migration

For those who never saw this review of my book, a reprise, with the original picture. The use of ‘myth’ here is not my choice, by the way. That would imply that no abuses or problems exist in migration, which is a far cry from the truth.

The New Statesman       27 March 2008

The Myth of Trafficking 

Brendan O’Neill

Most migrant women, including those in the sex industry, have made a clear decision, says a new study, to leave home and take their chances abroad. They are not “passive victims” in need of “saving” or sending back by western campaigners.

Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry

Laura María Agustín Zed Books, 224pp, £16.99

It is always refreshing to read a book that turns an issue on its head. Laura María Agustín’s trenchant and controversial critique of the anti-trafficking crusade goes a step further: it lays out the matter - in this case, “human trafficking” - on the operating table, dissects it, unravels its innards, and shows the reader, in gory, sometimes eye-watering detail, why everything we think about it is Wrong with a capital W. It’s a jarring read; I imagine that those who make a living from campaigning against the scourge of human trafficking will throw it violently across the room, if not into an incinerator. Yet it may also be one of the most important books on migration published in recent years.

Most of us recognise the ideological under pinnings of old-style baiting of migrants. When newspaper hacks or populist politicians talk about evil Johnny Foreigners coming here and stealing our jobs or eating our swans, it does not take much effort to sniff out their xenophobic leanings. Agustín’s contention is that the new “discourse” on migrants (in which many of them, especially the women and children, are seen as “victims of trafficking” in need of rescue) is also built on ideological foundations. Like its demented cousin - tabloid hysteria about foreign scroungers - the trafficking scare is based on a deeply patronising view of migrants, rather than any hard statistical evidence that human trafficking is rife.

Agustín begins by challenging the idea that there is a “new slave trade” in which hundreds of thousands of women and children are sold like chattels across borders. The US state department claims that between 600,000 and 800,000 people are trafficked for forced labour or sex worldwide every year; Unicef says a million children and young people are trafficked each year. Upmarket newspapers - which have embraced the seemingly PC “trafficking discourse” with the same fervour as the tabloid newspapers screech about fence-leaping job-stealers from Sangatte - tell us that “thousands” of women and children have been trafficked into Britain and “traded for tawdry sex”, and that some of them (the African ones) “live under fear of voodoo”.

Agustín says the numbers are “mostly fantasies”. She does not doubt that there are instances of forced migration, or that, in a world where freedom of movement is restricted by stiff laws and stringent border controls, many aspiring migrants have little choice but to seek assistance from dodgy middlemen. Yet, having researched trafficking and sex workers’ experiences for the past five years, both academically and through fieldwork in Latin America and Asia, she concludes that the figures are based on “sweeping generalisations” and frequently on “wild speculation”. “Most of the writing and activism [on trafficking] does not seem to be based on empirical research, even when produced by academics,” she notes. Many of the authors rely on “media reports” and “statistics published with little explanation of methodology or clarity about definitions”.

Agustín points out that some anti-trafficking activists depend on numbers produced by the CIA (not normally considered a reliable or neutral font of information when it comes to inter national issues), even though the CIA refuses to “divulge its research methods”. The reason why the “new slavery” statistics are so high is, in part, that the category of trafficking is promiscuously defined, sometimes disingenuously so. Some researchers automatically label migrant women who work as prostitutes “trafficked persons”, basing their rationale on the notion that no woman could seriously want to work in the sex industry. The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women argues that “all children and the majority of women in the sex trade” should be considered “victims of trafficking”. As Agustín says, such an approach “infantilises” migrant women, “eliminating any notion that women who sell sex can consent”. Ironically, it objectifies them, treating them as unthinking things that are moved around the world against their will.

The reality is very different, the author says. Most migrant women, including those who end up in the sex industry, have made a clear decision to leave home and take their chances overseas. They are not “passive victims” who must be “saved” by anti-trafficking campaigners and returned to their country of origin. Rather, frequently, they are headstrong and ambitious women who migrate in order to escape “small-town prejudices, dead-end jobs, dangerous streets and suffocating families”. Shocking as it might seem to the feminist social workers, caring police people and campaigning journalists who make up what Agustín refers to as the “rescue industry”, she has discovered that some poor migrant women “like the idea of being found beautiful or exotic abroad, exciting desire in others”. I told you it was controversial.

