Once, after I’d given a talk, an academic became very upset while trying to get me to admit that the poor of this world are victims objectively, by definition because of ‘global structural inequalities’. I replied that I understood how she, coming from her subject position of white, middle-class woman identifying as socialist, produced poor people this way. I went on to say, ‘But if you move over to the poor person’s place and ask them how they see their situation, they may well not produce such an image of themselves.’ I thought the woman was going to go through the roof with outrage at my inability to see her point.

Of course I believe that the world is rife with terrible differences between the poor and the rich and that 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! Here’s the longer version, and it applies to all migrants, whatever jobs they do.

Forget Victimisation: Granting Agency to Migrants

Development, 46.3, 30-36 (2003)

Laura Agustín

There is a growing tendency to victimise poor people, weak people, uneducated people and migrant people. The trend, which began as a way of drawing attention to specific forms of violence committed against women, has now become a way of describing everyone on the lower rungs of power. Routinely, supporters position them as victims in order to claim rights for them, but this move also turns them into victims, and victims need help, need saving—which gives a primary role to supporters. Much rhetoric about migration has fallen into this pattern: migrants, it turns out, are not only vulnerable to exploitation, a patent truth, but they are ‘victims’.

The other choice, according to sensationalist media treatments, is criminal. Since news on migrants is reported only when disasters befall them, or when they are caught in something ‘illegal’, they can only be positioned in one of these two ways: as past victims of poverty or conflict in their home states and present victims of criminal bands, or as criminals who take advantage of such victims. The victims need to be saved, and the criminals to be punished. This reductionism encourages the idea that there is something inherently dangerous about being a migrant. Since migrants are usually seen as people from the third world, the positioning of so many of them as victims—of economic restructuring if not of criminal agents—harks back unsettlingly to the old category of the ‘native’. And since migrants nowadays are so often women, these natives are constituted as backward, developmentally less than first-world women. This is most overt, of course, in ‘trafficking’ discourses (for example, in Barry, 1979) but can now be heard in general talk about ‘illegal’ migrants.

Ratna Kapur shows how this victimising tendency began in the early 1990s with the project to reveal the widespread, routine nature of violence against women:

In the context of law and human rights, it is invariably the abject victim subject who seeks rights, primarily because she is the one who has had the worst happen to her. The victim subject has allowed women to speak out about abuses that have remained hidden or invisible in human rights discourse (Kapur, 2001: 5).

This strategy has led to many benefits for women. The problem is that the person designated a victim tends to take on an identity as victim that reduces her to being seen as a passive receptacle and ‘encourages some feminists in the international arena to propose strategies which are reminiscent of imperial interventions in the lives of the native subject’ (Kapur, 2001: 6).

The category ‘migrant’, awkward and ambiguous to begin with, becomes more so when it is victimised. In this article, I want to look at what we think we mean when we call someone a migrant, and then suggest that there are both class and postcolonial analyses to be made of this constructed identity and the passivity assigned to it. To do this, I will call on my own research with migrating people in various parts of the world. What I recount is widely known, but not often included in formal studies of migrations.

Conventional travellers

On the surface, there seem to be patently different kinds of travellers: tourists, people whose work involves travel, refugees and migrants. Tourists are generally defined as people with time and money to spend on leisure activities who take a trip somewhere to do it: they are ‘travelling for pleasure’. Tourism is defined by an absence (work), and tourists are believed to have left their jobs behind to indulge consciously in not working. In the literature, the tourist is someone from the North (the tourism of Southerners is invisible). Some people oppose a status of ‘traveller’ to that of tourist, saying their trips are unplanned, open-ended, longer and more appreciative of the ‘real culture’ of a place. ‘Interacting with the culture’ is the goal for many of these, and this interaction most likely comes about through getting a job. ‘Working’ does not exclude pleasure, then, for first-world subjects.

People who travel in the course of carrying out their jobs are at first glance also clearly identifiable. Whether sent on trips by companies or undertaking them on their own, business travellers are obliged to be on the road. Their trips may be long or short, involve familiarity with the culture visited and the local language or not and require sociability or not, but they have in common that this is not supposed to be ‘leisure time’. But is this true? Many businesspeople also engage in tourism during their trips, using their ‘expense accounts’ to entertain clients, much of this money going to sites where tourists also go (theatres, cabarets, sex or gambling clubs, restaurants, bars, boat trips, sports events). The trips taken to attend conferences, do field work or provide consultations by academics, ‘development’ and technical consultants, missionaries and social-sector personnel also feature tourism. Sports professionals, singers, musicians, actors, salespeople, sailors, soldiers, airline and train personnel, commercial fishermen, farm-workers, long-distance truck drivers and a variety of others travel as part of their professions. Modern explorers search for oil, minerals, endangered species of animals and plants and ‘lost’ archaeological artefacts. Many of these people spend a long time away from home, and their work life is punctuated by leisure and tourist activities. Some of these people have homes or ‘home bases’ in more than one place. Students who take years abroad or travel to do field work are combining tourism and work. The main goal of a voyage for religious pilgrims is not work, but they may work and engage in tourist activities on the way to and from the pilgrimage. And then there are nomads whose traditional way of gaining a livelihood includes mobility.

The dichotomy working traveller/work-free traveller is misleading, and many forms of travel have aspects of both. So what makes a ‘migrant’ different?

This other kind of traveller

Some people distinguish between all the above types and ‘migrants’, on the grounds that the latter ‘settle’. According to this distinction, migrants move from their home to make another one in someone else’s country. They are not positioned as travellers or tourists, since they are looking not only to spend money but earn it. The word migrant is nearly always used about the working class, not about middle-class professionals and not about people from the first-world, even if they also have left home and moved to another country. Instead, the word rings of a subaltern status.

