Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
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Statistics in general must be understood as constructions, not truth, deriving as they do from labels and methods that reflect subjective visions.18 Statistics coming from countries left behind are also skewed:
[The usual data] refer to legal labor migration and only to that part which is officially recorded as overseas employment migration. They do not cover women who leave a country for reasons other than work (most commonly tourism and education) but in fact end up working at the destination nor women who leave or enter a country illegally, not going through border check points, also to work as migrants. When undocumented or illegal flows are also considered, both the numbers and proportions of women are likely to be much higher.19
These various confusions in terms cause misunderstandings. Theories of migration have tended to concentrate on why people move to new countries, some focusing on international structural conditions such as recomposition of capital (for example, in export trading zones) or globalisation of markets, others on the national policy level or on household units, and still others on wage differentials between countries. Migration is described as caused by the desire to make better money, by loss of land, by recruitment by employers abroad, by flight from violence, persecution and war, by the need to reunite with family, and by the ‘feminisation of poverty’. None of these causes is exclusive, and no single condition guarantees that someone will migrate. Nevertheless, migrations are commonly discussed in terms of ‘push–pull factors’. Armed conflict and loss of farms may push people away from home, while labour shortage and favourable immigration policy may pull them elsewhere: the basic concept is unarguable, but it also envisions migrants as acted upon, leaving little room for desire, aspiration, anxiety or other states of the soul. In contrast, first-world travellers are imagined to be modern individuals searching for ways to realise themselves.
One sign of changing discourses is the gradual abandonment of the distinction between emigrate and immigrate, which depends on two easily separable standpoints deriving from distinct events: the definitive leaving of a country (emigration), and the arrival in another with the intention of staying (immigration). Immigration was traditionally viewed as a masculine project, according to a generation of scholars trying to inject gender into research and analysis.
Commentators also try to distinguish migrants from refugees, who are imagined to have no desire to leave but to be abruptly forced to go by disasters, fighting, persecution. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees grants refugee status to people fleeing from selected situations, failing to recognise many similar situations (for example, armed conflicts not considered ‘war’ because rebels are not acknowledged by governments).
The arbitrary nature of these categories and the assigning of people to nation states constitutes a form of international biopolitics, a means of controlling populations.20 According to nations’ statuses (first-world, poor, at war, non-European), governments decide whether to label people migrants, refugees, guest workers, tourists, students or business travellers; according to which label is assigned, the traveller is subject to more or fewer rights and obligations.
Against the determinism that produces poor people as shunted about by purely external factors, Saskia Sassen writes:
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.21
‘Only certain people leave’ applies in places of violence and crop failure as well as in urban ghettos. The question of who becomes a migrant is deeper than traditional theorising suggests and can even be viewed as ‘individual resistance by way of physical relocation’.22 But the predominant discourse concentrates on economic factors, especially work, and, as such, is gendered:
The underlying assumption in studies of migration has been the male pauper – a single or married male who looks forward to amassing capital with which to return to his native country. Thus, the corollary assumption has been that it is males who typically make the decision to migrate and that females follow.23
Women do, of course, migrate for family reasons, as men do, but statistics estimating that women constitute more than half of migrants in the past few decades cannot be explained by the desire of family members to join each other. Men’s decisions to travel are generally (and seriously) understood to evolve over time, the product of their normal masculine ambition to get ahead through work. But when women decide to travel, commentators search for reasons. The desire to be more independent, see the world, make money and travel is not gendered. A recent UN report found that women who accept the challenge of migration worldwide are increasingly motivated by the desire for personal betterment as well as, or even rather than, by family responsibilities – yet also send a large proportion of their salaries home and become the principal sources of family income.24
Although statistics show that in many areas of Europe other European migrants still predominate, the word migrant is generally used to signify non-Europeans. Ambiguity arises also because migrants now ‘assimilated’, or who have become European citizens, are sometimes included and sometimes not in both popular definitions and official censuses.
The Concept of Labour Migrations
In formal discussions of labour markets, classic economic and demographic concepts and dichotomies prevail: legal and illegal workers, formal and informal sectors, the real market and the black market, and, in Europe, Community and non-Community states. These constructed concepts25 fail to describe large numbers of job searches, jobs and workers. If the divisions between tourism and working travel are fuzzy, those that attempt to classify labour migrations are even less clear.