One of Agustín’s chief concerns is that the anti-trafficking crusade is restricting international freedom of movement. What presents itself as a campaign to protect migrants from harm is actually making their efforts to flee home, to find work, to make the most of their lives in often difficult and unforgiving circumstances, that much harder. She writes about the “rescue raids” carried out by police and non-governmental organisations, in which even women who vociferously deny having been trafficked may be arrested, imprisoned in detention centres and sent back home - for the benefit of their own mental stability, of course. It used to be called repatriation; now, dolled up in therapeutic lingo, it is called “rescue”.

For all its poisonous prejudices, the old racist view of migrants as portents of crime and social instability at least treated them as autonomous, sentient, albeit “morally depraved”, adults. By contrast, as the author illustrates, the anti-trafficking lobby robs migrants of agency and their individual differences, and views them as a helpless, swaying mass of thousands who must be saved by the more savvy and intelligent women of the west and by western authorities.

Agustín reserves her most cutting comments for the flourishing “rescue industry”, arguing convincingly that it is driven by a colonial-style, maternalistic attitude to foreign women. In its world, “victims become passive receptacles and mute sufferers who must be saved, and helpers become saviours - a colonialist operation”. Bitingly, she compares today’s anti-trafficking feminists with the “bourgeois women” of the 19th century who considered it a moral virtue to save poor prostitutes, who were “mistaken, misled, deviant”. Like them, anti-trafficking crusaders see women as weak, easily victimised, and in need of guidance from a caring chaperone.

In truth, poor women - and men and children - migrate for many different reasons and have many different experiences, some good, some bad, some tragic. Such migrants are wise and wily, says Agustín; they have gumption, ambition and hope; they are often cosmopolitan, too, working, mixing and having flings with migrants from the other side of the world whom they meet in some big city in Europe or the United States. And many of them have far more liberal attitudes to freedom of movement than the westerners who campaign on their behalf. She quotes a Kurdish migrant to the Netherlands who thinks borders should be abolished: “I don’t come from the sun or moon. I’m from earth just like everybody else and the earth belongs to all of us.” Now that’s an argument I can get behind.

Brendan O’Neill is the editor of Spiked

On Monday Sarkozy threatened to make wearing a burka in public illegal in France. I wrote about this kind of thinking last year in The Guardian. This issue is related to migration, it is related to trafficking and it is related to commercial sex. Ideas about how the right kind of women should look predominate in the history of women: you’re meant to cover yourself up more, or less, or in some particular way. From the original text of Sarkozy’s speech:

Le problème de la burqa n’est pas une problème religieux, c’est un problème de liberté, de dignité de la femme. Ce n’est pas un signe religieux, c’est un signe d’asservissement, d’abaissement. La burqa ne sera pas la bienvenue dans notre République française.

From the BBC story:

We cannot accept to have in our country women who are prisoners behind netting, cut off from all social life, deprived of identity. That is not the idea that the French republic has of women’s dignity.

Note the applause from politicians when he makes these statements.

Women wearing burkas are not welcome in France. That ‘Frenchness’ should depend on clothing I find very scary. That the idea of personal identity should be institutionalised by the French state I find even scarier. The original title of the following piece was Which migrants assimilate best? How do we know?, which editors changed to

What Not to Wear - if you want to be French

The Guardian, Comment is Free,  6 August 2008

Laura Agustín

A woman from Morocco who has lived in France for eight years with a French husband, has three French children and speaks fluent French, was refused citizenship recently on grounds of being insufficiently assimilated. The Conseil d’etat said Faiza Silmi’s way of life does not reflect “French values”, particularly the goal of gender equality. The judgment claims she lives in “total submission” to the men in her life because she wears the niqab, which covers all of the face except the eyes. The decision was approved by commentators from right, left and centre. Fadela Amara, the urban affairs minister, called Silmi’s clothing a “prison” and a “straitjacket”. Predictable debates about fundamentalism unfolded in the media, with Silmi appearing as a strange, distant object.