Theories of migration have tended to concentrate on what causes people to move to new countries, focusing on structural conditions such as recomposition of capital or globalisation of markets, national policies and the rational decisions of ‘household units’. Discourses of ‘push-pull factors’ at the point of origin and the point of reception centre on causes such as wage differentials between countries, loss of land or crop failure, recruitment by employers abroad, family reunification projects, favourable immigration policy, flight from violence, persecution and armed conflict and the ‘feminisation of poverty’. None of these conditions excludes the others, and migrations are obviously best thought of as having multiple causes, since no single condition guarantees that migration will take place.

That such factors exist is unarguable, but they envision human beings as being acted upon, leaving little room for more subtle issues of desire, aspiration, frustration, anxiety or a myriad of other states of the soul. ‘Push-pull’ factoring, which sounds like something that happens to less-than-‘civilised’ people, is not usually mentioned when Euramericans are the migrants; these are more likely to be described as modern selves searching actively for better situations in which to realise their identities.

We know that choice is always at work, even with the poorest migrants, simply because everyone does not migrate from places having ‘push’ factors.

If it were true . . . that the flow of immigrants and refugees was simply a matter of individuals in search of better opportunities in a richer country, then the growing population and poverty in much of the world would have created truly massive numbers of poor invading highly developed countries, a great indiscriminate flow of human beings from misery to wealth. This has not been the case. Migrations are highly selective processes; only certain people leave, and they travel on highly structured routes to their destinations, rather than gravitate blindly toward any rich country they can enter (Sassen, 1999: 2).

Since the media, many governments and numerous supporters of migrants tend to talk as though the proverbial ‘avalanches’ of migrants were actually occurring, it seems important to underscore this point.[1] Even in the most trying situations, there are people who prefer to remain at home, while other people prefer to leave. Both are acted upon by world forces, yes, but they do not lose their ability to think through their options. Individual personalities play their part, differences such as degree of self-confidence, willingness to take risks and adaptability in the face of change. Being in a structurally less powerful position than people in the first world does not mean that one is not making decisions, and those decisions are influenced by a vast multiplicity of circumstances, including individual desire. Being poor does not make people poor in spirit.

In the same way, it does not follow that people who have decided to leave home, travel abroad and look for work, even in the most arduous conditions, never have leisure time, engage in tourist activities or look for pleasure. Combining business with pleasure is a concept available to the poor as well as the rich, to those with a false passport as well as those with a real one, and to those working in stigmatised occupations such as sex work as well as those doing what societies call ‘dignified work’. Saying migrants are people exclusively dedicated to work makes as little sense as saying business travellers are—it means rendering them one-dimensional, less than human.

A good deal of the fault for this reductionism goes to the media overload on the issue of how people migrate.

The manner of arriving

Until recently, the way people migrated was not a central issue in migration studies. They were assumed to have got the money together somehow, taken a bus, train, boat or plane and landed somewhere. Until they tried to make money, asked for help or presented some kind of social problem, they were more or less invisible. But now that the focus is on people getting past border controls to work in the sex industry, questions of how people get out of their own countries are on the agendas of numerous national and international governments.

Without a job offer, work permit and associated documents, entrance to the first world and many other countries is legally out of the question. Entering with a tourist visa is therefore a conventional solution, the idea being to overstay the time allotted and ‘disappear’ from authorities’ control. But obtaining a tourist visa can also be next to impossible for citizens of many countries with destinations in the first world, or may require long waiting because of quotas. Or the potential tourist-migrant may indeed be able to get a visa but not have the money to buy tickets and survive while looking for work. For these and other reasons, would-be travellers commonly seek help from intermediary agents in the travel process. These intermediaries sell services and documents that many travellers cannot afford to buy, so loans are a common feature of these trips. Those who help (in this context selling the service is helping) are often family members, old friends, tourist acquaintances, independent entrepreneurs or any combination of these, and they may play a minimal part or offer a whole travel ‘package’ which links them closely to the migrant at every step of the way.

Services offered for money may include the provision of passports, visas, changes of identity, work permits and other documents; advice on how to look and act in interviews with immigration officials (at the border, in airports, on trains and buses, in the street); the loan of money to show upon entrance with a tourist visa; pick-up service at the airport or car transportation to another city or country or to pre-arranged lodgings; and contact information for potential employers or other intermediaries at the destination. These services are not difficult to find in countries where out-travel has become normalised over time, and in certain countries, formal-sector travel agents offer such informal services.

Once in the destination country, travellers continue to need help and advice if they are going to get safe jobs with decent pay and without egregious labour abuses. They need contacts who can provide transport schedules or transport, addresses of safe places to stay, translation services, information on labour and cultural norms, medical references and other, conventional travel advice. In short, the creation of an economic niche for outside agents is a normal development in the informal economy facilitating migrations. That part of this economy turns to criminal exploitation does not mean the entire network does, nor that the clientele are all its ‘victims’.

I remember one day in a café in the centre of a Caribbean town. While Europeans were enjoying typical tropical holidays on nearby beaches, everyone in the café was talking about how to get out of the country. A young waiter discreetly chatted me up, soon asking if I could help him travel to Europe, in exchange for any kind of services I liked. Many vacationers who have been in poor countries have had this experience, and some will still remember the sympathy they felt, and the desire to help. Some will, in fact, have helped with money, ideas or contacts, thus becoming part of the informal networks that assist migrations, but few of these think of themselves as ‘traffickers’ or ‘smugglers’, no matter what job a migrant is destined to do.

