In the following, I will analyse some of the attempts to use the push-pull model to understand trafficking, in particular what is commonly referred to as ‘sex trafficking.’ I raise some questions about the fundamental assumptions of First-Third World differences, the nature of vulnerability and women’s sexuality in these narratives, and interrogate their explanatory power in understanding trafficking.
First, let me set the stage with two different stories from the field of migrant women who engaged in intimate and sexual labour. Ira’s story is drawn from my ethnographic fieldwork on Filipina entertainers in US military camp towns in South Korea from 1998–2000. Korean NGOs, international NGOs, and a Fox News reporter have variously referred to these migrant women as “trafficked women,” “victims of sex trafficking,” and “sex slaves.”9 Jin’s story is drawn from my research in the US almost a decade later in 2007. As part of a global project on ‘trafficked Korean women’ in five global sites, I was introduced to Jin by a New York-based NGO for Asian women victims of violence. She was working as a masseuse and had sought advice from the NGO but refused to identify as a victim.10 These condensed renditions of their stories seek to illuminate the limitations of the push-pull model to offer any satisfactory explanation of these women’s migration. While one journeyed from the Philippines to South Korea, the other moved from South Korea to the US. Together, their stories illustrate the direction of migrant flow, the regulatory regimes migrant women contend with both at home and in host countries, and their struggles to pursue their aspirations and goals in the rugged terrain of transnational migration as migrant sex workers.
Case 1
Ira was a Filipina who worked as an entertainer in clubs catering to a US military clientele in South Korea for one year starting in July 1998. Her passport was taken away when she arrived, and she was only paid the full amount of her salary when she left Korea at the end of her one-year contract. She had an enjoyable experience and made many friends in Korea, including a fiancé who eventually broke up with her. She returned to her children and extended family in the Philippines in July 2000 and spent all her savings on her family and relatives in the next eight months. When she went to a recruiter hoping to return to Korea, she was told that there would be an extended wait due to extra vigilance in the Philippines and Korean immigration control, mandated by new concerns about trafficking of Filipinas to Korea. Unable to wait any longer without an income, Ira went to Malaysia instead on a false passport in March 2001. Not only was the Malaysian club management much harsher than in Korea, the customers were also very demanding and at times violent. She was raped by a customer but could not complain. She took to drugs, which she never tried or felt she needed in South Korea. When the Malaysian immigration authorities raided her club and found her stay illegal, she was deported without being paid her wages. Yet one year later, her sister left for Malaysia for the same job, despite Ira’s warnings.11
Case 2
Jin came to the US in November 2004, two months after the introduction of new anti-prostitution laws in South Korea. Jin was 40 years old and had worked in massage parlours as a sex worker before coming to the US. She knew that it was not a respectable job, but she had been making good money, enjoying the ability to live well as an independent woman and to shower her family with gifts. Her parents were not aware of what she did for a living. Before she left Korea, Jin was arrested in her own home by the Seoul police, who obtained her address from the owner of the massage parlour in which she worked. She was released after paying a fine of 580,000 won ($500) for engaging in prostitution. Jin experienced first-hand the new severity in penalising women who sold sex. She said that Korean police crackdowns were the “deciding factor” for her decision to go to the US; she had long resisted the idea of leaving home. Not being a victim of forced prostitution, and not seeing any means of livelihood more viable than sex work, Jin realised that for her the only way out was to leave for the US, where a friend had been urging Jin to join her to work in the massage parlours. She paid an agent to prepare all the paperwork and flights, and managed to travel to the US to work in massage parlours on the East Coast. Others normally took a year or two to pay off the debt incurred by having a middleman. She rented an apartment in Queens, New York, and was overstaying her tourist visa as we spoke in 2007. She referred to her detention by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) (and not her job) as her most humiliating experience in the US.12
Both Ira and Jin belong to populations of migrant women who have been identified as “victims of sex trafficking.” There are striking similarities in these two stories that may allow us to identify some push and pull factors of trafficking. First, various anti-trafficking advocates from women’s groups, anti-trafficking NGOs, and State agencies have labelled women like Ira and Jin as “victims of sex trafficking.” One could identify that the Philippines and South Korea are relatively poorer than the US, and thus these women are pulled into their respective destinations. One could also suggest that the lack of employment opportunities at home has pushed them into migration. One could further suggest that the low level of women’s empowerment has pushed them overseas. Yet these are only part of the stories if their narratives are anything to go by.
One important similarity in the two cases is that anti-trafficking measures played a key role in their migration decision: as a result of the heavy penalty and aggressive police crackdowns, Jin left Korea for the US. Ira could not find a way to return to Korea because of stricter border control caused by concerns about “sex trafficking,” and therefore took the alternative route to Malaysia, where immigration control remained lax – but also where abuse of migrants was extensive. Both Jin and Ira left for destinations that they initially had no intention of visiting, but ended up going because of the expansion of the anti-trafficking apparatus.