What does Silmi herself say? The website Jeuneafrique.com has just published her first interview with the French press, corroborating another in the New York Times. Silmi’s voice emerges clearly:

I am not submissive to the men in my family nor do I lead the life of a recluse and I go out when I want. When I drive my car, I wear my niqab. I alone decided to wear it, after reading some books. I respect the law and my husband respects my decisions.

While she talked, her husband served tea. Read the rest of this entry »

I have excerpted here some of the ethnographic material from a research article that has much more in it, on how Mexican migrant men’s loneliness affects their sexual behaviour. The article illustrates how ethnography can illuminate our understanding of the sex industry. It’s a description of one particular place in New York City and the activities of one specific group of young men from Puebla, Mexico. I’ve chosen to excerpt two kinds of material: 1) description of the site and dancing and 2) how male socialising may depend more on watching and talking than directly on sex.

Miguel Muñoz-Laboy, Jennifer S. Hirsch and Arturo Quispe-Lazaro. ‘Loneliness as a Sexual Risk Factor for Male Mexican Migrant Workers.’ American Journal of Public Health 2009, Vol 99, No. 5, 806-7.

‘. . . The signs on the outside of the La Garza club provided an accurate depiction of the differences between strip clubs or brothels and this type of social space. These signs said in both English and Spanish:

Every day beautiful dancers; Monday - Mexican nights tequilazo; Tuesday - all dancers in sexy babydolls; Wednesday - bikini nights; Thursday - sexy dancer nurses; Saturday - all dancers in micro-miniskirts; Sunday - school girls night; Happy Hour from 4 to 10pm, $3 beers and house drinks; no caps or hats, no sneakers, no jeans; decent place to dance; we are looking for dancers.

. . . La Garza was a 1-floor [table-dance] club with bathrooms in the basement, a 20-foot-long bar, 1 large-screen TV, 1 pool table that can only be used by VIPs, a dance floor in the center of the club, and 3 small seating sections around the dance floor. There is no entrance fee. Each dance costs $4 but clients can get a private dancer for $40 per hour.

. . . some couples danced physically close whereas others did not; some danced fast, others slow. However, reggaeton songs were danced almost the same across patrons; men were pressed against the columns or standing by the walls by the women dancers who would thrust their backs and buttocks against the men’s penis area (this is also known as grinding). Reggaeton was probably the most erotic dance in the club, and, yet, the most common behavior among men in the club was drinking and watching women dance, with other men, by themselves, or with other women.

. . . The men who attended La Garza can be divided into 3 main groups: (1) those that went mostly to dance with women, (2) those that mostly spoke and flirted with women and rarely danced and; (3) those that went to drink and watch, but rarely danced or spoke with the female dancers.

. . . [In] the second group . . . men paid women to speak with them for the duration of a single song (approximately 3 minutes) but most often they started their conversation in the middle of the previous song). They expressed that they had a better chance of getting together with any of the women by talking with them rather than by dancing and grinding. . . .  Men . . .talked about their experiences in places like La Garza as a way of being able to talk to women without the ‘complications’ of doing it at work or in the neighborhood. As expressed by research participants, these complications induded the difficulty of initiating a conversation with a strange woman, the need to avoid sexual harassment in the workplace, and prohibitions on men being able to talk to clients in many of the restaurant establishments in which they worked. . . .’

In this story, young people in Benin explain why sex work and migration are appealing and can be a sensible choice. No other comment is really necessary, except perhaps to note that this kind of projected trip/fantasy - although the traveller doesn’t know whether she will ultimately go to the UK or nearby Nigeria - is among those that get called ‘trafficking’ too often. 

Globalization: Learning English for sex in Nigeria - Afrik.com

 Benin, 6 May 2009

Many young people in French-speaking Benin are learning English to adapt to globalization, but some young women have another goal: to enter the thriving sex industry in neighbouring Nigeria, where the market is considered more lucrative.

Jenifer, 20, has been taking a course at a language school in Cotonou, the business capital of Benin. “Well, yes, I’m not learning English just for the sake of learning the language, I have other goals to achieve,” she said.

Although it is hard to assess the extent of this clandestine trend, Jean-Paul, who is in the same business English class as Jenifer, is aware of his classmate’s objective. “Basically, it’s English for sex,” he said.

Kadi, 19, who has been learning English for the last four months at a large training centre in Cotonou, admitted that she would soon be ready to overcome the last barrier to entering the Nigerian sex trade: language.