The processes described involve potential migrants in a series of risky judgements and decisions. Each step of the way, they must weigh the story they are being told against what they have heard from returned migrants, friends abroad and news reports. Whether migrants buy a ‘full package’ from a single entrepreneur or make a succession of smaller decisions, only one link in the chain needs to be bad in order for things to go wrong. Obviously, this kind of clandestine market, outside all regulation, is not ‘fair’ in comparison with what people expect to enjoy in the first world. But the people who act within it are real, whole people who do not merit being generalised as ‘victims’. Néstor Rodríguez describes such migrations:

It is important to understand that autonomous migration means more than unauthorized (‘illegal’) border crossings: it means a community strategy implemented, developed, and sustained with the support of institutions, including formal ones, at the migrants’ points of origin and . . . points of destination. Precisely because core institutions (legal, religious, local governmental, etc) support this migratory strategy, undocumented migrants do not perceive its moral significance as deviant. Migrants may see their autonomous migration as extralegal, but not necessarily as criminal (Rodríguez, 1996: 23).

This point demonstrates that the ‘other’ of the victim—the ‘criminal’—is also a misleading notion for describing great numbers of people both travelling and facilitating travel in these immense worldwide networks.

Thinking about migrancy another way

Granting agency to migrating individuals does not mean denying the vast structural changes that push and pull them. On the other hand, granting them autonomy does not mean making them over-responsible for situations largely not of their own making. Global, national and local conditions intervene in individuals’ decisions, along with doses of good and bad luck. Many situations come up during a migration in which migrants have to choose between doing things the ‘right’, or legal, way, or doing them so that they might turn out the way they want. This brings to mind the conversation I had with a Colombian woman through the bars of the detention centre where she was being held in Bangkok after spending a year in prison. Her anguish did not derive so much from her having been in prison as from her own feelings of guilt because she had semi-knowingly broken the law, allowing a fake visa to be prepared for her in order to get into Japan. Her family had helped her with this, and her resultant conflicts over love and blame were tormenting her. While this woman had been a victim, she had also made choices and felt responsible, and I would not want to take this ethical capacity away from her.

Since Manuel Castells proposed the idea of a ‘space of flows’ for human movements in a ‘network society’ (Castells, 1996), migration scholars have used this metaphor in various ways. Doreen Massey emphasizes the ‘power geometry’ of flows:

Different social groups have distinct relationships to this anyway differentiated mobility: some people are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movement, others don’t; some are more on the receiving-end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it (Massey 1994: 149).

The migration-project consists of a vast complex of forces, from the national and global to the most local, personal and serendipitous (whom one happens to meet in a café). How people move, how necessary knowledge moves toward them, how they move their money and how its value moves them, as well as how they encourage other migrants to make similar moves: all form part of these flows. We are surrounded by images and sounds that foment the desire to ‘see the world’, and although we don’t have solid proof that this vision affects the desire to travel, we all know that it does.

In the classic distinction, migrants ‘settle’. So very many don’t, though: because they never (mentally or physically) relinquish a house, village, city or culture they are accustomed to, because they set themselves up to do business between the old and new country or because they find it unavoidable or impossible not to leave and go back. The latter possibility by no means signifies failure of the migration project, which may end up taking the shape of repeated use of tourist visas or simply repeated attempts to cross the border illegally and manage not to get caught while working. Most of these people come to feel they have more than one ‘home’, and that they live in both of them.

Living in more than one place

Take the titles of two texts written about the Dominican diaspora: Between Two Islands (Grasmuck and Pessar, 1991) and One Country in Two (Guarnizo, 1992). In this case, a large number of Dominicans are said to live in both Santo Domingo and New York City, or live between them, on the ‘bridge’ they have built during the past 20 years.

Family arrangements in which one or both parents live in the U.S. with none or some of their children, while their other children live on the island, are frequent. Although having more than one household in two different countries might be a source of emotional stress and economic hardship, it also arms family members with special skills to deal with uncertainty and adversity. They become more sophisticated than nonmigrant people in dealing with a rapidly globalising world. (Guarnizo, 1992:77)

These arrangements may derive from enormous injustices committed against a people in the past but be expressed as great strengths. Take the case of the West Indian island of Nevis:

The global quality of West Indian culture is seen to be related to the circumstances of slavery and colonialism which sought to suppress and make invisible the Afro-Caribbean community within the island society. For this reason the Afro-Caribbean people employed colonial institutions, to which they gained access, as frameworks within which to formalize and display a culture which they saw as their own. After emancipation these frameworks increasingly derived from migration destinations in the West Indies, North America and Britain, where waged employment was available. In the course of these historical processes a global culture emerged which was characterized by its ability to cultivate and promote a locally developed system of values and practices through the appropriation of external cultural forms (Fog Olwig, 1993)

Karen Fog Olwig’s study is called Global Culture, Island Identity, again demonstrating the ‘bothness’ of many peoples’ sense of home. These concepts, so common to studies of diaspora and hybridity, are so far not recognised widely in studies of migrations in general, which makes me ask whether we think diaspora is something more profound or complex than mere migration, and why. Diasporas began, after all, with ordinary migrants, ‘pushed’ or ‘pulled’ by ‘factors’.

Cosmopolitanism should give us another way to position migrants, but Ulf Hannerz, in another classificatory exercise, said:

Most ordinary labour migrants are not cosmopolitans either. For them going away may be, ideally, home plus higher income; often the involvement with another culture is not a fringe benefit but a necessary cost, to be kept as low as possible (Hannerz, 1990: 243).