How does one apply the ‘push and pull model’ to understand these women’s perspectives of their migration? A key question would be: could one see the expanding State efforts to combat trafficking by more aggressive criminal and immigration law enforcement as ‘push factors’ of unsafe migration, causing women like Jin and Ira to enter situations of vulnerability, and possibly trafficking? Studies have shown that increased border control has increased “debt financed migration as smugglers respond to policy-induced change in the market value of a migrant by adjusting the volume of smuggling.”13 In other words, it is not migration that causes trafficking, but strict border control and the lack of institutional mechanisms for the protection of migrant and labour rights that makes THB possible.
Could we call the relatively less intensive law enforcement efforts in the US and Malaysia to arrest and penalise women in sex work a form of ‘pull’ factor? Chin and Finckenauer14 have pointed out the need to recognise that individuals in the sex trade may find these efforts of eradication and suppression a ‘push’ factor to migrate to a place/country where sex work is relatively vibrant and free from the interruption and intervention of law enforcement efforts.
Another question would be: who was the evil trafficker? Could it be the friend who suggested Jin join her in the US – and her suggestion an embodiment of the “greed of human traffickers”? Or was it the agent who made arrangements for Jin’s travel to the US – even though it was Jin who actively sought him out, thought that the price was reasonable, and insisted that it was not trafficking but a fair deal? And could Jin’s social network of Korean masseuses be part of a “transnational organized criminal network”? Piscitelli found that “informal networks of friends, acquaintances and relatives,”15 rather than autonomously organised travel or debt-bondage that needed to be paid off, were the most common way for Brazilian women to travel to Spain for sex work.
The final, but also the most damning, question to be asked of the push and pull model is: do the perspectives and understanding of the migrant sex workers matter in a push and pull model? Neither Jin nor Ira thought of themselves as victims of sex trafficking, and each offered their own critique of the anti-
trafficking measures. Piscitelli not only found Brazilian women sex workers in Spain distinguishing themselves from those who have been ‘trafficked,’ but further directed their anger and frustration at the anti-trafficking activities of the State and NGOs.16 I have also characterised these anti-trafficking activists, in spite of their deployment of the language of human rights and women’s rights, as another form of governance that migrant sex workers have to contend with in addition to the State and market regimes.17 This gap between those who are on the ground and those who advocate policies to combat ‘sex trafficking’ is immense.
Push and pull model in trafficking
How is the push and pull model applied to trafficking? Does the model make room for us to ask the question, “Why do some migrants fall victim to human trafficking, while others do not?”18 We will look at two sources to see the circulation of the push and pull model in discussion of human trafficking. First, we look at the 2005 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes (UNODC) Toolkit to Combat Trafficking in Persons, and then we consider a report by Kevin Bales. Each used the language of “push and pull” to make sense of the phenomenon of THB.
In a 2015 report in which he presented ways to “predict” THB, Bales gave his view in terms of the push and pull model:
[T]he local conditions that make populations want to migrate in search of better conditions: poverty, oppression, lack of human rights, lack of social or economic opportunity, dangers from conflict or instability and similar conditions. Political instability, militarism, civil unrest, internal armed conflict and natural disasters may result in an increase in trafficking … war and civil strife may lead to massive displacements, leaving orphans and street children extremely vulnerable to trafficking … these factors exert pressures on victims that “push” them into migration and hence into the control of traffickers.19
In a similar but less thorough manner, the UNODC 2005 Toolkit to Combat Trafficking in Persons suggested some “factors that tend to ‘pull’ potential victims”:
[R]elative poverty which lead to both migration and trafficking patterns in which victims move from conditions of extreme poverty to conditions of less-extreme poverty … rapid expansion of broadcast and telecommunication media, including the Internet, across the developing world may have increased the desire to migrate to developed countries and, with it, the vulnerability of would-be migrants to traffickers (my emphasis).20
The reiteration of victims’ lack of sophistication seems endless, and it conveniently complements the presumed evil nature of the traffickers who harp on such innocence:
Traffickers play off this push/pull dynamic. They use as recruitment tools the promise of a better life and increased opportunity. Victims of trafficking, who are usually poor and often uneducated, are not in a position to discern beforehand that the promises of economic opportunity are, in fact, lies or gross exaggerations. Ignorance and naïveté, along with dire economic circumstances, make these people vulnerable to traffickers.21
As these accounts show, people in countries of origin are already victims (of trafficking and otherwise), even before they embark on a journey overseas – because of the countries they live in, and their ignorance coupled with their desire to migrate. One key feature is that the human agency of the migrant in this framework of analysis is simultaneously erased and magnified, but rarely assessed in context. The migrant is on the one hand a passive subject whose mobility is determined by the dynamics between home/host as polar opposites: (s)he has no choice but to move. Yet on the other hand, the migrant is posited as a super-rational subject whose decision is the only variable in a set of objective conditions. This latter assumption thereby holds the migrant as ultimately responsible for the risks and consequences that may arise from the move.
