See a recent story about Goa, for example, where an entire red-light district was torn down, with the result that Goans now see commercial sex everywhere. Entrepreneurs in the sex industry adapt easily to changing conditions. See recent stories on Sonagachi in India and on Malaysia and Korea. I published an academic article on the irrationality of legal prostitution regimes last year.

Then there is the ever-present story showing that even when European sex businesses are legal, many or most workers are migrants. A report on prostitution in Ticino (in Italian) explains why undocumented migrants may not bother to register and become legal (when they are eligible),

Here’s the Swiss news story.

Ticino’s brothels profit from Italy clampdown

15 September 2008, swissinfo, based on an article by Nicole della Pietra

Tough new measures introduced in Italy have sent many customers across the border to brothels in Switzerland. Prostitution is currently booming in Ticino, Switzerland’s Italian speaking canton. But many of the girls involved are illegal. The authorities say they are keeping a close eye on the situation. Half a dozen brothels line the road that links the north and south of the canton at Monte Ceneri. The establishments are doing brisk business, to which the stream of visitors attests. “There are more brothels here than houses,” remarks a young army recruit who has been posted to the Ceneri barracks.

Apart from a few Swiss soldiers and the odd local, most of the clients here and at other Ticino brothels are Italian – as can be seen by the huge number of cars with Italian number plates. Some places in the Lugano and Chiasso region, further south, have an even greater density of brothels. The small village of Melano (population 1,000) alone has four. Cross-border sex commuters are attracted by the closeness to the A2 motorway through the canton, the standards of comfort, security and hygiene and the competitive prices.

The Italian media have long been talking about the “Ticino phenomenon”. The prestigious La Stampa newspaper went so far as to describe the canton in an August article as “a brothel paradise” and “Mecca of luxury”, while highlighting establishments’ “discreet charm”.

Clients may enjoy a certain freedom in Ticino but the same cannot be said for Italy. Brothels have been illegal there for 50 years, which has led to a rise in street prostitution. The government, anxious to change the situation, issued a clampdown decree at the beginning of this year. In Lombardy, which borders Ticino, the authorities have decided to issue a €500 (SFr796) fine to kerb crawlers. And in Milan police have stepped up patrols of red light districts. Video surveillance and the internet are also being employed.

Swiss police believe that the Lombardy situation could have consequences for Ticino. “We don’t have any precise data yet but border regions are certainly going to have an influx of visitors from Italy,” said Alex Serfilippi, an inspector with a special unit which fights the proliferation of prostitution in the canton.

In the week in which swissinfo visited Ticino, two new establishments announced that they were opening for business – adding to the 37 places already in operation in the canton. The sex business adapts quickly to the needs of its clients and to offer and demand, say experts. “We only need to be absorbed by a big enquiry for a few days to see an immediate upsurge in the number of girls in the area,” explained Serfilippi. “We keep applying pressure every day as it’s the only way of stopping the phenomenon from growing even further,” he added.

The prostitution boom is a godsend for some of the area’s hotel and restaurant owners who have seen better days. Some have converted their businesses into brothels, complete with champagne bar and rooms for hire.

On average between five and 20 girls work in these types of establishments. Most come from eastern Europe, with a third coming from Latin America. “We have recently seen a massive increase in the number of Romanians,” added Serfilippi. The police officer estimates that there is a maximum of 600 prostitutes in the canton, of whom between 60 per cent and 80 per cent are illegal. Added to this are the dozens of saunas and massage parlours which each employ one or two young women. Since 2002 a total of 490 people have signed up to the cantonal prostitution register.

“It’s unfortunately extremely difficult, if not impossible, to provide precise figures for this very fluid milieu,” said Serfilippo. The crime expert and journalist Michel Venturelli believes that south of the Alps the number of prostitutes could be as high as 1,200. . .

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. . .

. . . In one camp, in a wood off the A26, groups of Vietnamese and Chinese immigrants looking for work in the UK are living under plastic sheets stretched across traces of old first world war trenches in a wood. . .

. . . the fault lies with the progressive closure of facilities for immigrants in towns such as Calais, a French government drive to disperse and harass asylum-seekers who cross its territory, and new security measures implemented by the UK that have made it harder to physically penetrate the ports – forcing immigrants to try new ways to cross the Channel. Each week a new camp is established. The true number of them is unknown. “There are many that no one notices” . . .

Most of the immigrants do eventually reach Britain. Activists monitoring the refugee population notice when there are big “crossings” and the internet and mobile phones allow refugees who get to the UK after stowing themselves in lorries to give tips and encouragement to those coming behind. “My brother got over 10 days ago in a Polish lorry. He sent me a text from London”. . .

. . . Around a third have already spent time in the UK and are making their second, third or even fourth clandestine crossing of the Channel.

. . . Though many immigrants travel independently, others use organised criminal traffickers for at least some of the journey to the Channel. Inok, a 23-year-old at Norrent-Fontes, recounted how he had paid £3,000 to get from Sudan to Turkey and a further £2,500 to get to Greece hidden in a car. From Greece he was “freelance”, he said, and found the Norrent-Fontes camp eight weeks ago after being tipped off by other east Africans. “I’ve been unlucky so far and haven’t got a good lorry yet,” Inok said. “I’ll keep trying, but if I can’t get to the UK I might try Norway. I know lots of Eritreans there.”

Though the organised criminal gangs try to maintain control of the trafficking, less organised “semi-professional” networks also form where there is demand. The result is vicious turf wars with gangs using extreme violence to maintain their control over key sites such as busy laybys on useful routes.  . .