Governments may organise labour migrations, conceiving them as temporary. In Europe, examples include Algerian migrations to French factory work and Turkish migrations through the German guestworker system. In such programmes, states actively recruit workers and control their stays with permits that may prohibit changing jobs.26 But formal programmes describe only a small portion of labour migrations, omitting even the movements of individuals to take up legal jobs when they undertake them independently. And, of course, many or most people actually called migrants arrive without a concrete job offer, although someone may have told them a job is available. State discourses on immigration, social services and social integration describe migrants as always seeking legality, but job seekers often expect to work in informal or illegal jobs, even though they know they can never regularise their status this way. Migrants are excluded when their professional qualifications are not recognised across country borders, with the result that trained and experienced dentists or teachers end up driving taxis and doing manicures. Some countries impose quotas on how many professional licences may go to non-natives, and many countries simply do not allow even experienced migrants to apply for many posts, keeping these for their own citizens, who continually worry that migrants will steal good jobs.
For jobs to be considered legal, employment must be recognised by official government accounting as part of the formal economy. Legal migrant workers possess work permits and corresponding visas. Quasi-regular situations arise when migrants work in the formal sector without a work permit or work in jobs for which no work permit exists. Large numbers of migrants who intend to look for jobs arrive in Europe on tourist visas, which by definition prohibit them from earning money.27
The informal economy is also called underground, hidden, cash, black, grey, shadow, irregular, subterranean and twilight, and encompasses all areas not included in government accounts, which does not mean that the regular economy of capitali
sm is ‘wholly formal’.28 The artificial dichotomy formal/informal obscures more than it reveals, and the range of income-generating occupations excluded from accounting is too wide to be coherent: do-it-yourself work, selling without a licence, guarding parking spaces, bet running, providing bed-and- breakfast, begging, selling home-grown produce or cooked food, drug dealing and supplying places to use drugs, unlicensed taxi services, loans, pawn and check-cashing services, carpentry and construction services, selling sex, ‘pimping’ and other protection services, sports coaching, card-sharking, running dice or shell games or neighbourhood card and chess games, cleaning windshields, dog walking, childcare, street and party entertainment, car repair, home computer help, messenger services, manufacture of pirated products, language teaching and homework tutoring: the list is long and ranges from small-time infractions to more important ones, which also include smuggling, embezzlement, robbery, burglary and fabricating false documents.29
Some of these occupations resemble formal-sector activities but do not fulfil local regulations; some are forms of tax evasion or money laundering; some are crimes that require a victim; others fit definitions of alternative or solidarity economies (mutual aid, community projects, voluntary work, self-help) and household economies where women and children are expected to go unpaid. Legal citizens also perform these jobs. When the informal sector is criticised, blame goes to those selling, but those who buy are equal participants. Informal work often comes about as the only available way to earn a living:
Anna ... worked in a hairdressing salon until it was taken over by a Spanish man, who told her he would have to hire Spanish people. Now she works informally as a hair stylist, visiting customers in their homes. All her customers are British and pay her with cash. These women have not chosen informal work within their own ethnic niche as a preference, or as a means of avoiding integration. It is merely a way of earning an income where formal employment is not an option.30
Thinking about a first-world character is instructive. Somehow, Anna has travelled from Britain to Spain, where she needs to make money. Because of the bureaucratic requirements surrounding work in the formal sector, she must work informally. To describe Anna as doing something wrong, all travel outside one’s country of passport would have to be limited to tourism or business, which would require hundreds of thousands of people to abandon their second homes in other countries. Technically, when Anna works for cash she is doing wrong, but how many people would blame her? And if Anna is excused, why should a Moroccan or Romanian not be?
The popular prejudice that informal activities are criminal and caused by migrants is mistaken. Sassen sees the informal economy as ‘a necessary outgrowth of advanced capitalism’,31 and Ruggiero shows how the entrepreneurial activities of many people, including illegal migrants, are interlaced in informal economies; he asks whether ‘the official rhetoric is part of what organizational theory would term as manifest goals, ... destined to be ignored because they are inoperative’.32
Many legal citizens spend their lives in the social margins, engaging in activities not considered crimes. Both Prince Charles and Prime Minister Thatcher, for example, claimed that the existence of an irregular economy proved that ‘the British are not work shy’.33 Bureaucratic processes involved in becoming legal can be overwhelming and trigger investigations inconvenient to numerous people. And then, some people prefer a more marginal life, avoiding taxes, enjoying independence or taking pleasure in the company and lifestyles found away from the centre.
European policies promote the idea that migrants can be easily divided into legal and illegal, in terms of how they travelled and got their jobs, but a German example shows otherwise:
There is more than anecdotal evidence that the different ways in which people from the East can legally obtain employment in Germany constitute bridges for undocumented workers ... both employers and employees often benefit from overstaying. In addition, the more people there are coming and going, the greater the opportunity to spread information in sending regions about the destination country in general and about the structure of job opportunities.34
Travelling and working people who have correct documents mix with others who do not, often with the help, collusion, tolerance and for the convenience of regular citizens in states with restrictive policies.
