mobility

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

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?

This week I got wound up for the silliest of reasons: media reporting on prostitution. The prompting event was a two-part series (Selling sex legally in New Zealand and Europe and NZ poles apart on sex trade) from the stodgiest of sources, the BBC, supposedly revealing a huge contrast between New Zealand and European prostitution policy. The second story’s headline isn’t even supported by the report itself: Well, what else is new? The mainstream media regularly deal with sex-industry topics in an ignorant, reductionist way. I got irritated because I was sent this junk eight times: too many! In my opinion, the BBC reports fall into a category we all know well: Delete Upon Reading Subject Line.

The first article describes advantages for sex workers in New Zealand. Those are pretty clear for people who work in the kind of establishments described. But the BBC reporter did little more than interview the usual two or three workers and includes ridiculous, titillating details such as the towel one woman wears. This is traditional, uninformative, anecdotal reporting on prostitution.

The second article attempts to develop the argument that there’s a gigantic contrast between New Zealand and Europe - and has the nerve to reproduce factoids and misrepresentations already outed in the Guardian:

‘Something like 80% of women in prostitution are controlled by their drug dealer, their pimp, or their trafficker,’ MP Fiona Mactaggart told the BBC in November.

No. Fiona doesn’t have evidence to back this up. The figure 80% was given by the Poppy Project, a government-funded abolitionist shelter, to refer to the number of foreign women working in places in London. They came to this conclusion by hiring men to ring telephone numbers found in contact adverts. The callers elicited statements on women workers who might come from other countries. No follow-up research was done, no visits were made to the sites. The research results are suggestive but nothing more; methodogically there are serious questions about them, which were asked publicly last October. However the mistake resurfaced shortly afterwards and the Guardian had to debunk it again, publicly. Foreign does not equal trafficked.

Apart from the BBC’s apparent ignorance about these well-known events, there are other questions to ask about this pair of articles. Is the contrast really so great between New Zealand (decriminalising sex work) and Europe (growing movement towards criminalising punters as a way to preventt trafficking)? Some observers wrote to question the insistence always on national policies, as though each country enjoyed a hermetically sealed set of cultural characteristics that lead them to instate specific – and the implication is original and justified - policies.

The truth is that both policy trends – decriminalisation and abolition/prohibition - exist in all countries. If one trend wins in a particular parliamentary vote, it is because the politicians of the moment swayed one way or the other. It is never a permanent state, and ‘progress’ is pretty hard to find. European countries have wobbled back and forth between loosening and tightening laws, according to the zeitgeist. Moreover, in countries like Germany and the Netherlands, which presently have more tolerant and regulated systems, there are those who fight to clamp down. No society simply is one way or the other, and all could change fairly easily.

At the moment, a few UK politicians are trying to impose a law criminalising buyers of sex (the same law found in Finland), but there is also a movement against this imposition in Britain, and not only from sex workers and their allies. A strong libertarian argument is made that boils down to Government out of our sex lives. Last week an event was held at London’s ICA in which no anti-prostitution people were speakers (which sparked silly protests). At a recent event in Copenhagen a former New Zealand politican praised as progressive the country’s prostitution legislation but nonetheless argued against allowing migrants to work in the country - as a way to prevent trafficking. This came across as both conservative and illogical: If you have faith in decriminalisation, why not allow anyone to do the work? Any meaningful engagement with sex-industry law nowadays really must address the issue of mobile workers, and rights activists argue that decriminalisation could help prevent trafficking.

The insistence on national separateness is particularly ludicrous when dealing with the sex industry, which is characterised by movement: workers, investors, facilitators, businesspeople, all are wont to travel, whether to the next town or another country. Before ‘migrant sex workers’ or ‘trafficking’ were big topics, everyone was moving every which way and selling sex along the way. Neighbouring countries have always seen prostitutes cross borders to distance themselves from home and become more exotic to customers. Travellers stop a while and sell sex in order to keep travelling. This mobility applies not only to conscious sex workers but also to migrants who expected to be able to make money legally and find out that they can’t, or who are supposed to accept very low-paying jobs and instead switch to selling sex.

I also dispute the usual assumption that these laws make reality on-the-ground very very very different. On the contrary, if someone were to come to Earth from Mars, they would look at commercial sex in the USA, which mostly has mean criminalising laws, and look at it in New Zealand or the UK or Germany, and not see much difference at all. The endless debating about legal systems to control prostitution is bizarrely irrelevant, except for its symbolic value. I wrote about this in Sex and the Limits of Enlightenment: The Irrationality of Legal Regimes to Control Prostitution, a dense academic article but with some interesting ideas in it.