. . . living in one of the half-dozen makeshift camps hidden along the side of the motorway linking Calais and Dunkirk. Every evening they joined the other inhabitants of the shacks on a thin strip of wasteland behind the Dunkirk ferry port known as Loon-Plage to head out toward the carparks to stow away in the lorries. But with new security precautions and British officials posted on the French side of the Channel, the task was not easy. “The key is to get past Calais and Dover because the officials there lock you up,” said one. “Once you are into the country itself you can escape easily and then hide.”

First the immigrants – most of whom do not have the €500 (£450) demanded by the amateur traffickers camped in plain view of the ferry port – had slept in disused port buildings. Police raids forced them into a band of thick vegetation where they thought their makeshift huts were well hidden. . . .  Local authorities insist that the bulk of its inhabitants have been offered alternative accommodation in Calais.

. . . “It’s the same story across the whole of Europe. The refugees keep moving because they think it is going to be better elsewhere and that is exactly the authorities here and elsewhere want them to think,” Zaibet said. “Each government pushes them further down the road and the end of the road is the UK.”

The camp at Norrent-Forentes was the target of a recent police raid. All those living there were arrested and held for a day in Calais before being released and returning to their makeshift homes. The police ripped holes in tent walls and took all cooking equipment but left the camp standing. “We are sensitive to human suffering of course but there can be no question of effectively helping human trafficking (by allowing camps to develop),”[said] the local government chief. Recent statistics reveal that only 12% of the nearly 30,000 asylum demands received in France were granted in 2007 – one of the lowest levels in Europe.

Arrest and deportation are seen by most of the immigrants as occupational risks – like breaking a leg while jumping from a lorry. “I try not to think about it,” said Anthony as he strummed his krar in the ditch by Norrent-Fontes. “It would be really tough to have to start out all over again. But if that’s what happens that’s what I’ll do.”

Border Thinking,

Last month, I flew into Stansted Airport, in the southeast of England, where the disembarking traveller is met by an enormous black structure looming high above the large passport-control area. UK BORDER it reads, in giant letters. In fact, at this point one is geographically well inside the country, the coast having been crossed while still in the air. But the message is clear and ominous: you aren’t In until you’ve got past the police.

As usual, waiting in the queue for Others – non-Europeans – is nerve-wracking. As I wait, I worry. Do I still look enough like my passport photo? Do I look like a drug dealer, terrorist, prostitute or
harmless tourist? Are my clothes wrong, is my hair okay? What will they think about how I speak English? Should I smile or rather demonstrate I understand the gravity of the situation? Which official will I get, the younger woman or the older man and which is better? And so on.

Holding my passport, I look down at the little white UK Landing Card and wonder, for the millionth time, why I am asked to tick one of two boxes, Male or Female. Apart from the pain this causes people who don’t definitely identify with one or the other, why do they ask this? Why do they ask for birth date and nationality, when all passports carry this information? I wonder where these cards wind up, in storage or dumped in the rubbish.

When it’s my turn, the official asks me for information she is already reading on my Landing Card, or on my visa. I answer, and then she repeats the questions, in the skeptical tone I have come to know so well. Finally she lets me through, and I have the sensation of having got away with something, even as I know I am not doing anything ‘wrong’. And every time I go through this it gets harder, as though they think that my continuing desire to be here were a crime.

No borders?

It is easy to complain about all this. It is easy to make border policy seem like a clear right-left choice between control and freedom, an oppressive device set up by our fathers, the men in business suits and military uniforms. From the border-keepers’ point of view, classifying and scrutinising travellers before they enter and while they are inside is essential to reducing risk and chaos for their own citizens. The project to make a European ‘union’ tries to celebrate diverse local nationalities, ethnicities and cultures while simultaneously identifying true pan-European values: enlightenment, humanism, rationality, progress. Inevitably this means that cultural systems arriving from outside may be viewed as inferior, backward or suspect – a repellent idea to many.

But to say ‘Let there be no borders’ is like saying let’s do away with traffic regulations, allowing unlicensed drivers to go as fast or slow as they want on streets with no stoplights, lanes or marked exits. To state the utopian goal is one thing; to figure out how to keep order afterwards is another. And to position ourselves as free of any necessity to differentiate ourselves from others by accusing the men in suits is to avoid the harder truth that we are all implicated in these oppressive cultures and that we often benefit from them.

In this case, the hard part isn’t the tedious queuing to be vetted by officials but what comes afterward. If national borders are abolished and everyone can enter, live and work in your country, will you be happy if they are selected for a job you trained to do? If newcomers accept lower salaries than you for the same job, will you feel fine about it? What if they are willing to pay much higher rent than you are or don’t mind living eight to the room? Or if they will put up with levels of injustice in the workplace that you wouldn’t dream of? In other words, do differences between us and others matter or not – or which ones do and which don’t?

Constructing our own identity involves differentiating ourselves from others. They wear this, I wear that. They believe one thing, I believe another. Our boundaries permit us to know ourselves. Later, we may realise we have cut ourselves off by too much distinguishing and have to work to come closer to those we have distanced. The push and pull between believing in ourselves and opening up to others is a constant job of work.

What do we mean by the border?

Talk about social justice often employs spatial language: the centre, the margins, the border, no man’s land. The social world is reduced to maps covered with lines drawn at political conferences where nations have divvied up the spoils, and with dots, the larger of which are imagined to be more ‘central’ than others.

These geographical metaphors ignore what we know perfectly well, that borders appear whenever we feel separate from others, when we feel invaded, or when we want to close the gap between us. This concept of border is far more interesting, complicated and difficult to police.

Of course, we do not all experience these border moments the same way. Some of us actively enjoy the confusion of mixing with cultures not our own, while others are driven crazy by it. Some of us don’t care about knowing and preserving our family’s genealogy while others find nothing more interesting. Sometimes these differences are expressed as the search for authentic identities – as in the case of those eager to have their DNA analysed in hopes of proving who they really are (viking? etruscan?). Others don’t care, or believe no such categories exist, preferring to think of themselves as part of a great blurred or hybrid universality.

