. Cuando la editora de la...
Sex workers, support groups, academics and concerned citizens welcome! Possibility of interesting discussion over drinks afterwards.
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 María Agustín, PhD, is author of Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry (Zed Books 2007). A lifelong migrant herself, she has worked in a wide range of both formal and informal jobs in the Americas and Europe, including NGO and academic projects. Since the early 1990s she has studied irregular migration, commercial sex and trafficking. She has published widely in academic journals, mainstream media and online and blogs regularly at lauraagustin.com.
Agnes Földhazi received her PhD in Sociology at the University of Geneva, exploring power relations in the sex trade. Her research interests include the effects of globalization on the sex trade, health prevention with disenfranchised actors and feminist research methodology.
Organised thanks to Network Gender Studies CH and MAPS – Maison d’analyse des processus sociaux, Faculté des lettres et sciences humainesUniversité de Neuchâtel.
Getting trafficked into a marriage you didn’t want sounds at least as bad as getting trafficked into the sex industry, because on top of the need to have sex when you don’t want to you will be very isolated and forced to do housework and other manual labour. Migrant women from Myanmar recruited for jobs in China and then passed on as wives are being forced to marry (in contrast to different sorts of ‘arranged’ marriages by families of two more-or-less witting spouses).
Lured into a trap, Global Post, 9 September 2010, with photos by Katsuo Takahashi
Last year Chinese police freed 268 Burmese women who had been trafficked and forced into marriages with Chinese men. Human rights activists believe that this represents only a small fraction of the growing number of Burmese forced to marry Chinese husbands.
The causes of this disturbing trend lie both in China and Myanmar (also known as Burma). Seeking to escape Myanmar’s military regime and the horribly mismanaged economy, young women are often lured by recruiters who speak of well paid employment. Many of the victims are from rural areas near China’s Yunnan province and belong to Myanmar’s persecuted ethnic minorities.
Beijing’s “one-child policy,” combined with the long-held national preference for male heirs, has resulted in a grossly lopsided male to female ratio; 120:100 in 2005. The massive shortage of potential brides drives many lonely Chinese men to resort to buying a foreign spouse.
Those women who are lucky enough to have escaped often tell a remarkably similar story. Usually they are recruited in their rural village and brought to the bustling towns on the Chinese side of the border. At this point they are handed over to another trafficker who will take them as far away as Beijing for their “job interview.” The price of a bride depends on her age and beauty, but a Chinese buyer will typically pay between 40,000 to 50,000 yuan (roughly $6,000-$7,500).
Once married, escape is difficult, as the new bride is forced to do housework or farm for long hours. Her husband or his family members watch her at all times. Those who have escaped tell stories of rape, physical abuse and dire loneliness.
Loverboys are in the news again in the Netherlands these days, usually in pretty silly media stories. This term is meant to describe men who use ‘love’ to get women to feel attached to them and who then get the women to sell sex and hand over the money: so these are a variant on the pimp. The term is used by academic researchers in the following excerpts to describe one sort of trafficking situation. Some of those described here are women seduced by loverboys, others are sold by their families and some are kidnapped, but the majority have responded to job offers The dossiers mentioned refer to court cases the researchers analysed, who use a framework for analysing business and financial practices – a nice change from the usual personal and emotional focus on ‘the women’.
From Johan Leman and Stef Janssens, European Journal of Criminology, 5 (4): 433–45 (2008):
In several Albanian networks the trafficked women are girls within a loverboy network (18 dossiers) where they were first seduced. In other cases the girls were also bought: in two cases an Albanian girl was sold by her own family and in two dossiers Albanian girls claim to have been kidnapped. But the majority of trafficked women in our 62 cases were recruited through job offers (40 dossiers). This means that the majority of the trafficked women in our files are former potential migrants.
There were constant promises that they would earn a lot of money. For instance, one girl was promised a monthly wage of €3000 for a job as a stripper. In other dossiers, jobs as dancers were offered with promises of wages between €2000 and €6000 per month or daily wages of €450. In a number of cases there was also an explicit mention of prostitution. In a dossier involving a Russian network, a girl who had consciously chosen prostitution made an agreement with her recruiter on departure that she owed €2000 and that she would have to pay this back later through prostitution. Eventually, the woman had to buy her release in Belgium for €5000 or had to work as a prostitute for free for six months, which made her a victim.
Is there any subsequent space for agency? In 40 of the 62 court files there obviously was agency in the mind of the women at the very beginning of their contacts with the trafficking entrepreneurs. They wanted to start a new life as a migrant. In 38 dossiers it is apparent that no real agreements were made about subsequent employment, which is of course a weakness in the plans of the women, who nevertheless decided to embark on their migration project.
What happened later, between their departure and their employment as a sex worker, is not clear from our files. Occasionally the girls were forced to give their money directly to the bar operator or pimp, irrespective of whether or not they were recruited for the job. This situation occurs frequently in closed ethnic networks, as well as in various business networks. Another situation, however, is where women have made agreements with the traffickers but these have not been honoured. This is evident in 22 dossiers, where women became victims in this sense, a situation that one finds largely in the business and international networks.
Thanks to Zanne Bisse in Copenhagen, Carol Leigh in San Francisco and Maria Rankka in Stockholm for making the above video possible. I am available for public (and paid) speaking engagements and workshops of all sorts; disseminate this video to any group you think might be interested.
I arrived in Switzerland last week to be Visiting Professor in Gender and Migration till the end of November. I am based at MAPS, at the University of Neuchâtel, where I will give two 3-day workshops to PhD and MA students. I will also give six lectures at different Swiss universities, so if you are here or nearby or know someone who might be interested, these are the dates and places. The exact times and addresses are not confirmed yet, get in touch via the contact form at your right if you need to but I will publish details as soon as I can.