“It is the sad truth and it is unfortunate. Sometimes our young girls find themselves in this position without wanting to,” said Solange Legonou, President of the Benin network of NGOs for female leadership (ROLF).

“Some of them, for example, go to learn English … in Nigeria, for further study - not all of them go with the intention of becoming [sex workers], but their circumstances push them into it,” said Legonou, who emphasized the need to “concentrate on awareness-raising of young girls”, particularly to the risk of HIV.

Globalization

Many girls from Benin and other countries in West Africa succumb to the temptation of sex work in Nigeria. “I was told that it was just like the West there,” said Aïcha, who studies law by day and is a sex worker by night. “Fellow Beninians in Nigeria, particularly in Abuja [the capital], do very well out of their clients, who come with dollars and euros.”

Amy, a young sex worker near one of the big hotels in the city, came from Ivory Coast in 2007. She said she made enough money to rent an apartment for US$400 a month in a suburb of Abuja.

“The world has changed, we need to get moving and we need to meet others. What is true for business is also true for other areas. Why should we think that sex is not affected by this? We need to find ways to adapt ourselves,” she said.

“Most of these people are just adapting to the new world and we cannot criticize them for that,” commented Amidou Boubacar, a hotel employee in Lagos, the large port city in the south of Nigeria.

HIV risk

Nigeria has 2.6 million people living with HIV - the third highest HIV caseload in the world after India and South Africa – and a prevalence rate of 3.1 percent, compared to 2 percent in Benin, but this does not discourage young people.

“I am well aware that the possibility of catching AIDS is high [but] you don’t need to go to Nigeria to be at risk,” said Kadi. “I always take precautions.”

Marcelline, another student in Cotonou, said she planned to go to Abuja, “the city of rich men”, where some girls had clients who paid around $130 or more for a night.

Some young Beninian students hone their skills in Cotonou while waiting for the big move. “When I finished my English course I started practicing here because there is a large English-speaking visiting client base in [our] country,” admitted Christine, 28. “But my real goal is to one day go to the United Kingdom, America … or even just to Nigeria.”

Mexicans running across deserts in a ragged line: that’s the only image many people have seen of undocumented migrants sneaking aross a border. Videos from the BBC show one of numerous other ways. The scenes were shot recently in and around Calais, the closest French port to the UK and the entry to the Channel Tunnel. The first video shows migrants, apparently all men, attempting to jump into the backs of large trucks without being spotted by police or drivers. The report shows the informal camp, which is horrible, where migrants wait until they make it onto a truck (if they ever do). The back doors must be quickly openable, so there are people hanging about to sell advice about which lorries to try. The second video addresses the same phenomenon from the point of view of truck drivers and police. Note how public it all is. [The introductory advertising bits are quite short, hold on]

An earlier post discussed an Observer article illustrating the chaos in this small part of France. There used to be an official refugee camp at nearby Sangatte that migrants waited in, but the British pressured the French to close it several years ago. Since then, makeshift shacks and tents have grown up without control. The other day, however, French police swooped in and rounded up many migrants. The BBC says:

The police operation came two days before Immigration Minister Eric Besson was due to visit Calais for talks on the migrant situation, a state spokeswoman said.

“It is an attempt to dismantle people-trafficking networks,” she said. “It is an operation to destabilise the networks and try to find the smugglers.”

Really, the word trafficking is being used for everything.  The contradictions are impossible to resolve: migration law versus ‘humanitarian concerns’. Where will these migrants move to when policing makes the Calais area too much trouble and danger to deal with?

Here are excerpts from a BBC story from a couple of years ago that I post now because most people have no idea what ’smuggling’ and ‘trafficking’ look like where they begin. An entire boat-building industry exists to supply vessels that will make one trip and then be destroyed at their destinations: see BBC photo collection. This story is about undocumented migrants leaving from Gambia and arriving at Spain’s Canary Islands.  

Gambia - new front in migrant trade
Lucy Fleming, 10 October 2006

The cost of the journey is between $880 to $1,250… “The agents tell you that you have a 50/50 chance - the boat may sink or you may get sent back,” says a tourist resort worker in his thirties, who was approached in Serrekunda about making a trip two months ago.