Some like the idea of contact zones where people meet and influence each other. Others are fanatical about the need to keep ‘races’ separate, ethnicities pure, traditions untouched. I don’t believe either of these world views is going to prevail in the foreseeable future.

Beyond polarised thinking

A month after my arrival at Stansted Airport, I am standing at the border separating the US state of Arizona from the Mexican state of Sonora. I last stood here fifteen years ago, but the desert looks the same – beautiful, endless in every direction and impervious to efforts to absolutely distinguish one nation from another with a line. A classic contact zone where many languages are spoken – Spanish, English, Spanglish and many indigenous tongues – the whole Southwest region is claimed by some Mexican nationalists as land stolen by the US. Other activists in indigenous causes scoff at this idea, saying the area has belonged to native peoples since long before the European conquest and founding of a modern Mexican state.

Numerous identities vie for attention all over the region. Chicanos, with Mexican heritage but born in the US, distinguish themselves from Mexicans, who affirm strong differences according to whether they come from the north or south, the west or east, the city or the countryside. Both Chicanos and Mexican migrants are quick to disclaim anything in common with Central American migrants, who distinguish themselves by nationality. Some activists unite all these under the label Latino, while others use the term heard amongst many whites, Hispanic – and the differences are politically meaningful. There are African Americans and native Americans of many tribes, as well as those whose ancestors came from China and Japan. And every possible mixing has already occurred, according to everyone except a very upset White Power fringe. And they are not the only ones taking a racist line.

The variety is amazing, and although the media report continuous polemic and violence here, vast numbers of people move across this border every day in the course of their ordinary lives. The Tohono O’odham people, who have been here for 6000 years, live on a reservation cut in two when the border was drawn in the 19th century.

The only way to take it all in is to indulge in Walter Mignolo’s ‘border thinking’, making a conscious effort to overcome an easy opposition of dominant and dominated cultures.[1] One of the border’s most passionate proponents of changing our way of thinking, Gloria Anzaldúa, exhorted us to ‘break down the subject-object duality that keeps [us] a prisoner’.[2] It’s an exacting activity, feeling the melange with all its contradictions and not falling into an easy condemnation of any one group. I must try it the next time I arrive at Stansted Airport.

Notes

[1] See Mignolo, Walter. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton University Press.

[2] Anzaldua, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute.

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. . . .

“I took my first ‘chickens’ across when I was nine years old, and when I grew up I started moving drugs across the border. My mother taught us the business and made us tough. She hated poverty. For her, power was everything,” says Cristal, daughter of the notorious drug smuggler Rosa Emma Carvajal Ontiveros, . . . And like their male counterparts, female coyotes engage in extortion and bribery – of both Mexican and American authorities – which are prerequisites for setting up and maintaining human trafficking rings.

“In this business, everybody gets a share. The ministries, the Border Patrol and the narcos. You have to keep them happy so they let you do your job. Here, no money means no business,” says Adamaris, a young woman in El Paso, Tex. As she tells it, her children’s hunger drove her to turn her home into a “safe house” where more than 500 undocumented migrants have passed through in less than a year.

In addition to bribing federal agents, the women coyotes must also fill so-called “quotas” – monthly payments ranging from $5,000 to $15,000 – demanded by members of the major drug smuggling cartels, in order to be allowed to operate.

According to the women La Opinión interviewed – all U.S. citizens except Adamaris – many female coyotes smuggle migrants through the border crossings, rather than the mountains or the desert. “It costs more but it’s safer. That’s why they come to us. We don’t mess around with walking for three lousy days in the desert, but you gotta have balls to take people across the border,” says Margarita, who limits herself to smuggling women and children through California border crossings.

“We all got into this business out of necessity. Some of us are single mothers, and others have husbands in jail. The fact of the matter is that we’re all on our own. What bastards are gonna blame us for what we do? Who wouldn’t do the same thing if the miserable pay you get in a factory couldn’t be stretched far enough to feed your kids, and you find you can get twice the money for just giving a drink or taking care of a goddamn ‘chicken’ (an undocumented migrant)? Anybody who blames us has never seen their kids cry out of hunger,” affirms Esperanza, who smuggles undocumented migrants, money and narcotics in the Nogales, Ariz. region.

As Esperanza says, women’s stories of smuggling must not remain untold, because, she says, “Getting laid by the coolest guy at the party isn’t worth it if your gang doesn’t know about it.”

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:

The Guardian - Comment is Free

The Shadowy World of Sex Across Borders

The government’s latest proposals for sex workers do little to tackle the problem of human trafficking

Laura Agustín

19 November 2008

Today the government proposes that paying for sex with those “controlled for another person’s gain” be a criminal offence. High on the list are victims of trafficking, and punters’ defence that they didn’t know women were trafficked is declared inadmissible. But clients may still have an out. How, they will ask, can the police prove that sex workers were trafficked?

The police will have to identify the real trafficked victims in order to identify customers at fault – a notoriously difficult enterprise. In a few high-profile cases, self-identified victims name and help find their exploiters, and sometimes these traffickers are successfully prosecuted. But these cases are few and far between. More often it is difficult to point to migrants who knew nothing about their future jobs, who agreed to nothing about their illicit travels and who are willing to denounce perpetrators who may be family or former friends and lovers.

More than a decade ago, while working in a Caribbean Aids-prevention organisation, I visited a small town famous as a market for informal migration. In one cafe, a waiter offered me anything I asked for in return for helping him reach anywhere in Europe. Later, I met a woman determined to travel to Paris to work. Highly informed about prices, she steered clear of brokers promising to “take care of everything”.