Women are disproportionately represented in informal economies worldwide, predominating in domestic service, sweatshop labour, home piecework, export processing zones, caring jobs and commercial sex. Globalisation theorists link the growth of production, commerce and finance with the increase in women’s participation on the production side, and note that migration is often the only way for women to get jobs.35 Although there have been complaints of a lack of interest in working women within migration studies,36 migrant domestic and caring workers are currently the subject of considerable research. Migrants working in the sex industry, however, are usually ignored, as in the generalisation ‘the domestic sector is the only economic sector that employs a large number of female immigrants from developing countries’.37 Alternatively, those selling sex are minimised, as in the statement ‘quantitatively this sector is far less important then the migration of domestic workers’,38 though no reliable numbers are available for people who sell sex. Scholars of the sex industry estimate migrant workers there to be equal to numbers of migrant domestics. Again, statistics may not be used to prove these points.
‘Feminisation’ and Gender in Migration
References to the feminisation of migration are now routine, but although migrant women are believed to outnumber migrant men in Europe, proof is impossible, since so many of the people involved are undocumented. For the process-word feminisation to make sense, one must believe that previous to recent history, women did not migrate in great numbers. It has been said that ‘histories of travel make it clear that women have never had the same access to the road as men’,39 but several kinds of research disprove this idea.40 One study of European migration examined 7,000 English life-histories covering 1660 to 1730, finding that more than three-quarters of country women left their villages, in greater numbers than men. All types of migrations were included, from inter-parish to long-distance.41 A very different kind of study, carried out in Africa to determine the geographic range of sex-related DNA, revealed that male chromosomes tend to be more localised. This points to a rate of female migration eight times higher than male, owing to traditional practices of patrilocality, under which brides move to their husbands’ houses: patrilocality is a common practice worldwide, and in countries with enormous populations.42 Two sets of data from the UN show that women and girls have constituted a large proportion of all international migrants for many decades: in 1960 at least 47 of every 100, in 1998, 48, in 2000, 49. Talk of a significant change in recent years is not substantiated.43
Industrialised countries’ shift to a service economy while moving manufacturing to ‘developing’ countries contributes to an increase of jobs for the ‘type of worker represented by immigrant women ... gender cannot be considered in isolation of these structural arrangements ... whether within their countries of origin or outside’.44 In addition, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has, since the late 1970s, imposed policies of ‘structural adjustment’ on third-world countries that seek loans or want to refinance debts. Structural adjustment policies mandate severe cuts in government spending, and social programming is always cut first. Women, who predominate in the social sector, lose jobs – as teachers, hospital workers and social workers, as well as support personnel such as cleaners and secretaries. Structural adjustment policies are also often blamed for the disintegration of families and the migration of women looking for incomes far from home. In the case of the Philippines and Sri Lanka, official government programmes facilitate women’s going abroad on contracts to do domestic work, while the bulk of their earnings are sent back home.
Migrants describe how economic factors influence their decisions to leave home:
The
alternative would have been working for one of your Italian firms that have come to Albania to exploit our work. Two years ago, when I left home, a worker in one of your shoe factories made 150,000 lire a month [C= 77]. A woman, half that amount. I don’t understand why Italy is amazed if young Albanians come here to try to make money the fastest way possible. Girls like me in one evening earn 800,000 lire [C= 413] and sometimes more than a million. Should we be making shoes for 150,000 lire a month? (Albanian woman in Italy)45 You work, work, work and then they don’t pay you, because there’s no money. For example, I worked in an ashtray factory, and when there was no money to pay me they said ‘take ashtrays’, 100 ashtrays. So? Can you eat ashtrays? (Ukrainian woman in Spain)46
Giving economic need as the ‘reason’ for selling sell sex can also be a performance of ‘poverty’ that listeners will accept as an excuse for immoral activity.47 However, migrants’ reasons cannot be reduced to economics only:
I worked in a company, but they were letting people go. I had problems with my children’s father, he mistreated me, he threatened me, they were going to fire me. I have a sister who’s a resident here ... I came with the money they gave me when they threw me out of work. (Ecuadorian woman in Spain)48
I separated [from my husband] and then began to work in my city in a [sex] club ... Since the work was hard, I said to myself, I’m going to go far away ... to Spain, because I had a friend here and my mother came years ago and stayed five years ... My friend helped me come and my mother helped with the money for the ticket. (Brazilian woman in Spain)49
Before, I just want to stay in my province, but then I found out there was something else in life ... I did not even know there was such a thing as a lamp ... then I had experience with a light you could simply plug in ... now that I have lived in the city, I do not think I could live in the province any more. (Filipina migrant in Manila)50