“Senegalese carpenters have been brought in to build the boats, which take about a month or two to build,” a local trader in the area explains. “That will cost more than 100,000 dalassis ($3,539), but the boats can hold between 60 to 120 men,” he says. As well as getting passengers and boats, the agents also purchase supplies: between 10 to 15 barrels of fuel, food for the trip - which takes about one week, water, first-aid packs and medicine for sea sickness.

Many Gambians complain about the near impossibility of obtaining a visa for the European Union; and the allure of being able to earn the equivalent to several months’ wages in one day . . .

Photos © BBC 

This is a follow-up to the many interesting comments made on my previous three posts on New Zealand’s Prostitution Reform Act (just scroll down). Obviously the conversation could go in several different directions, but I want to try to clarify a couple of points made in the original post about the possible ‘whitening’ effect of a brothel-oriented policy. I was talking about cultural whiteness, not skin colour: the tastes, presumptions and norms of the (ruling) middle classes. The purpose of studying whiteness is to help us see that most of what is taken for granted as ‘good for society’ simply represents the views of the people who have most power, whose interests lie with the status quo (nearly always anti-poor, anti-immigration) and whose opinions are said to be ‘normal’.

This discussion started because the Prostitution Reform Act prohibits migrants from sex working in NZ; it’s a law regulating a business sector that also contains a piece of migration law. Some of us are speculating that a law that focusses on brothels

‘creates an ideological framework that promotes a very white middle-class kind of sex industry - one that is concealed from public view behind the doors of brothels. ‘ Josie

The fact that one can find a variety of ethnicities in brothels, anywhere in the world, is not surprising and doesn’t contradict the point. Brothel managers very often have a policy of keeping ‘one of each’ on hand to satisfy consumer whims. What I’m trying to

La Sortie du Bourgeois, Jean Béraud, 1889

get at here is that regulated brothels are a conservative, patriarchal business form, a conception of the sex industry most palatable to bourgeois ‘family values’ stressing discretion (for the benefit of men) and non-visibility (of women’s sexuality). So whilst a semi-hysterical ’sexiness’ shimmies away on television, making people feel they are more ‘liberated’ all the time, this prostitution law addresses primarily the most controlled and traditional version of commercial sex. In New Zealand, local councils may limit signs outside and the location of houses, which is good for community relations but belongs to the same impulse to ‘clean up the streets’ that protests against street prostitution do. This isn’t to say this law isn’t better than most. And I have taken the point that street prostitution is progressively accepted and included in it. But note also that the enormous variety of businesses found within the sex industry is not mentioned, including potentially raunchier activities like lap dancing and peep shows. How do those fare?

I’m not going to pronounce on the extent to which New Zealand is diverse or multicultural. Statistics from NZ’s census can be viewed here, and in a simple chart here, but they can be interpreted different ways. The statistics don’t include anyone living in NZ irregularly, of course - tourists who have overstayed their visas, workers who’ve been smuggled and so on. There are maps showing the percentage of people identifying as Maori (13.0%), Asian (8.1%) and Pacific Islander (6.0%) in the 2006 census. ‘73% of New Zealand’s population is of unmixed Europrean descent’ - whatever that means. The maps show that non-European people are densest in the north.

On the other hand, if you simply count the number of nationalities and ethnicities people lay claim to, then you can say that the country is highly diverse. A NZ Ministry for Culture and Heritage website roundly claims multiculturalism. Of course, you need to add in variables about language, age, religion, and you must try to resist relying on your experiences living there or as a visitor. Someone who’s lived in New York might experience NZ as very white; someone from a small town in a Nordic country might find it diverse. The term multiculturalism can also refer to a state policy that encouragies members of different groups to celebrate and maintain their different cultures as a way to promote social cohesion.

Similarly, NZ’s immigration policy can be described as benevolent and open or highly restrictive. As in other richer countries, the openness is towards ‘Skilled Migrants’, a point system is used, there are many, many limitations and difficulties put in the way and the whole thing is skewed towards the most educated white collar workers. I wouldn’t bet on the chances on getting into NZ for someone from South America or Africa whose profession is Kitchen Help or Manual Labourer (Construction), though I expect some of those jobs need filling. Many who read this blog consider sex work to be skilled, but so far no country’s migration policy agrees.