I visited a village where most families spoke proudly of daughters who maintained them by selling sex abroad. And I met many people who arranged papers and transport for travellers, some charging fees and others as a family obligation. Scholars understand these as social networks and community strategies used to get migrations underway. Where few jobs are available at home, local institutions rarely try to prevent such trips. To those involved, this travel may feel irregular but not criminal, given the market for migrant labour abroad.

The rub is that most jobs available are not recognised by national immigration regimes that only value highly educated professionals and formal-sector employment. Work permits are not granted for low-prestige jobs in kitchens, sweatshops, night clubs or agriculture. The strict regulation of labour markets can fairly be said to promote an increase in unauthorised workers.

The UN convention against transnational organised crime tries to distinguish between the trafficking and smuggling of human beings, but there is still confusion about which means what. The trafficking protocol mentions women, coercion and prostitution but not the will to migrate, whereas the smuggling protocol discusses men as migrants. Meetings to arrive at definitions were prolonged and conflicted, and disagreement is still rife as to what key words like coercion, force and deceit mean in concrete situations.

No one can have the right statistics where journeys involve false papers or overstayed visas and where jobs are in the informal economy. The US federal government’s annual trafficking report relies on CIA, police and embassy guesstimates of situations that are not understood the same way across all cultures and social classes. Some figures for trafficked victims refer to all migrants who sell sex, while others require proof that the victims knew nothing about what was happening. To prove a case, investigators must focus intensively and at length; knowledge of multiple cultures, political contexts and languages are required. Even then, stories tend to be ambiguous and victims implicated in wrong-doing.

Successful migration requires some sophistication and access to social networks providing knowledge, contacts and expertise. Migrants find them amongst friends, families and small-time entrepreneurs, most of whom would not qualify as organised crime, with its demonic overtones, or even as gangsters. This helps account for the failure of the police to locate large numbers of traffickers: migrants are not eager to denounce people who helped them, even when they didn’t get the deal they hoped for. Successful migrants need to be adventurous, flexible risk-takers; they are often proud of the trials and tribulations they have survived.

Some imagine migration involving the sale of sex as fundamentally different, because they view sex as intrinsic to the self and ruined by money. Others view sex as yet another human activity engaged in for all kinds of reasons. What is not realistic is to insist that all migrants who sell sex be either completely forced or completely free. Many of these migrants object to being pigeonholed as passive victims – a poster brothel-workers made in Chiang Mai, Thailand, lists how rescue operations do harm. This is not to say that the situation is fair or that no one suffers, but rather that rescuers often don’t understand.

If, as many Guardian commentators declare, you believe a British woman may prefer selling sex to her other options, then you must allow that possibility to people of other nationalities, whether they are living outside their birth countries or not. Anything else is colonialism. It’s similarly patronising to declare that they were always forced to migrate, as though they had no will, preference or ability to plan a new life.

The problem for the government proposal to criminalise the buying of sex from those “controlled for gain” (whether migrants or UK citizens) is how to define control – another word with slippery meanings that don’t jibe with relationships that may involve feelings of affection and obligation as well as coercion and deception. Clients of sex workers may demand that prosecutors prove the unprovable: that migrants were unambiguously exploited against their will and wish instantly to be deported – or, as the government will put it, returned to their families and homes.

The underground nature of so much migration promotes all kinds of exploitation. But these networks have always existed. It’s only with the current hyper-anxiety about the sex industry that the entrepreneurial side of crossing borders is attacked en masse, as though a new evil race were trying to take over the civilised world.

It shouldn’t be so difficult to maintain two ideas at the same time: some people prefer selling sex to their other options, no matter where they were born, while some other people find it unbearable. Some migrants get a raw deal from intermediaries or do not want to migrate at all, while other migrants get more or less what they want by paying people to help them. The greater issue is the near-impossibility of getting legal permits and visas based on informal-sector work. If that problem were ameliorated, those who don’t want to sell sex could move into other jobs, and those who do would not be worried about police persecution – or, indeed, being rescued when they don’t want to be.

Europe: Grin and bare it, German naturists tell Poles

Jess Smee in Berlin

The Guardian, Monday July 28 2008

For decades, Germans holidaying on the white sandy beaches of Usedom have opted to leave their swimming trunks at home. Their penchant for naked bathing is nothing unusual in a country where naturism is popular and seen as, well, natural.

But this summer, border controls between Germany and Poland were dismantled as part of the Schengen agreement. Now flocks of Poles stroll along the leafy coastal paths to nearby German towns - and many are shocked by what they see.

Approach to airport on Usedom

“It is unheard of. People sunning themselves in the nude! And right on the coast, where normal people go walking,” Stanislawa Borecka, a 63-year-old from the Polish town of Szczecin, told the Märkische Allgemeine newspaper. “What should I tell my grandson?”

But for Germans of all ages who enjoy swimming and sunbathing on naturist - or FKK (free body culture) - beaches, the disapproving glances from Polish walkers are incomprehensible and intrusive.

“It’s an FKK beach. It’s awful that fully dressed Polish people come and stare at us,” said 46-year-old Elke Bernholz.

Naturism is so popular on the Baltic coast island of Usedom that German travel agent Ossi Urlaub selected it as a destination for its first nudist charter flight, a trip which was later cancelled because of “moral concerns”.

The culture clash between the border towns is a recent phenomenon. Many cheered in December, when the barbed-wire fence was dismantled as part of the Schengen deal.

“Finally we can cross the border without passport controls,” said Szczecin’s mayor, Janusz Zmurkiewicz.

Little did he know that some German tourists prefer to stroll in their birthday suits. With the FKK beach lying close to the border, some naturists have strayed on to the Polish beach. For many, that is a step too far.