I know. Sex-worker rights activism pushes for New Zealand-type legislation. And yes, laws make a difference to individual sex workers’ rights when being harassed or arrested. But the vast majority of activity carries on similarly, if not identically, no matter which law is in place, and that’s because prostitution law is often vague and unenforceable, in the end having less impact than people assume.

The Lautrec picture at the top portrays women in a brothel dining room. It helped me think.

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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. . . Read the rest of this entry »

The UN recently released yet another report on trafficking which says:

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. . . . Read the rest of this entry »

There seems to be some confusion about another book of mine, which was published in Spain at the end of 2004 by Gakoa, in the Basque Country. Its translated title is Working in the Sex Industry, and other clichés about migration and consists of a series of essays plus a report written for Colectivo Ioé in 2000. I did the Ioé field work in Pamplona, talking with migrants, sex workers, social workers, police and other government officials. Sex at the Margins is not a translation of the first book. Below I tell a bit about how the first one came to be. If you are interested in buying the first one write to hiruga01@sarenet.es.

Trabajar en la industria del sexo, y otros tópicos migratorios. Publicado en el Pais Vasco, España, en 2004 por Gakoa. Pedidos: hiruga01@sarenet.es

Gakoa es la editorial que publica la revista Mugak. Peio Aierbe se puso en contacto conmigo cuando querían sacar una edición sobre migrantes que trabajan en la industria del sexo, que salió en 2003.

El sitio de Gako dice sobre Mugak que ‘está concebida como una herramienta al servicio de los movimientos de solidaridad frente al racismo y la xenofobia. El camino recorrido desde su aparición, en 1997, nos permite afirmar que es una herramienta consolidada. Hemos podido comprobar que existe una amplia franja de personas que se acercan a estas cuestiones desde una postura solidaria. Sea desde la práctica militante o desde la inquietud intelectual, o incluso, desde quienes tienen que prestar un servicio en el ámbito de la Administración, la sintonía que hemos encontrado con todas nos hace ser optimistas de cara al futuro.

Esta sintonía es la que convierte a la revista Mugak en un actor de primer orden en la labor de construir redes por las que transite el debate, la solidaridad, el contraste, las propuestas y, en definitiva, parte del caudal solidario que existe en nuestra sociedad. Las oportunidades y los retos que plantean las migraciones afectan, de manera transversal, al conjunto de ámbitos en los que se desarrolla nuestra vida diaria. Esta complejidad exige una mirada detenida sobre cada uno de ellos y recurrir a muchos puntos de vista. Ése es el ámbito de trabajo de Mugak.’

Puedes leer sobre El Centro de Estudios y Documentación sobre Inmigración, Racismo y Xenofobia Mugak y sus ideas en euskara.

Recently on a history-of-sexuality list, people complained about blanket statements regarding ‘Africans’, given the enormous diversity of people and cultures across the many countries on that continent. I agreed with the complaints, but at the same time I don’t care much for national orientations, either, as though people labelled Kenyan or South African exhibited a set of defining characteristics that can be pinned down, just because they were born there.

The following story is about one man in one city in one country, but for those of us who work in or study the sex industry anywhere in the world, it’s a familiar story. The headline emphasises the social status of the clients - as though it were big news - but there are other interesting details, which I’ve highlighted in bold.

Behind The Mask - a website magazine on lesbian and gay affairs in Africa

kenyan male sex workers serve ‘politicians and religious leaders’
26 January 2009

Nanjala Majale

MOMBASA – 26 January 2009: Panning out to Mombasa, the second largest city in Kenya, a young good-looking well-groomed man sits on a bamboo chaise lounge. He is a male sex worker, who caters only for male clientele. He has a slightly bored expression on his face, but is willing to talk about his lifestyle and line of work.

“I don’t know why they think there are only a pocketful of homosexuals in this country”, Brian mused before the interview even started, staring absentmindedly at his nails. “Our main market is not the white tourists who come down here. We cater for people in Nairobi, Meru and even Mandera!” He went on to say, in a slightly feminine tone, that last December he spent the entire month, fully paid, in Nairobi. “I had fun!” Brian enthused.

Brian is one of many male sex workers who cater exclusively to male clients. He regularly attends one of four health centres that serve MSM in the coastal town, set up with the help of the International Centre for Reproductive Health (ICHR) an institution that teaches men about safe sex practices and offers occasional counselling. In a study published in the June 2007 edition of AIDS, researchers estimated that at least 739 MSM were selling sex to other men in and around the city of Mombasa, a “sizeable population that urgently needs to be targeted by HIV prevention strategies,” the research said.