Links to information about the law are back at the first post.

Nightmare, by Nikolaj Abildgaard

The other day I wrote about a protectionist clause in New Zealand’s Prostitution Reform Act that was tacked on at a late stage as part of a political deal. There had been little  discussion of migrants working in New Zealand’s sex industry beforehand, and there has been little enough since. The following story is really absurd, based completely on fantasies of what could happen. All the scary things. The story apparently exists at all because of the United States’ interference in judging (in the form of the TIP reports) the whole world’s efforts to get rid of trafficking. But given a complete absence of evidence, the reporter is forced to use every possible hedging device, including in the headline. I’ve highlighted all this evasive language in bold.

Note the fundamental fallacy being used to justify increased anti-trafficking efforts: ‘Two out of every five countries did not have a single conviction for human trafficking last year.’  One could imagine there isn’t much trafficking happening in those places, right? But no, a lack of convictions is ascribed to countries being ‘in denial’ or to inadequate policing. Well, it’s possible but is a very flimsy base on which to set up a Government Task Force.

I don’t mean to say there couldn’t be any coerced people working in New Zealand, or any bad guys who’ve managed to slip through immigration controls. But this story has more in common with the Nightmare painting above than with any real evidence. I’m interested in evidence, if you remember a post that got some people very upset indeed: Prostitution v. trafficking: Judging the Evidence.

Sex slaves may be working in NZ, officials say

The New Zealand Herald, 4 April 2009,  by Jared Savage

Fear of reprisals can stop victims from speaking up. Immigration officials admit that women could be working undetected as sex slaves in New Zealand, despite previous assurances that there is no evidence of a problem. The Cabinet will be asked to set up a taskforce involving seven Government departments to stop human trafficking in this country. The action plan follows criticism in United States intelligence reports, which name New Zealand as a destination for traffickers from Malaysia, Hong Kong, China and other Asian countries.

Police and advocates for change believe it is likely the trade exists here and has become harder to detect since the liberalisation of prostitution laws in 2003. Documents obtained under the Official Information Act show that advisers told Immigration Minister Jonathan Coleman the critical comments about trafficking in New Zealand were “unsubstantiated”. The December 2008 briefing paper goes on to say there is no verified evidence to suggest trafficking is happening here, but New Zealand had the potential to be targeted.

“Similarly, there could potentially be cases of people trafficking in New Zealand that remain undetected,” the paper said. “People trafficking for sexual and labour exploitation is an evolving global phenomenon and New Zealand remains at risk.”

Dr Coleman told the Weekend Herald there was no verified evidence that New Zealand was a trafficking destination, but conceded that the Government does not “assume immunity” to being targeted now or in the future. He said the multi-agency action plan would increase training for enforcement officials to identify potential victims. Intelligence on trafficking would be more readily shared, Dr Coleman said, as well as enhanced risk profiling for potential victims both at the border and in visa applications.

A United Nations report into trafficking criticised any country that had not prosecuted any human trafficking offences. Two out of every five countries did not have a single conviction for human trafficking last year, according to the global study of 155 countries released last month.

“Many governments are still in denial,” said United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime executive director Antonio Maria Costa. “Either these countries are blind to the problem, or they are ill-equipped to deal with it, or both.” Read the rest of this entry »

In conversations about legal models for dealing with the sex industry, New Zealand’s Prostitution Reform Act of 2003 is often held up as the best. The law’s main thrust regulates how brothels may operate, by the way also making it legal for one to four people to work alone or together without having to participate in regulation (registering, getting permissions or being subject to inspections). This is obviously positive for more independent workers, unless they prefer to work from the street, in which case there is no benefit.

Many rights activists who back this legal model are not aware of a protectionist clause enshrined in the legislation: only New Zealand citizens and some, not all, migrants with permanent residency may work in its sex industry. This means no work permits are available for people who might want to go to New Zealand to work in a brothel or other sex business, or independently. Spokespeople for the law claim this clause prevents sex trafficking.