“It is disgusting,” said Edward Zajac, a Szczecin politician who wants to move the FKK beach from the Polish border.

But the Germans, who have been unfolding their towels on the beach year in year out, are unlikely to want to move. For the time being, authorities plan to put up signs marking the boundaries of the nudist beach - in both German and Polish.

In a battle of statistics and ‘evidence’ last week on the Guardian’s comment website, both sides claimed to have the correct, evidence-based analysis of the extent of trafficking in the UK. To my thinking, this is a fruitless debate. That is, I agree with the 27 academics arguing that figures have been extrapolated and manipulated shamelessly by fundamentalist-feminist politicians. I was one of the first people, many years ago, to say so and take the flak. But the painful conflict is not about numbers It’s about definitions, visions of the world, passions, sex and money. My contribution to this business has been, from the beginning, to complicate conversations that present black versus white versions of something that is very grey indeed. For those who would rush to legislation my vision is not satisfying because it says ‘Wait, stop, slow down. Until you comprehend the myriad elements present amongst people who leave home to go to another country and sell sex, you shouldn’t be passing laws about them. Of any kind.’ This is not useless ‘postmodern’ dithering. It is a position that says that until you understand the minimum about how people experience their own lives, you cannot responsibly take actions to help them.

Leaving Home for Sex is the first piece I published that defined what my work would be for the next few years. At the time it was unusual enough not to use the term prostitutes, but I wasn’t and still am not in a position to make a clear substitute with the term sex workers. Here I was trying to describe how selling sex can be an occupation that works out okay for migrant women without their taking on a definite identity based on it. This is also the piece that suggested that many migrant sex workers can be viewed as cosmopolitan subjects. The reference to ‘challenging place‘ derives from the editorial focus, for a journal issue, on women and place, the local and the global. I couldn’t fit migrant workers into that framework, and this was the result.

Challenging ‘Place’: Leaving Home for Sex

Laura Mª Agustín

Development, 45.1, Spring 2002, 110-117.

As soon as people migrate, there is a tendency to sentimentalise their home. Warm images are evoked of close families, simple household objects, rituals, songs, foods.[1] Many religious and national holidays, across cultures, reify such concepts of ‘home’ and ‘family’, usually through images of a folkoric past. In this context, migration is constructed as a last-ditch or desperate move and migrants as deprived of the place they ‘belong to’.Yet for millions of people all over the world, the birth and childhood place is not a feasible or desirable one in which to undertake more adult or ambitious projects, and moving to another place is a conventional—not traumatic—solution.

How does this decision to move take place? Earthquakes, armed conflict, disease, lack of food impel some people in situations that seem to involve little element of choice or any time to ‘process’ options: these people are sometimes called refugees. Single men’s decisions to travel are generally understood to evolve over time, the product of their ‘normal’ masculine ambition to get ahead through work: they are called migrants. Then there is the case of women who attempt to do the same.

Research in a marginal place: Geographies of exclusion

For a long time I worked in educación popular in various countries of Latin America and the Caribbean and with latino migrants in North America and Europe, in programmes dedicated to literacy, AIDS prevention and health promotion, preparation for migration and concientización (whose exact translation does not exist in English but combines something about consciousness-raising with something about ‘empowerment’). My concern about the vast difference between what first-world social agents (governmental, NGO workers, activists) say about women migrants and what women migrants say about themselves led me to study and testify on these questions. I have deliberately located myself on the border of both groups: the migrants and the social, in Europe, where the only jobs generally available to migrant women are in the domestic, ‘caring’ and sex industries. My work examines both the social and the migrants, so I spend time in brothels, bars, houses, offices, ‘outreach’ vehicles and ‘the street’, in its many versions. Data on what migrant women say come from my own research and others’ in many countries of the European Union; women have also been interviewed before or after migrating in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. Data on what social agents say come from my own research with those who work on prostitution issues in those countries, including as evaluator of projects for the International Labour Office and the European Commission.

Although researchers and NGO personnel have been working with migrant prostitutes for nearly twenty years in Europe, publication of their findings remains outside mainstream press and journals. Most of the people who have met and talked with many migrant prostitutes are neither academics nor writers. ‘Outreach’ is conceptualised as distinct from ‘research’ and generally funded as HIV/AIDS prevention. This means that the published products of outreach research are generally limited to information on sexual health and practices; the other many kinds of information collected remain unpublished. Some of those who work in these projects have the chance to meet and exchange such information, but most do not. Recently, a new kind of researcher has entered the field, usually young academic women studying sociology or anthropology and working on migrations. These researchers want to do justice to the reality around them, which they recognise as consisting of as many migrant prostitutes as migrant domestic/‘caring’ workers. Most of these researchers do oral histories and some have begun to publish but it will be some time before such findings are recognised. Stigma works in all kinds of ways, among them the silencing of results that do not fit hegemonic discourses.[2] The mainstream complaint says ‘the data is not systematised’ or ‘there is no data.’ In my research, I seek out such ‘marginalised’ results.