How in the world does Hannerz know this? It’s patently not true of many, many migrants, and anyway—at what point does a person stop being a migrant and become something else? Hannerz fixes migrant identity in an early stage, that of ant leaving, self-protection and wariness toward the new. We can be thankful that most migrants, especially younger ones, do not remain in this stage for long, and they may just as well go on to be cosmopolitans as anything else.

Alejandro Portes et al have proposed a new social field to be called Transnationalism, composed of

a growing number of persons who live dual lives: speaking two languages, having homes in two countries, and making a living through continuous regular contact across national borders. Activities within the transnational field comprise a whole gamut of economic, political and social initiatives—ranging from informal import-export business, to the rise of a class of binational professionals, to the campaigns of home country politicians among their expatriates (Portes et al, 1999: 217-8).

Defining a field means the authors have to delimit the phenomena involved, to avoid the term’s ‘spurious extension to every aspect of reality, a common experience when a particular concept becomes popular’ (219). From the quoted text, it would appear that transnationals are middle class, but I see no need for this. Delimitation is not my project, however.

Beyond labelling

I opened this piece with a complaint: that (unconscious) victimisation is the growing modus operandi of people speaking on behalf of migrants. Obviously, those who work in victims’ services meet only victims, and as long as they speak on behalf of those particular people there is no problem. But the tendency is wider, and it is not solved by trying to distinguish precisely between a ‘smuggled’ person and a ‘trafficked’ one. Possible abuses committed by facilitators of migration know no boundaries; they may happen to men as well as women and to those working in sweatshops as well as in private houses.

I suggest that we re-confirm the idea of agency for migrants, with the emphasis on the process they are going through. Although some migrants may experience a (sad) feeling of being permanently uprooted, many others do not, and the whole theory of social ‘integration’ of migrants depends on their desires and abilities to adapt, assimilate and lose not their own identities but their identification with migrancy. At best, ‘migrant’ refers to a stage of life.

I also suggest that researchers and supporters consider the ‘transnational’ as a way to understand many migrants’ customs, including those that have caused polemic (‘sacrifice’ of animals, wearing headscarves and so on). Perhaps I don’t use the term in a carefully delimiting fashion, but it seems to me that many individual migrants evolve transnational ways of living that show creative adaptation and strength: looking for ways out of bad situations, trying to maintain something of the past while opening to the future.

Notes

[1] According to the director of the external relations department and senior regional adviser for Europe at the International Organization for Migration: ‘The 150 million migrants estimated to be in the world today make up only 2.5 percent of the world’s population’ (Schatzer, 2001).

References

Barry, Kathleen (1979) Female Sexual Slavery. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Fog Olwig, Karen (1993) Global Culture, Island Identity: Continuity and Change in the Afro-Caribbean Community of Nevis. Reading UK: Harwood Academic Publishers.

Grasmuck, Sherri and Pessar, Patricia (1991) Between Two Islands: Dominican International Migration. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Guarnizo, Luís Eduardo (1992) One Country in Two: Dominican-owned firms in New York and in the Dominican Republic. Doctoral dissertation, Johns Hopkins University.

Hannerz, Ulf (1990) ‘Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture’ in Mike Featherstone (ed) Global Culture, special issue of Theory, Culture & Society, 7.

Massey, Doreen (1994) Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge UK: Polity Press.

Kapur, Ratna (2002) ‘The Tragedy of Victimization Rhetoric: Resurrecting the “Native” Subject in International/Post-Colonial Feminist Legal Politics’, Harvard Human Rights Journal, Spring, 1-37.

Portes, Alejandro, Guarnizo, Luis and Landolt, Patricia (1999) ‘The study of transnationalism: pitfalls and promise of an emergent research field’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22, 2, 217-237.

Rodríguez, Néstor (1996) ‘The Battle for the Border: Notes on Autonomous Migration, Transnational Communities, and the State’, Social Justice, 23, 3, 21-37.

Sassen, Saskia (1999) Guests and Aliens. New York: The New Press.

Shatzer, Peter (2001) ‘Illegal migration needs firm but compassionate solution’. Presented at Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe Conference on Illegal Migration in Paris, on 13 December 2001.

Parties last days, fun is had by some, money is paid to some, and sometimes these groups overlap. A lot of it is about drink, drugs, food and music. Most people who board ships to share leave with sailors do not call themselves prostitutes or sex workers. They are party girls who like long hedonistic sieges and who accept gifts when it’s time to go home, and they are known the world over.

To meet seafarers who do have permission to disembark, sex workers and folks with no such identity make their way to port bars when ships come in, sometimes migrating from the interior.

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 

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.

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.

Do you know whether or not you are a prostitute is the question raised by a sign seen at Zapata’s Mexican Cantina in Shanghai.

I’ve been worrying about prostitution qua prostitution only since the early 1990s. Before that I didn’t read books about it— I didn’t go to conferences, I had no academic acquaintances of any description— and I didn’t know it to be a big issue,” either in Latin America, the US, or Europe. You could say I was uncontaminated by ideology; any opinions I had were casual and uninformed.

On the other hand, I have had people in my life who sell sex going back to the 1960s, way before I began to think about prostitution.
My friend Mona had sex with a lot of men and took money from them to help with her rent. But she didn’t call herself prostitute, hooker or call girl, and I doubt she’d call herself a sex worker now that the term is available. Mona had special talents that suited her to a certain kind of prostitution, but she never earned much money— and, many will point out, she scarcely had a professional attitude. Her tenement studio was tiny and dingy, so the rent she got guys to help her with was low.