This dichotomy of the innocent victims and evil traffickers is embedded in these attempts to frame human trafficking in terms of push and pull factors. Furthermore, source countries are not just inferior to the receiving countries, but their nationals are inherently victims. As Kevin Bales put it: “within the origin countries, a large population of victims remain available for exploitation.”22
This presentation of the sending and receiving countries thus creates a relationship of indisputable inequality and, thereby, hierarchy.
A fundamental assumption in these discussions is that migration causes trafficking. Neither report provide clues to how some of these “potential victims” become migrants and others victims of trafficking. Is it simply a matter of luck? Is it a matter of the traffickers’ limited sphere of influence? Or is it that migrants who are able to engage in safe migration with regularised rights protection are able to avoid the harms of trafficking? It is clear that neither UNODC nor Bales question the institutional arrangements that generate populations of unsafe migration or the lack of rights protection for migrants that allows for the abuses and exploitation that come to be defined as “trafficking.”
Migration CAUSES trafficking?
In their IOM report “Is trafficking in human beings demand-driven?”, Bridget Anderson and Julia O’Connell Davidson23 found that it was the unrealistic cap on migrant labourers that drove many to enter countries through underground channels and work as undocumented migrants, thus making them vulnerable to the abuses that we now refer to as “human trafficking”. They concluded that the continued expansion of any unregulated market is likely to require and facilitate the exploitation of vulnerable labour.24 Cho et al. also found that large demand for labour in the informal sectors serves as a ‘pull’ factor for vulnerable migrants. It is the informality, and therefore unregulated and often underground demand for labour, that increased the possibility of trafficking, not the migration itself.25
Proponents of the ‘push and pull’ model have failed to grapple with this demand for labour in the informal sectors, or have taken it as a given that could not be changed or ameliorated. For example, Bales identified in his project on predicting human trafficking that, “the strongest predictor of trafficking TO a country is the proportion of the destination country’s male population in the age 60+ age bracket.”26 While it might appear as an irrelevant factoid at first sight, I take it that Bales was pointing to “the demographic profile” of ageing countries that “can lead to a shortage of younger workers who would tend to take up low skill jobs … [it] suggests a potential demand for immigrant workers willing to take low skill jobs.”27 Whether one agrees with the demographic argument or not, Bales was acknowledging the ‘pull’ of the labour market. Yet on the next page, Bales said that this “is a false impression that leads migrants into the hands of traffickers because the perception of such opportunity may be at variance with the reality of such opportunity.”28 Bales’ preoccupation with the migrants’ vulnerability due to misperception and false judgment prevents him from interrogating the conditions of the labour market and labour rights protection, as well as other institutional arrangements.
In view of the assumption that migration causes THB, economist Cho Seo-Young tried to “identify robust push and pull factors of human trafficking.”29 Cho found that the linkage between migration and THB is not as clear as our general impression and public policies have suggested. Her findings showed that institutional quality matters more in source countries than destinations.30 Therefore, in addition to the migrants’ and labour rights protection in host countries, it is necessary to scrutinise sending countries. It has been found that sending countries that are highly dependent on remittances (both as part of their GDP and their source of foreign exchange) face the “dilemma of promoting overseas employment and protecting their workers abroad.”31 Few countries have effective policies sensitive to migrants’ rights, including the monitoring of exploitative labour recruitment practices. These call for careful attention to the policies that undermine migrants’ rights and labour rights in both sending and receiving countries, as well as the need for inter-State cooperation at regional and international levels to protect migrants’ rights.
Therefore,
in addition to asserting the lack of agency of migrants from developing countries, and the hierarchical relationship between sending and receiving countries, attempts to identify “push and pull factors” of trafficking further endorse the assumption that migration causes trafficking. How is this assumption manifest in an understanding of migration into sex work?
Sex work migration: a narrow focus on sexual victimhood and crime
In attempts to discuss migration into sex work, the passivity of the individual presumed in the push and pull model finds synchrony with the presumed female innocence and victimhood that has dominated discussions of prostitution and women’s mobility. The inferiority of the sending countries and the superiority of the receiving countries come to be expressed in terms of patriarchal ‘cultures’ and ‘traditions.’ The tendency to overlook structural factors and policy impacts that engender migrants’ vulnerability intensifies with a preoccupation with sexual harm, further narrowing attention to the binary of innocent victims and evil traffickers, further justifying the expansion of a criminal justice paradigm in addressing sex work and migration.
Routledge Handbook of Human Trafficking Page 99