Discourses of leaving home

It is striking that in the year 2001 women should so overwhelmingly be seen as pushed, obligated, coerced or forced when they leave home for the same reason as men: to get ahead through work. But so entrenched is the idea of women as forming an essential part of home if not actually being it themselves that they are routinely denied the agency to undertake a migration. So begins a pathetic image of innocent women torn from their homes, coerced into migrating, if not actually shanghaied or sold into slavery. This is the imagery that nowadays follows those who migrate to places where the only paid occupations available to them are in domestic service or sex work.[3] The ‘trafficking’ discourse relies on the assumption that it is better for women to stay at home rather than leave it and get into trouble; ‘trouble’ is seen as something that will irreparably damage women (who are grouped with children), while men are routinely expected to encounter and overcome it. But if one of our goals is to find a vision of globalisation in which poorer people are not constructed solely as victims, we need to recognise that strategies which seem less gratifying to some people may be successfully utilised by others. Therefore, this essay is not about whether domestic service can ever be pleasant or prostitution should be accepted as ‘work’.[4]

The bad beginnings or sad, frightening or even tragic moments of people’s migrations to work need not forever mark them nor define their whole life experience. Relative powerlessness at one stage of migration need not be permanent; poor people also enjoy ‘multiple identities’ that change over life-courses composed of different stages, needs and projects. By insisting on the instrumentality of migrating under less than ideal conditions, the existence of the worst experiences are not negated. The abuses of agents who sell ways to enter the first world extend to migrants who work as domestic servants and in sweatshops, maquiladoras, mines, agriculture, sex or other industries, whether they are women, men or transgender people. But these most tragic stories are fortunately not the reality for most migrants.

Displacement or misplacement? Questions of will and ‘choice’

Research among migrant prostitutes and domestic workers reveals little essential difference in their migration projects and demonstrates that migrations that may have begun as a kind of displacement (a feeling of being pushed out, of having no reasonable choices) are not doomed to be permanently sad stories.[5] Even the poorest and even the partially ‘trafficked’ or ‘deceived’ look for and find spaces to be themselves in, run away, change jobs, learn to utilise friends, clients, employers and petty criminals. In other words, they do the same as other migrants and in all but the worst cases tend to find their way eventually into situations more to their liking, whether that means finding a good family to clean for or a decent brothel owner or the right contacts to work freelance.

Neither are migrations totally economically motivated. Exposed to media images that depict world travel as essential to both education and pleasure, potential migrants learn that first world countries are highly comfortable and sophisticated places in which to live. They are excited at the prospect of meeting people from other countries. All poor people do not decide to migrate; many that do are people interested in and capable of taking the risks involved in uprooting in order to ‘find a place in the world’.

My example here is migrant women and transsexuals in Europe, but the discourses which construct them as ‘trafficked’ exist all over the world and are being addressed by international bodies.[6] At the time of this writing, the majority of migrant prostitutes in Europe come from the west of Africa, Latin America, eastern Europe and countries of the ex-Soviet Union. While domestic workers have begun to unite across ethnic borders to demand basic rights, sex workers have not, making them impossible to fit into classic migration frameworks, in which associations are formed as an essential step to ‘settling’ down. For a variety of legislative and social reasons, not least of which are the repressive policies of police and immigration all over Europe, prostitutes tend to keep moving, from city to city and from country to country.[7] This itinerant lifestyle creates a particular relationship to ‘place’ that impedes doing the things migrants are ‘supposed’ to do, related to establishing themselves and becoming good (subaltern) citizens (the Roma suffer from the same impediment). While nomadism is found romantic in people who live far away (such as the Bedouin) it tends to be seen as a social problem inside the West.

Writers on migrations and diaspora maintain a nearly complete silence about migrant prostitutes,[8] though they can be studied as daring border-crossers who typically and (repeatedly) arrive with little information, luggage or local language. But the only aspects of their lives discussed (by everyone, not only by lobbyists against prostitution) are their victimhood, marginalisation and presumed role in the transmission of HIV/AIDS, injustices which reproduce stigmatisation. Yet it is safe to surmise that if men were the large group using prostitution as a strategy to get into Europe and good wages then it would be seen as a creative move and not routinely characterised as a tragedy.

Finding pleasure in the margins

A crucial element in this gendered reaction is the widespread assumption that a woman’s body is above all a sexual ‘place’, where women’s experiences of sex and their sexual organs is essential to their self-respect. While this may be true for many, it is not universal, and the use of the body for economic gain is not considered so upsetting or important by many prostitutes, who usually report that the first week on the job was difficult but that later they adapted.[9] Some theorists assume that something like the soul or real self is ‘alienated’ when sex occurs outside the context of ‘love’, and that women are fatally damaged by this experience, but these must remain moralising hypotheses impossible to prove. Some women feel this way and some find pleasure in prostitution, which only means there is not a single experience of the body shared by everyone—no surprise, after all. In any case, even prostitutes who don’t like what they do say it’s better than a lot of other options that they also don’t like; learning to adapt to necessities and ignore unpleasant aspects of a job is a normal human strategy.

In the sentimentalising that occurs around ‘uprooted migrants’, the myriad possibilities for being miserable at home are forgotten. Many women, homosexuals and transsexuals are fleeing from small-town prejudices, dead-end jobs, dangerous streets, overbearing fathers and violent boyfriends. ‘Home’ can also be a boring or suffocating place, as evidenced by the enormous variety of entertainment sites located outside of it. In many third-world cultures, only men are allowed to partake of these pleasures, occupy these spaces; in Europe, everyone can. People in prostitution also have private lives, go to films, bars, discotheques, restaurants, concerts, festivals, church parties and parks. Their wish to leave work behind and be ordinary is no different from that of other people; in the context of urban spaces they become flâneurs and consumers like anyone else.