Another of my friends of that era, Scotty, played the piano in joints all over town, changing his appearance and repertoire to get more gigs. I admit that once, after running into him looking like Count Dracula with purple hair on the corner of 57th Street and Broadway, the thought that he was prostituting his talent crossed my mind. Not fair, but then I didn’t think prostitution was anything bad, either.

Years later, I suspect I must have read everything ever written about the sex industry. I published a book about migration and trafficking (Susie’s interview with me is a great introduction).

I invented a new field of study called the cultural study of commercial sex, in which any type of exchange involving sex and money (or benefits, gifts, etc.) can be examined without moralizing and without  calling and condemning everything as “prostitution.” My idea is that we need a lot more information about what goes on in sex-money exchanges before we rush to pass laws and regulate everyone involved in all of them. A special edition of the journal Sexualities is full of examples written within this liberating framework.

Most of the heat in conversations about commercial sex goes to the idea of prostitution – whether it can ever be a normalised profession called “sex work” or whether it is by definition “violence against women.” Some people think marriage is prostitution; others think all paid work is.

For myself, I wonder how people imagine there to be a clear line between commercial and non-commercial sexual transactions, since all of life seems saturated with both.

My curiosity was piqued when I saw the above photo from Zapata’s, a middle-class bar-restaurant located in Tongren Lu, a popular Shanghai nightlife area. It’s not the kind of place where I’d expect to see a sign about prostitution. Trying to figure this one out led me into the expat world, where only insiders— most of the vocal ones men—  understand what’s going on. I hung around Internet forums where this sign made the rounds and explanations ranged from “it was the bar manager’s private joke” to “the place is filthy with prostitutes; decent girls won’t go there.” 

There are discussions of the many types of predatory women loose in the city. ISpyShanghai mentions “entertainers,Tiger girls, bar girls, butterflies, hostesses, chickens, and those girls on Tongren Lu who will literally jump into the taxi with you if you don’t shut the door quickly enough.”

Discussants at forums like Shanghaiexpat say too many “pros” get past bar bouncers and warn each other about falling into the clutches of girls who try to get you inside talk-talk bars, where they will only flirt and promote your buying of drinks.

Some call such bars fronts for prostitution. Others make a class distinction between talk-talk bars and hostess bars, the latter being more upscale. There are also warnings about ladyboys, transvestites and other “non-real” women, who are even said to form the majority of female-looking customers in some places. 

Could Zapata’s managers be trying to keep single women out? Certainly not; Ladies’ Nights are common in Shanghai, where each time the door opens, hundreds of eyes fix on the arriving guests, hoping that they have breasts.

So, what have we got? A commercial bar scene where men with money want females to be available to them for picking up, flirting, and perhaps going somewhere to have sex. Yes? Those women may accept gifts of drinks, food, taxis, and flowers without losing their shine. In another popular, mainstream, local example, KTV (karaoke television) venues invite men to come in groups and hire the services of women to drink and sing with them in small private rooms.

The taint comes when women do exactly the same things with the addition of asking for cash.

It’s subtle and confusing, isn’t it? When is it legitimate for women to take money or accept drinks? What about the customers— why is there no distinction amongst them? They take out their wallets in all kinds of situations— and that’s considered fine— except when they position themselves as victims of predators. On the other hand, they discuss which KTV place has the “hottest/most fun girls.”

Zapata’s managers and bouncers are male, so maybe it makes sense that they would put up such a blunt, sexist sign telling prostitutes to keep out. But what does it mean to say If you are unsure whether or not you’re a prostitute, please ask one of our friendly security guards to sort it out for you?

Presumably a professional knows that the sign refers to her or him-self and has no need to consult anyone about it. Which leaves whom?

What if I go to Shanghai alone, get dressed up, and appear alone at Zapata’s bar? Is it okay as long as I don’t talk to any men or am seen to be paying for my own drinks? What happens if the barman brings me a parasol-decorated margarita on behalf of the guy across the bar, who’s already paid for it? Should I now feel worried about being bounced? In case anyone thinks this is unlikely, one of the expat discussions involved a woman who was asked to leave Zapata’s although she was there with girlfriends. 

She was said to be “Taiwanese.” Some of the participants in expat forums specify that they are Chinese. Bouncers might or might not understand different kinds of regional Chinese. Someone said prostitutes don’t have to look Asian. Since ho-style is in fashion, clothes aren’t the key to this conundrum. I think I’m better off not going out, or sticking to an old-fashioned hotel bar where I’m allowed to accept a drink from a stranger— or offer one to someone else.

P.S. Zapata’s is still supposed to be the place to be on Wednesdays – there are free martinis for girls.

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. The U.S.’s land borders were largely unguarded. While inspectors at ports of arrival (usually port collectors) could deny admission to persons excludable under the law, immigrants could easily evade inspection. People in the U.S. illegally were unlikely to be caught or deported since very little money was appropriated for immigration enforcement and deportation. In 1882 Congress passed the first general immigration law, which created the first immigration bureaucracy, supervised by the Secretary of the Treasury. In 1891, as immigration increased, Congress established a Bureau of Immigration in the Treasury Department. A 1924 law finally set up the first “consular control system,” which required visas obtained abroad from a U.S. consulate before admission. The northern and southern borders were ambiguous, subject to change, and unguarded. The Border Patrol was not established until 1924, when restrictive laws led to large numbers of unauthorized immigrants entering the U.S.

