Laura Agustín of Border Thinking on Migration, Culture, Economy and Sex is a sociologist who’s work focuses on legal and illegal immigrants in general, and migrant sex workers in particular, at the interface between NGOs and migrants themselves. She’s using her blog, in part, to publish some of her earlier works. Here’s an excerpt from “Challenging ‘Place:’ Leaving Home for Sex.”

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

Read additional insights she brings to the discussion here.

Agustín makes the further point that if tradition in both countries of origin (usually in the 2nd- and 3rd-world), and destination countries (usually in the 2nd- or 1st) make jobs available to women only in the domestic, “caring,” and sex industries** then that’s… pretty much where they’re going to end up in the course of doing what men have done for centuries: emigrate in search of greater economic or social opportunities elsewhere.

This suggests two things where one’s obvious and the other ought to be. First, that without shifts away from limiting women, especially at the margins, to tasks that tie them to “home” activities no amount of criminalization of sex work is going to reduce the likelihood of surplus workers winding up in it (whether more or less against their will.) Second, as the quoted passage illustrates, the specific criminalization of sex work complicates the development of networks available to other migrants for “landing” in a place and becoming established — leaving them perpetually both more displaced and more vulnerable to continuing coercion and exploitation.

Link via Red Spine.

[** I’d add sweatshop piece work which, based on my own childhood experiences with small-scale farming in the middle of the last century, is itself an offshoot of the tendency for the partners of male farmers to process, finish, or package what the male farmer harvests and takes to market. —fl]