24-year-old Brian says he initially got into the business to make money. “Nowadays sometimes I do it just for pleasure, but mostly it’s for the money. I work only five times a week,” he declared. Asked whether he is a homosexual Brian confided “I was raped by a neighbour when I was about eight years old and from that time I started getting sexual urges – more for men than women. I didn’t take any action after the rape, because I was threatened”, he revealed, explaining that he suffered emotionally for a while before coming to terms with it.

“I started actively going with boys when I was in secondary school. I was in a boarding school and I had about 40 boyfriends during my four years of studying there,” he said with a seemingly shy but proud expression. “I didn’t have sex with all of them, but I liked the romance. After college is when I came out and from then I would look for people who want serious relationships.”

Brian revealed that his first few relationships did not work. “Most people just wanted to have sex and then they would often cheat on me. I have never desired to have a sexual relationship with a woman though. Maybe one day I will, just to try.”

“In my business, I charge about KSH 1,200 per shot. But that’s on the lower side for the younger clients. I only give two shots, once at night and once in the morning. I don’t stretch myself.” “I don’t like old guys,” he confided with a low voice, “so with those ones I charge a bit extra, about KSH 2,500 and that is just for the night.” Brian says that despite the stigma that faces homosexuals, more specifically from society, police, and the church, their clientele is made up of people in these very segments.

It was revealed at a June 2007 conference on Peer Education, HIV and AIDS, in Nairobi, that MSM face high levels of stigma and discrimination. Agnes Runyiri of ICHR said at the forum that homosexuality is considered taboo, un-African and anti-Christian.

“It [homosexuality] is very common. The only problem is stigma. That is why we are scared to come out. But in a real sense, our clients are politicians, businessmen, religious leaders – I’m very sorry to say – but it’s true,” Brian pointed out. Since every business has its own down sides Brian narrated that “sometimes you get bad customers who pay you less than the agreed amount or disappear with your money.”

“Luckily, I have never had a violent customer although I was in a violent relationship once. He used to beat me up and say that it was because I had become naughty, that is why I had to break it off”, he said shrugging.

He also underlined that safe sex is key in his line of work, and even generally with men who have sex with men. “There is a safe clinic [ICHR] that I work with. I started as a peer educator, but since I have a background in journalism, I now work as a counsellor. We have very many gays, who are messing about and they don’t know that they are. We deal with prevention of HIV/AIDS and it is helping because many of us were dying.”

He says it’s unfortunate that homosexuals are mistreated in most health institutions, an issue which he thinks the government should look into. “I wish that the government would sensitise the whole country to accept that this thing [homosexuality] is there and we have to help these guys out. The more we push it under the table, the more we are going to die.”

“What we need is health rights, not even marriage rights because I don’t think even my family would allow me to do that [be a homosexual]. They need sensitisation. People don’t understand that we are normal human beings, it is just that our sexual preferences are different”, he concluded.

The simplification of complexity is well illustrated by the idea of putting physical obstructions at national borderlines to keep people out. The stereotype of illegal migration imagines three clear roles: the migrant trying to cross, the smuggler or trafficker helping to flout the law and the police officer attempting to stop them. The reality is often much more complicated. The other day a story from Moldova pointed to corruption as a major problem in controlling migration there, and now here is a more tightly focussed account from the Mexico-US border.  I understand corruption to mean, in both cases, that those on the police and government side of the equation - who are paid to prevent people from getting in - take money in exchange for making entry easier. This can happen whether the activities in question are labelled smuggling or trafficking.

The below excerpts are from a news report about Lowell Bergman’s documentary on smuggling; his comments were made during a recent briefing at the University of California.

Corrupt U.S. Agents Aid Human Smuggling at Border

New America Media, Annette Fuentes, 6 Feb 2009

‘Building a fence and wall at the border and putting more border agents down there creates a bigger pool of potential corruption targets.’

The build-up of security agents on the border, especially since Sept. 11, 2001, hasn’t slowed illegal migration . . . Those who would have tried crossing alone are more likely to pay a smuggler to shepherd them across. ‘If people try to get across the border, they eventually get across . . .  Part of the fee to the smuggler is the guarantee that they’ll get you across. If they fail the first time, they’ll try again.’