Prior to the 1920s, there were no numerical limitations on immigration to the U.S., but certain persons were banned from entering. The first “illegal” immigrants were people, like the Chinese, who were banned from entering the U.S. The Chinese Exclusion Act passed in 1882. Over the years, immigration laws were passed that restricted certain categories of persons from immigrating, but no numerical limitations or quotas existed. Those persons barred from immigrating included Asians (except Japanese and Filipinos), prostitutes, paupers, polygamists, persons with “dangerous and loathsome contagious disease,” persons likely to become a public charge, anarchists and radicals, the “feebleminded” and “insane,” and the illiterate. The vast majority of people who arrived at a port of entry were allowed to enter. Of course, some people lied about their health and political beliefs and entered “illegally.” The Immigration Service excluded only 1 percent of the 25 million immigrants from Europe who arrived at Ellis Island between 1880 and World War I.[2]

The first numerical caps on immigration and limitations on Europeans were not established until the 1920s – after the great wave of immigration to the U.S. The Quota Law of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924 created a quota system that was based on race and nationality and heavily favored Western European immigrants, while closing the door to “undesirables.” Natives of Western Hemisphere countries were not subject to the quotas (but head taxes and literacy tests kept many from obtaining visas). The law also established the first preference system for spouses and children of U.S. citizens. For the first time, the 1924 law required immigrants to present medical certificates to the U.S. consul abroad and obtain a visa prior to arriving in the U.S.

Every restriction generated illegal immigration. The Asian exclusion laws resulted in an “illegal” Asian population. As laws were passed to keep out less desirable Eastern and Southern Europeans, immigrants from those countries—as well as others who could not pass literacy tests, pay the head tax, or enter through the quota system—began to enter illegally. In 1925, the Immigration Service reported 1.4 million immigrants living in the U.S. illegally.[3] A June 17, 1923, New York Times article reported that W. H. Husband, commissioner general of immigration, had been trying for two years “to stem the flow of immigrants from central and southern Europe, Africa and Asia that has been leaking across the borders of Mexico and Canada and through the ports of the east and west coasts.” A September 16, 1927, New York Times article describes government plans for stepped-up Coast Guard patrols because thousands of Chinese, Japanese, Greeks, Russians, and Italians were landing in Cuba and then hiring smugglers to take them to the U.S. illegally. [4] Many immigrants were also violating the laws of their home countries which required them to get permission to migrate, complete military service, or pay off debts prior to leaving.

Many European immigrants benefited from amnesties. Acknowledging the large numbers of illegal Europeans in the U.S., the government devised ways for them to remain in the U.S. legally. “Deserving” illegal European immigrants could benefit from various programs and legalize their status. The 1929 Registry Act allowed “honest law-abiding alien[s] who may be in the country under some merely technical irregularity” to register as permanent residents for a fee of $20 if they could prove they had lived in the U.S. since 1921 and were of “good moral character.” Roughly 115,000 immigrants registered between 1930 and 1940—80% were European or Canadian. Between 1925 and 1965, 200,000 illegal Europeans legalized their status through the Registry Act, through “pre-examination”—a process that allowed them to leave the U.S. voluntarily and re-enter legally with a visa (a “touch-back” program)—or through discretionary rules that allowed immigration officials to suspend deportations in “meritorious” cases. Approximately 73% of those benefitting from suspension of deportation were Europeans (mostly Germans and Italians).

Conclusion

The number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. is at a historically high level, and reforming our nation’s broken immigration laws should be a priority. However, failing to acknowledge that undocumented immigrants have existed throughout U.S. history, and failing to deal with the causes underlying undocumented immigration is a mistake that perpetuates ineffective immigration policies.

Notes

1 Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 17.
2 Ibid., p. 18.
3 Ibid., p. 61.
4 Brian Donohue, “Many Immigrants Were Legal Only Because There Were No Rules,” The Star-Ledger, July 22, 2007.

Immigration Policy Center, A Division of the American Immigration Law Foundation, 918 F Street NW, 6th floor, Washington DC 20004 • www.immigrationpolicy.org

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.

The Sex in ‘Sex Trafficking’

Why do we think migrant sex workers need rescuing?

American Sexuality, Autumn 2007

By Laura Agustín

The title of this publication notwithstanding, I don’t believe there are national sexualities. But our language reflects vague impressions of how people in other cultures do sex—a tongue-kiss, ‘French’; anal penetration, ‘Greek’; penis-between-the-breasts, ‘Cuban’. They are stereotypes most of us don’t take seriously, and the national tags vary according to what country we’re standing in. But everywhere we have notions that out there somewhere are strange, wonderful, and exotic kinds of sex waiting for us to try. 

But what about ’sex trafficking’, denounced in the media as a rampant crime linked to global gangs and insecurity at borders? The U.S. government, claiming to be the world’s moral arbiter, spends millions issuing an annual report card rating other countries’ efforts to combat this crime and trying to rescue victims around the world. The implication is clear: ‘American’ ideas about sex and morality are the right ones for the planet. In other words, if the ideal of ‘American’ sexual relationships is accepted everywhere, the enslavement of women and children will end.

In the West, in the present, many people believe that sex should express love. This ‘good’ sex is also said to provide a key way to discover personal identity—who we really are, our innermost selves. It is assumed that feelings of love increase pleasure (quantitatively) and intensify it (qualitatively), resulting in meaningful passion that is expressed through long term, emotionally committed relationships. Other sexual relations then seem wrong, among them anonymous, public, and ‘promiscuous’ sex. Above all, ‘real’ love and sex are said to be incompatible with rationality and work—at least that is the way many wish it to be.