Social constructs of prostitutes’ ‘place’

Various NGO projects in Europe work with migrant prostitutes and would like to foment their self-organisation to defend their basic rights.[10] Such projects inevitably require, however, that subjects identify as prostitutes, which few do; rather, they identify as migrant people from Cali or Benin City or Kherson who are doing sex work temporarily as a means to an end. This means they are less interested in questions of identity than in being allowed to get on with earning money the way they are without being harassed and subjected to violence on the one hand or pitied and subjected to projects to ‘save’ them on the other.[11]

Very often the discourse of solidarity sets up a dichotomy about ‘place’ for migrants which consists of (1) home (which you loved and were forced to leave) and (2) Europe (which you don’t want to be deported from). The complicated relationships migrants have to ‘home’, which may or may not be a place they wish to visit or actually live in again, are excluded from discussions about them. And when migrant prostitutes are constructed as ‘trafficked’ they are assumed to have been wrested away against their will, allowing immediate unsubtle deportation measures to appear benevolent (and to be characterised by some ironic activists as ‘re-trafficking’).[12] Various theorists have pointed out how migrants’ work of caring for children, the elderly and the sick creates ‘chains’ of love and affection which take in the families migrants leave behind, the families they come to work for and new relationships started abroad. This more nuanced vision of the role of ‘place’ in women migrants’ lives is generally not extended to sex workers, however.

Milieux as workplaces

All this theorising impinges little on women focussed on getting ahead, whose relationship to ‘places’ is dramatically mediated by the industry they work in, a series of milieux. A rural woman from a third-world country can arrive in Europe and, with the right contacts, soon be in a position to earn 5000 or more euros a month. This figure does not refer to what are sometimes called ‘luxury’ prostitutes who work with ‘elite’ customers (and who can earn much more) but refers to an amount commonly earned in large or small clubs and brothels as well as flats, whose names and particular characteristics change from country to country.[13]

With this amount, a migrant may be able to pay back debts undertaken to migrate fairly soon, and to earn it she works in multicultural, multilingual clubs, brothels, apartments and bars. Here you find people from Ecuatorial Guinea working alongside people from Brazil and Russia and people from Nigeria alongside people from Perú and Bulgaria. Milieux are ‘workplaces’ for those selling sexual services in them, who spend many hours in the bar, socialising, talking and drinking with each other and the clientele as well as other workers like cooks, waiters, cashiers and bouncers. In the case of flats, some people live in them while others arrive to work shifts. The experience of spending most of their time in such ambiances, if people adapt to them at all, produces cosmopolitan subjects, who, by definition, have a special relationship vis-a-vis ‘place’. The cosmopolite considers the world his oyster, not his home, and there is nothing in the concept which impedes him or her from being poor or a prostitute.

It is easy to find migrant sex workers who have lived in multiple European cities: Turin, Amsterdam, Lyon. They have met people from dozens of countries and can speak a little of several languages; they are proud of having learnt to be flexible and tolerant of people’s differences. Whether they speak lovingly of their home country or not, they have overcome the kind of attachment to it that leads to nationalist fervour and have joined the group that may be the hope of the world, the one that judges people on their actions and thoughts and not on how they look or where they are from. This is the strength of the cosmopolite.

Some doubt that ordinary work relations can exist in milieux. This doubt seems to construct all other work sites as less alienating: office, medical, factory, domestic, mining, sweatshop, farming, academic, homework, etc. But the sex industry is huge, taking in clubs, bars, discotheques and cabarets, erotic telephone lines, sex shops with private cabins, massage parlours and saunas, escort services, some matrimonial agencies, flats, pornographic cinema, erotic restaurants, services of domination and submission and street prostitution. Much of this work is part-time, occasional or a second job, and working conditions for these millions of jobs worldwide vary enormously, so they cannot be generalised in terms of ‘place’. Though frequent change of personnel is common, this is also a characteristic of work in the cinema and performing arts, as well as of ‘temporary’ office and computer workers (where no one doubts that normal relationships occur). Relationships with colleagues may cross ethnic lines or not, according to the individual; the chance of this is increased where a great variety of people is found with no one type predominating. This is the situation in the milieux, now that migrants constitute the majority of prostitutes across Europe—as many as 90 per cent in Italy (Tampep 200).

. . . and milieux as borderlands

Milieux are not only multi-ethnic; they are borderlands: places of mixing, confusion and ambiguity, where the defining ‘lines’ between one thing and another are blurred. Since so many of Europe’s migrant prostitutes are foreigners, languages spoken in the milieux include pidgins, creoles, signing and lingua francas, where Spaniards learn to communicate with Nigerians, Italians with Russians, French with Albanians. Similarly, many clubs would appear to be carnival sites, the world upside down, where the prostitute is like the pícaro, the half-outsider who substitutes trickery for dignified work, living the role of “cosmopolitan and stranger . . . exploiting and making permanent the liminal state of being betwixt and between all fixed points in a status sequence” (Turner 1974, 232).

The milieux are sites of experimentation and show, where masculinity is performed by some and femininity by others. Investigations as far apart as Tokyo and Milan demonstrate that for many the sexual act carried out at the end of a night on the town or puttan tour is not at the centre of the experience, which rather resides in sharing with male friends an experience of talking, drinking, looking, driving, flirting, making remarks, taking drugs and, in general, being ‘men’ (Allison 1994, Leonini 1999). The prostitute in her work uniform does what will lead to making money, in the case of the transsexual a hyperperformance of womanliness. While any sexual service contracted usually occupies no more than fifteen minutes, not only workers but clients spend long hours having no sex at all.

In the patriarchal institution of the sex industry it is men who are publicly ‘permitted’ to experiment with their masculinity and relate to people they would not meet anywhere else. The availability of migrant women, homosexual men and transsexuals means that millions of relationships take place every day between people of different cultures. The essentialisation of these relationships as undifferentiated ‘acts’ and their elimination from cultural consideration because they involve money cannot be justified.[14] For some who theorise sex as culture, sexual practices are seen as constructed, transmitted, changed, even globalised, and migrant sex workers as the bearers of cultural knowledge.[15]

Everyone agrees that the sex industry exists within patriarchal structures. Some critics will continue to lament migrant prostitutes’ loss of home and the near impossibility of their organising formally. But one must also give credit where credit is due, recognise the resourcefulness of most migrant women and allow them the possibility of overcoming feelings of victimhood and experiencing pleasure and satisfaction within difficult situations and in strange places.