For those interested in sex work rights and theory, this is not coherent. New Zealand’s law can be called both decriminalisation, a policy that says sex work is socially acceptable, and regulation, which says sex work can be made safe and rational. Therefore, if jobs are available, it is logical to allow people from outside to come do them. If the jobs have not been made subject to quotas because there are not enough openings to satisfy all the ‘natives’ that want them, but ‘foreigners’ are still prohibited, something odd is going on.

I talked with several scholars and the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective about how this contradictory combination of liberalisation and protectionism came about. All agree that the clause limiting workers coming from outside New Zealand was inserted at a late stage, without meaningful analysis or discussion, because of one parliamentarian’s insistent noise about trafficking. From the New Zealand First party, he agreed to vote for the decriminalisation bill in exchange for a clause that would limit immigration. His position reflected anxiety, racism and xenophobia in New Zealand about increased immigration from Asia, the Middle East and the Pacific, as well as refugees from Africa. 

The disallowal of migrants helps keep the industry racially and culturally homogeneous. It is true that New Zealand’s population includes indigenous Maori as well as a large number of Pacific Islanders and is becoming multicultural. But the PRA focusses on brothel employment rather than on street-based prostitution where Maoris and Pacific Islanders have traditionally worked.

The PRA also favours middle-class cultural norms, promoting discreet prostitution contained inside brothels conceived to be as inoffensive as possible. There seems to have been a fear that New Zealand’s sex industry might change as a result of the law: get bigger and bolder, possibly promote practices the Act eventually outlawed, such as selling of sex without condoms (as if to say no New Zealander had ever done this).

Some observers interpret the law’s failure to address street workers as seeking to push them into brothels, where they may benefit from the Act’s provisions - and where, by the way, they must be available for state inspections. Thus the New Zealand legislation has the effect of reducing diversity amongst sex workers and sex businesses.

This more complicated history and analysis needs to emerge in discussions of the New Zealand law. Would the situation change in New Zealand if the clause prohibiting foreigners were to go away? Or, put differently, if another country attempted to use the New Zealand model but not add the prohibition, would it work, in a worldwide context of migration and sexworking?

The Act also says nothing about other kinds of commercial sex and sex businesses. Workers there, like those on the street, receive no benefit from this legislation.

Thanks to Jo Richdale, Amanda McVitty, Lynzi Armstrong, Dan Healey and the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective for helping me think this through and providing links.

New Zealand Prostitutes Collective summary of the PRA

Frequently Asked Questions about the PRA

A 2008 review of the PRA that includes a literature review from 2005

The Suffering of the Immigrant is still one of the best books I know about the experience of migration. The book demonstrates how suffering does not have to equal victimisation and, most importantly, how migration is the inevitable consequence of colonialism. The migrants discussed left Kabylia, in northern Algeria, and went to France.

Book Review by Laura Agustín in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol 29.3 pp 703-15, September 2005

Abdelmalek Sayad, 2004: The Suffering of the Immigrant. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Initially I thought this book’s title might signal the growing trend to victimize migrants, but I was wrong. On the contrary, The Suffering of the Immigrant presents the strongest possible arguments for recognizing migrants’ agency in the face of inherent, structural conditions that are all against them and whose consequences they must, undoubtedly, ‘suffer’.

Whereas many contemporary commentators refer to migration as a phenomenon of ‘globalization’, Abdelmalek Sayad makes no bones about which stage of globalization we should be looking at: the north’s imperialist colonization of the south. Most commentators agree that current migratory flows are related to free-market capitalism’s need for flexibility, moving its workplaces around the world while workers move to find them. And probably few would deny that ‘earlier’ colonial relations were implicated, especially where migrants move to their former ‘mother countries’.

But Sayad obliges us to consider a more serious proposition, that migrations are a structural element of colonial power relationships that have never ended. His case study is the Algerian migration to France in the second half of the twentieth century, during which time many migrants passed from being French (citizens of the colony) to Algerian (citizens of an independent Algeria) and back to French (as legal workers and residents in France), with the complication that the majority were Berber peasants. The colonial relationship is seen in the subordination of the economic and social life of rural colonies to the industrial activity of the country in which peasants become ‘workers’.

Sayad’s arguments, however, go much further than this particular case. First, he demonstrates how discourses of migration focus on the situation of ‘immigrants’ — meaning, on how receiving countries view immigration as their own social problem. Read the rest of this entry »