At the same time, people wonder: Is there a boom underway in the buying and selling of sex, part of a general sexualization of contemporary culture? Since objective data is impossible to gather when businesses operate outside the law, we cannot know whether sex-and-money transactions are going on more than ever, but we certainly know we see and hear about them more. So although we tell a powerful story about sex and love belonging together, we also understand that people want other kinds of sex. We hear about people who buy and sell sex from our friends, acquaintances, the media, and sometimes through reporting on migration—which is where ’sex trafficking’ comes in.

In a context of increasing hostility toward migrants, it grates on people’s nerves to think that many might prefer to use sex to earn money instead of washing dishes, babysitting, working in a sweatshop, or picking fruit—for much less money. But migrants—who come in all sizes, shapes and colors, and from infinitely varying backgrounds—are just trying to get by as best they can on what can be a very rocky path. Migrants who cross borders to work need to be flexible and adaptable to succeed. They often do not know beforehand how they will be living, and they may not know the language. They may not find the food, music, or films they like, or the mosque, temple, or church. Everything looks different; they feel lonely. They may feel enormous pressure to pay back debts contracted to undertake their journey, and they may fear being picked up by the police. But they have arrived with a plan, some names and addresses, and some amount of money.

When migration policy is tightened at the same time that low-status jobs are abundantly available, a market opens up to help migrants cross borders. Some of this looks just like legal travel, but much of it involves bigger risks and higher costs, and some entails egregious exploitation—whether migrants are destined to work in mines, private homes, sweatshops, agriculture, or the sex industry.

Some migrants prefer to do anything rather than sell sex—for instance, ‘mules’ who take on the job of carrying drugs inside their bodies. Once across a border, past work experience and diplomas, whether white-collar or blue, are usually not recognized. Migrant schoolteachers, engineers, nurses, hairdressers and a range of others find only low-status, low-paying jobs open to them. Many of them, from everywhere on the social spectrum, would rather work in the sex industry—in one or the other of a huge variety of jobs.

Bars, restaurants, cabarets, private clubs, brothels, discotheques, saunas, massage parlors, sex shops, peep shows, hotel rooms, homes, bookshops, strip and lap-dance venues, dungeons, Internet sites, beauty parlors, clubhouses, cinemas, public toilets, phone lines, shipboard festivities, as well as modelling, swinging, stag and fetish parties—sex is sold practically everywhere. Where these are businesses operating without licences, undocumented workers can easily be employed: the paradox of prohibition. For migrants who are already working without official permission, these jobs may well seem no riskier than any other.

To understand why headlines insist that all migrant women who sell sex are ‘trafficked’, we need to go back to the popular idea that the proper place of sex is at home, between ‘committed’ lovers and family. When only this kind of relationship is imagined to be equitable and valid, it becomes easier to think that women from other cultures are poor, backward, vulnerable objects passively waiting for exploitation by rapacious men. With these notions, from the point of view of the comfortably sheltered, no one would opt to sell sex and migrants must be forced to do it.

What can we know about the actual sex involved in this moral conflict? We know all ’sex acts’ are not the same in the context of loving relationships, and they are not all the same just because money is exchanged for them. Migrant workers sell millions of sexual experiences every day around the world to customers from different cultures, learning and teaching through experience how physicality mixes with skill, sophistication, hostility, tenderness, insecurity, respect.

When we have sex with others we influence each other, and although a single interaction may not have a lasting impact, many sexual agreements are complex or often repeated. Occasionally, a single experience can change the course of a life. In a commercial relationship, on one side are people flexible about how they make money, on the other are people wanting to fulfill a desire or experiment. These relationships take place in actual social contexts—indeed, sex itself is often subsidiary to the conspicuous consumption of alcohol or entertainment, to cruising or just to men being men together. Since everywhere men are granted more permission to experiment with sex and have more money to spend, their tastes help determine what’s offered and with whom, whether they be women, men, or transsexuals.

These millions of relationships, which take place every day, cannot be reduced to undifferentiated sex acts or eliminated from cultural consideration just because they entail money. Both client and sex worker may be acting seduction, flirtation, and affection when they are together, but camaraderie, friendship, love, and marriage also occur. And both sides are fascinated by sexual differences, imagined to be ‘national’, exotic, and real.

How we perform sex, what we feel when we do particular things, depends on our cultural (not national) contexts: how we were taught to do them and by whom, what we were permitted to try out, whether we talked to others about what we were doing and what we wanted. When we engage sexually with others, we learn and teach, we influence each other and change how we do things—often without knowing it. Because people are poor, or have left their countries to work abroad, or take money in exchange for sex does not change their humanity, their capacity to feel, respond, learn, or teach, whether sex is at issue or not.

‘Sex trafficking’ headlines claim that all migrant women who sell sex are invariably being abused, without regard to their diverse backgrounds and without asking them how they feel. But many reject being defined as sexually vulnerable and in need of ‘rescuing’ and protection. Everyone does not feel the same way about sex—in rich countries like the United States, or in any other country. Nationality is a poor way to understand human beings and their sexualities.

Mathilde Bouvard

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VERNISSAGE
samedi 29 novembre 2008 à partir de 18h00

« Prostituées d’Europe » est un projet socio-artistique à dimension européenne. Mathilde Bouvard a parcouru l’Europe à la rencontre de travailleur(e)s du sexe. Elle s’est rendu à Paris, Bruxelles, Berlin, Prague, Stockholm, Budapest, Hambourg, Amsterdam, Genève, Londres, Berne et Marseille. De ces rencontres sont restés des témoignages, des photographies, et parfois de simples moments de partage, que l´on ne trouvera sur aucun mur.