Notes

[1] The word ‘home’ in English connotes much of this all by itself, but this is not omnipresent in other languages.

[2] David Sibley has contributed invaluable evidence of this in his chapter on W.E.B. DuBois’ rigorous sociological research on ‘The Philadelphia Negro’, which never was accepted by the academy (1995).

[3] Domestic service involves many of the same isolating characteristics as work in the sex industry, and the two are undertaken simultaneously by numerous women looking to acquire more money in a shorter amount of time.

[4] As one member of Babaylan, a migrant domestic workers’ group, said: “We look at migration as neither a degradation nor improvement . . . in women’s position, but a restructuring of gender relations.This restructuring need not necessarily be expressed through a satisfactory professional life. It may take place through the assertion of autonomy in social life, through relations with family of origin, or through participating in networks and formal associations.The differential between earnings in the country of origin and the country of immigration may in itself create such an autonomy, even if the job in the receiving country is one of a live-in maid or prostitute.” Anny Misa Hefti: 1997 (my emphasis).

[5] Published findings by and personal communications with researchers in Spain, the U.K., Italy, France, Belgium, Germany, Holland and Switzerland.

[6] Important other current sites of discourse on the issues are India, the Mekong Delta, Nigeria and the Dominican Republic, as well as Canada and the U.S.

[7] Police and immigration efforts to ‘clean up’ prostitution sites or pick up ‘undocumented’ workers vary from city to city across Europe, change from day to day and are targeted, according to the moment’s policy, on street, bar or brothel workers. Few workers are completely exempt from fears of police attention.

[8] The most notable exception to this silence is negative and emblematic. Discussing Mira Nair’s film India Cabaret, Arjun Appadurai begins by describing young women from Kerala who “come to seek their fortunes as cabaret dancers and prostitutes in Bombay”, a neutral enough treatment of the situation. Two sentences later, however, he refers to “these tragedies of displacement”, without providing any justification, and likewise criticises the men who frequent the cabarets as returnees from the Middle East, “where their diasporic lives away from women distort their very sense of what the relations between men and women might be”. Appadurai provides no references and no theoretical backup for these typically moralistic opinions about how sex and relationships ‘ought’ to be. (Appadurai 1996, 38-9) It is also interesting that he did not change his vision of this phenomenon since its first publication six years earlier, in Public Culture.

[10] Note that these are solidarity projects with sex workers and not composed of sex workers.

[11] Many will note that being allowed to ‘get on’ in sex work relies on the prior social proposition.

[9] I am not referring here to particular people who actively enjoy their sex jobs and want their rights as workers recognised. Some of these are organised and lobby against the criminalisation of prostitution and for prostitutes’ rights.

[13] The surprise this figure may cause is related to the media’s nearly exclusive coverage of either street prostitution or interior sites of worst exploitation. The ability to earn such an amount depends on being introduced or introducing oneself into this market, having the skills to operate there and learning to manage this kind of money (a frequent problem is large-scale consumption which tends to cancel out high earnings). Working fewer hours or days or taking breaks between contracts reduces income. For more on the ‘skills’ required, see Agustín 2000.

[12] The late realisation that such arguments are convenient to conservative immigration policies—those basically intended to close borders and exclude migrants—has led to various national proposals to allow trafficked people to remain, whether they agree to denounce their exploiters or not.

[14] The latest ‘place’ to be inhabited by migrant prostitutes is cyberspace, like cosmopolitan space borderless. The stigmatisation of prostitutes and the wish of many clients to hide their desires make cyberspace ideal for everyone, and, in a rapid proliferation of forms, sexual services are offered and/or completed in chat rooms, on bulletin boards, in pages with images and recorded sound, in direct advertisements with telephone numbers, and, via webcams, in both one-on-one and more ‘public’ shows. Here women are emerging as consumers, perhaps because of the dearth of ‘places’ where women may go to seek anonymous, public or commercial sex. Consider a study carried out in Europe which showed women to make up 26 per cent of visitors to pornographic websites. (Nielsen Netratings 1999)

[15] “Contextualising sexuality within political economy has underscored how extensively prevailing notions about sexuality, gender, and desire are fueled by a colonialist mentality that presumes a crosscultural rigidity and consistency of sexual categories and the durability of geographic and cultural boundaries imposed by Western scholars.” (Parker, Barbosa, and Aggleton: 2001, p. 9).

References

Agustín, Laura. 2000. “Trabajar en la industria del sexo.” OFRIM Suplementos, No. 6,
June, Madrid. English translation, “Working in the Sex Industry”, at
http://www.swimw.org/agustin.html

Allison, Anne. 1994. Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure and Corporate Masculinity in a
Tokyo Hostess Club. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Hefti, Anny Misa. “Globalization and Migration”. Presentation at conference Responding to Globalization, 19-21 September 1997, Zurich.

Leonini, Luisa, ed. 1999. Sesso in acquisito: Una ricerca sui clienti della prostituzione. Milan: Edizioni Unicopli.

Nielsen Netratings, published in Ciberpaís, 9, March 2001, p. 13, Barcelona.

Parker, Richard, Barbosa, Regina Maria and Aggleton, Peter. 2000. Framing the Sexual Subject: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality and Power. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sibley, David. 1995. Geographies of Exclusion. London: Routledge.

Tampep (Transnational AIDS/STD Prevention Among Migrant Prostitutes in
Europe Project). 1999. Health, Migration and SexWork: The Experience of Tampep. Amsterdam: Mr A de Graaf Stichting.

Turner, Victor. 1974. Dramas, Fields and Metaphors. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

LATimesBlogs 18 April 2008

[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.

p 131-2

‘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.