. . . Proponents of the militarization of the border have used the threat of terrorist attacks in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001 to justify the build-up. But Bergman noted that there is no evidence that terrorists have ever entered through the Mexico-U.S. border. Of all those apprehended at border crossings, there is no record of non-Mexicans. . .

. . . there has been no effective internal oversight of border agents since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Multiple agencies, each with some responsibilities for immigration, customs and law enforcement, have meant no coordinated approach to investigations. ‘They completely lost any idea of what was going on . . . Only now are they beginning to find out, and they are overwhelmed by the number of leads and cases to follow up on.’

The FBI . . . now has about 200 open cases of human smuggling involving corrupt border agents. But the agency is swimming against the tide. ‘People coming through checkpoints . . . is still a growth industry.’

Here the whole black and white, law-and-order idea loses ground, and we see instead a multi-national social setting. Placing people at a border to enforce it provides them with opportunities to make money doing exactly what their formal job pays them to prevent. This is, of course, a widespread phenomenon amongst police of all kinds. Many people take law-enforcement jobs not out of an inspired devotion to the State but because they can get those jobs.Maybe they perform many aspects of their jobs correctly, but they don’t believe in ‘the law’ enough to resist opportunities to freelance. 

Here are three more examples of specific cases where those with power were paid to smooth crossing the border: a Dominican diplomat in New York, a filipino in New Jersey and a US customs officer and Chinese smuggler of people via Ecuador.

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

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

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

Migrant criminal network exposed 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of course I believe that the world is a place of terrible differences between the poor and the rich, where men almost always have more power and money. It’s not fair. But given the unfairness, I prefer to listen to how people describe their own realities rather than create static, generalised categories like Exploited Victims. I also don’t agree that poor people only leave their countries because they are forced to, with no possibility for their desires and abilities to think and weigh risks. The same goes for people who get into prostitution or sex work - I prefer to give the heaviest weight to what they say they are doing!

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

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

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

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

This post reproduces a recent paper from one of the big immigration think-tanks. In a clear fashion the authors show how the meaning of ‘illegal’ changes with the times, and each generation’s particular ideas about which migrants should be let in and which kept out.

Yehuda Bauer believes that the term ‘illegal migration’ was first applied by the British in the 1930s to describe undesired Jewish migration to Palestine. Other terms are sometimes used: clandestine migration, undocumented migration, irregular migration and unauthorised migration. All posit a clean, correct, unambiguous opposite which is always ‘legal’.

The context of the following paper is the USA, where most people’s ancestors came from somewhere else. Resistance to new migrants nowadays often claims that past forms of migration were better, more orderly and respectful, more English-learning, more adapting and, therefore, less obnoxious and trouble-causing. This article explains why that’s a romantic view not supported by historical evidence. 

[Images of Ellis Island and Angel Island, immigrant entry points in New York and San Francisco, added by me.]

De-Romanticizing Our Immigrant Past: Why Claiming “My Family Came Legally” Is Often a Myth

from Immigration Policy Center, Washington DC, 25 November 2008

Many people assume that their family immigrated to the U.S. legally, or did it “the right way.” In most cases, this statement does not reflect the fact that the U.S. immigration system was very different when their families arrived, and that their families might not have been allowed to enter had today’s laws been in effect. In some cases, claiming that a family came “legally” is simply inaccurate—undocumented immigration has been a reality for generations.

Whether one immigrated “legally” or “illegally” depends on the laws in effect at the time. When many families arrived in the U.S., there were no numerical limitations on immigration, no requirements to have an existing family or employment relationship with someone in the U.S., and no requirement to obtain a visa prior to arriving. As numerical limitations were instituted and certain immigrants were restricted from entering the U.S., illegal immigration increased. The definition of who was “legal” and who was “illegal” changed with the evolution of immigration laws.

Many of our ancestors would not have qualified under today’s immigration laws. Today’s requirements that potential immigrants have close family ties to qualified U.S. citizens or permanent residents, or have employment offers in particular fields, would have effectively restricted many of our families from coming legally to the U.S.

Until the late 19th century, there was very little federal regulation of immigration—there were virtually no laws to break. The new nation needed workers, and immigration was “encouraged and virtually unfettered.”[1] There was no border surveillance to allow only those with proper documents to enter the U.S. Potential immigrants did not have to obtain visas at U.S. consulates before entering the country. Rather, immigrants would simply arrive at ports of entry (such as Ellis Island and other seaports), be inspected, and be allowed in if they didn’t fall into any of the excluded categories.

Before the 20th century, there was virtually no bureaucracy responsible for enforcing immigration laws. Read the rest of this entry »