De ce photoreportage découle une sélection de 45 photographies en noir et blanc, accompagnées de 3 peintures sur étoffes et de témoignages écrits. Les photographies reflètent un regard différent sur la prostitution, loin des stéréotypes habituels qui évoluent entre le misérabilisme et l’image du « pied de grue ». Car la prostitution, comme le disait Pascale, ancienne du Bois de Boulogne, « c’est loin d’être un bout de trottoir. C’est toute une vie. Un art de vie. » Suivant les traces de feu Grisélidis Réal, les travailleurs du sexe rencontrés ont partagé avec Mathilde Bouvard un petit bout de cette vie.

L’exposition est complétée de créations vidéos et sonores réalisées par Clémence Demesme, vidéaste et Claire Fenateau, disc-jockey, musicienne et réalisatrice de documents sonores.

Les visiteurs trouveront également une information très complète sur la prostitution, avec l’aide des différentes associations rencontrées, et particulièrement de « Espace P » à Bruxelles. Les photographies ainsi que d´autres produits seront mis en vente, une partie des bénéfices revenant aux associations, afin de leur permettre de continuer leur travail dans les meilleures conditions.

AUTOUR DE L’EXPOSITION…

Samedi 29 novembre à 20h30 :
Le vernissage (entrée libre) sera suivi d´un concert d´Odette Goffard : VIES DE FEMMES , FEMMES DE VIES.

0dette G0FFARD est l’une des fondatrices et animatrices de la Casa NICARAGUA à Liège, dans le quartier de Pierreuse, un haut lieu de la solidarité, où s’organisent des fêtes, des concerts, des rencontres poétiques, des expositions.
Paf: 4 euros - 2,5 euros étudiants et chômeurs, entrée libre pour les sans-papiers

Jeudi 11 décembre à 20h :
DE LA GRISETTE à LA COURTISANE,
Les Prostituées dans la littérature du 18è siècle
Conférence par Valérie ANDRÈ.

Valérie ANDRÉ est Maître de Recherches au FNRS et enseignante à l’ULB; conférencière lors de la mémorable soirée « Les roux dans la Littérature » à la Maison du Livre, elle est l’auteur, e.a. de Réflexions sur la question rousse, Paris, éd. Tallandier, 2007, et de Le Roman du libertinage, 1782-1815. Redécouverte et réhabilitation , Paris, Champion, 1997.
Paf: 4 euros – 2,5 euros étudiants et chômeurs, entrée libre pour les sans-papiers.

Samedi 13 décembre, de 17h30 à 3h00 du matin.
« ESPACE P » FÊTE SES 20 ANS !
Une manifestation pour faire le point, sensibiliser l’opinion publique et faire la fête.
Au Pathé Palace, 85 boulevard Anspach à 1000 Bruxelles.

LE PROJET
« Prostituées d’Europe » est un projet socioartistique de photoreportage à l’échelle européenne. Mathilde Bouvard, peintre, photographe et scénographe s’y consacre depuis le mois de février 2007. Son objectif, en réalisant des expositions, est de permettre à un large public de découvrir l’aspect social et humain de cette activité particulière ainsi que la situation très complexe de ce sujet délicat au niveau européen.

Le projet est soutenu par la communauté européenne et le programme Youth in Action.
L’exposition aura lieu à Paris, dans le cadre des Assises Européennes de la Prostitution au Théâtre de l’Odéon en mars 2009, à Berlin, à la Maison du Livre de Bruxelles, à Genève (juin 2009, en interaction avec l’inauguration du Centre d´archives Grisélidis Réal et la journée internationale des travailleurs du sexe) et Avignon.

Elle sera constituée non seulement des photos et des témoignages recueillis mais aussi de compositions picturales et créations vidéos et musicales. S’ajoutera à cela toute une campagne d’information sur la prostitution,qui est chose bien différente de l´esclavage sexuel, même si l’amalgame persiste trop souvent. Le travail des associations sera également mis en valeur, à travers des écrits, mais aussi des conférences et des ateliers.

LES ARTISTES

Mathilde BOUVARD
Photographies et Peintures

Clémence DEMESME
Créations vidéos

Claire FENATEAU
Créations sonores

LES PARTENAIRES

Espace P
La Maison du Livre

Informations pratiques

Chef de Projet :
Mathilde BOUVARD
Grünbergerstr.87
10247 Berlin
Tel : 0033 6 20 28 17 86
Ou : 0049 151 49 05 03 23
Email : prostitutesofeurope@ymail.com
Ou : mabouvard@yahoo.fr
www.myspace.com/prostitutesofeurope

La Maison du Livre :
Direction : Joëlle BAUMERDER
24 – 28, rue de Rome
1060 Bruxelles
Tel : 02/ 543 12 20
Fax : 02/ 543 12 30
Email : info@lamaisondulivre.be
www.lamaisondulivre.be

Espace P… à Bruxelles:
Coordinatrice : Isabelle JARAMILLO
116, rue des Plantes
1030 Bruxelles
Tel/Fax : 02/ 219 98 14
Email : espacepbxl@gmail.com
www.espacep.be

Contact presse : Mathilde Bouvard 0033 6 20 28 17 86
prostitutesofeurope@ymail.com
www.myspace.com/prostitutesofeurope

Exposition :
Du 29 novembre au 7 janvier, les mardis, jeudis et vendredis de 14h à 17h, le mercredi de 14h à 19h, et les samedis de 10h à 13h ou sur rendez-vous.
Fermé le 27 décembre.
Entrée libre.