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
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.
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.
. . . ‘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 southwest bit of it only, but still, I’m pleased to announce I’ll be giving a talk there. Kraków is near borders with Slovakia and the Czech Republic, so welcome to anyone who might pop over from there.
Public lecture: Sex at the Margins
Laura Agustín
Tuesday 1 June 2010
1800-1930
The Library of the Institute of Sociology Jagiellonian University
Sala Kominkowa
Grodzka 52
Kraków, Poland
Recently I contacted a number of practitioners, consultants, evaluators, social workers and other non-academics in the field in a search for reports on how people who’ve participated in rescue projects liked the services they were offered. I mean, people who through one means or another were rescued or removed from an illegal or terrible situation, whether by police or other campaigners, and ended up in a shelter or other sort of programme: legal victims. Meena Poudel is one person I contacted because of her work with formerly trafficked migrants: Post Trafficking Livelihoods in Nepal. Meena also published the following review of my book in Feminist Theory, 10, 1, 133–140 (2009).
Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry. London: Zed Books, 2007.
This is an engaging and deeply researched study of women migrating into Europe, which explores a domain that has been enormously influenced by global forces, both economically and culturally. Through her combined ethnographic observations, anthropological theory, feminist epistemology, historical insights and migration discourses, Agustín precisely organizes various contradictions and myths surrounding labour migration, market, services and the agency of travelling women within a rapidly globalized economy. Travelling women, in the context of Agustín’s analysis, range from women leaving home to explore the world to those who do so to sell sex.
The issue of sexuality has become increasingly politicized in recent years within the labour migration and sexual trafficking discourses partly due to the efforts of an ‘influential moral crusade’ (Weitzer, 2007) led by some of the ‘social agents‘ who, in Agustín’s words, ‘consciously attempt to better other people’s lives’ (p. 5). From her extensive travel across Europe and some parts of Asia, Agustín draws boundaries between myths and realities around the sexualities of travelling women.
Using testimonies of travelling women selling sexual and non-sexual services in the European market, Agustín illustrates how invisible jobs, the ‘services’ (p. 53), are available for highly visible migrant women who sell sex in the countries they arrive in. She asserts that the visibility of migrant women selling ‘services’ does not necessarily achieve the goal they had when leaving home, partly because these ‘services’ are excluded from the definition of the (formal) economic sector. This assertion parallels that of many feminist scholars and activists who advocate for the rights of migrant women working in various sectors, including ‘sex work’.
Although this book focuses on the European context, by establishing a tension between service providers and service receivers Agustin opens a global intellectual debate on both the meaning and role of the ‘social agents’ helping women in need. This tension is outlined in Chapter 3, ‘A World of Services’, where she examines Western European demand for sexual and non-sexual services from migrant women and argues that selling sex is not exploitative for some women in certain circumstances. Her robust analysis of the political economy of migrant women selling their sexual and non-sexual services sharply contrasts with the views of some feminists, who oppose all forms of prostitution as morally degraded and understand all migrant women selling sex as ‘victims’ to be rescued. For example, by situating experiences of migrant
women selling sexual services, in her analysis, Agustín sees no significance in debating whether ‘prostitution’ is a job or not, if the concept is replaced with ‘commercial sex’ (pp. 64–5). In this chapter, while examining immigration policies of Western European countries, Agustín also raises fundamental questions about the masculine interests of policies and takes contemporary feminist debates in sexual trafficking, prostitution and labour migration further.
By connecting colonial and postcolonial economics, Agustín carefully exposes the dual nature of European processes of ‘civilization’ in Chapter 4. She argues that migrant women selling sex, are (most) needed to boost European economies, and yet these are the women who are seen as threatening to European societies as ‘prostitutes’ and the ‘bearer of syphilis’ (p. 108). Furthering her argument on the necessities of migration for women and the circumstances created to sell sex, Agustín critically questions the dominant view of labour migration. The key facet of her argument is that the dominant view of labour migration not only undermines the agency of migrant women selling (or made to sell) sex, but also ignores their importance to the formal economy. In this context, Agustín’s work poses an important research question: what are the consequences of such exclusion that migrant women face, while they contribute to postcolonial economies?
In Chapter 5, Agustín opens up a methodological question. She argues that most of the ‘social agents’ are able to rationalize their actions without realizing the possible consequences for the migrant women they help. Agustín’s analysis suggests that, in addition to being viewed as a moral problem, prostitution has increasingly been seen as a classed issue in Western Europe. Agustín sensitively describes the complexities around the ways social reform and welfare, in the name of ‘help’, are formulated, enforced and regulated in contemporary Europe. Across the chapters, the term ‘help’ ranges from providing information on the nature of the job before women commence their journeys, to removing women from their work by police forces in rescue measures to ‘rehabilitate’ women. A desire to ‘help’, Agustín argues, often re/constructs and re/enforces the stigma attached to women who sell and/or are forced to sell sex.
Summarizing her arguments in Chapter 7, Agustín suggests that concerned authorities should listen to the migrant women they intend to ‘help’. In its powerful argument and thoughtful analysis, this book is essential reading for all those who intend to engage in researching migration, sexualities and sex
trafficking.
Don Kulick’s review of Sex at the Margins As a longtime appreciator of Don Kulick’s Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes, I am happy that...
Review of Sex at the Margins in American Ethnologist Bronislaw Malinowski’s fieldwork tent in the Trobriand Islands during Europe’s First World War Lorraine Nencel, of Amsterdam’s Vrije Universiteit, published...
