Behind the research: Thea de Gruchy

Over the course of the last 10 years, the Migrating out of Poverty consortium has drawn on the enthusiasm and expertise of many people across the globe. This blog series focuses on the people behind the research, who have kindly shared personal reflections and learning from their experience of working with the consortium.

Thea worked with the Migrating out of Poverty programme from 2015-2016 as part of her work with the African Centre for Migration and Society at the University of Witwatersrand, focusing on trafficking, gender and migration, and policy. Thea has just finished her PhD and will soon be starting a position at the ACMS as a postdoctoral researcher.

"The programme was the first research project I worked on after my Masters and was a critical step in deciding to undertake a PhD.   

The biggest lesson I learned from my involvement with the programme was the importance of collaboration across contexts. I'm most proud of bringing together researchers from Bangladesh, Singapore, South Africa and the UK, in Johannesburg in 2016."

The Migrating out of Poverty programme has been a true team effort, and we appreciate the role each individual has played in producing and disseminating the research.

Thank you for all your hard work with the Migrating out of Poverty programme, Thea!

Book Review: Human Smuggling and Border Crossings

by Dorte Thorsen

Review of Human Smuggling and Border Crossings by Gabriella E. Sanchez

Routledge, 2015

Human Smuggling and Border Crossings successfully challenges the dominant discourse linking the smuggling of people with mafia-like criminal organisations, extreme violence, and greed. Gabriella Sanchez paints a picture of fluid networks of ordinary men and women who engage in the facilitation of extra-legal border crossings in the US state of Arizona as a means to tide over income gaps and to contend with―and oppose―structural marginalisation. Through a unique combination of deep knowledge of border control and law enforcement procedures from her work interviewing detainees for a county criminal court, critical analysis of court case files, and ethnographic field research, Sanchez unpacks the multifarious, minute activities making up border crossing operations. Her work is an important contribution to the emerging body of research highlighting the perspectives and practices of people facilitating border crossings.

The ethnography steadily digs into the global and local discourses surrounding smuggling and extra-legal border crossings, identifying flawed understandings and misrepresentations in order to promote particular policies. In line with critical scholarship on contemporary regimes of migration management, Sanchez notes that the focus on humanitarian crisis, violence, and death in border zones often results in decontextualized and ahistorical arguments, which fail to consider the effects of racialized, gendered, and classed inequalities. This, she demonstrates, is particularly problematic in the context of Arizona where racial inequalities date back more than a century and have been subject to various degrees of institutionalisation in labour and immigration legislation over time.

While the marginalisation of Mexican immigrants could promote the idea that they were prone to enter criminal activities to make a quick buck, Sanchez’s continued deconstruction of the myths surrounding smuggling puts that idea to rest well before it nestles. Her detailed analysis of people facilitating border crossings shows that they are a highly diverse group, and yet she effectively points out the commonalities pertaining to the division of labour along gendered lines. Although both women and men can operate as recruiters and coordinators, men are usually the ones engaged in the risky business of guiding migrants across borders and through desert zones and of driving them from one pick-up point to another or to the final destination. Women tend to work in safe houses where they provide care and support to migrants in transit and thereby fulfil an important role in maintaining the networks’ trustworthiness.

These insights are fresh. Digging deeper to understand the gender dynamics at play, Sanchez weaves in the structurally different positions and pathways of Mexican women and men in the US. She exposes that female border crossing facilitators are more settled in the Arizona border zone than their male counterparts, and that they therefore tap into different niches in the facilitation process. These niches reiterate gender inequalities in pay but not necessarily in social position. While racial stereotyping within law enforcement authorities renders Mexican men more at risk of having their papers checked, female facilitators and their families are, in fact, affected more profoundly in situations of detainment and deportation. For women, deportation entails separation from their children, whereas for men, whose families often remain in the country of origin, deportation doesn’t have the same effect.

Finally, challenging the idea that smugglers are part of criminal networks, Sanchez describes the flexible, social networks of relatives and acquaintances that characterise border crossing facilitation in Arizona. Most people don’t engage in these networks because of greed; rather, their participation is embedded in acts of solidarity and concern. Thus, relatives may encourage someone in economic difficulties to participate in a border crossing facilitation to tide over financial hardship, or facilitators may allow border crossers to work off fees they were unable to raise through other means. Relatively often, facilitators enlist border crossers to take on the role of a driver (i.e., to become part of the facilitation process) for a reduced fee. These practices manifest the fluidity and flexibility of border crossing networks in Arizona.

Human Smuggling and Border Crossings is a captivating and grounded account of how and why border crossing facilitators organise. Sanchez frames her analytical approach as part of the age-old agency-structure debate and turns to Bourdieu’s work to highlight how choices are made in the interstices of limits imposed by the habitus and people’s weaving around social and structural constraints in their struggle for social position. Yet, this debate isn’t picked up in her subsequent analysis. 

It would perhaps have been useful to her argument to offer further theorisation of the multiplicity of intersecting moral economies surrounding Mexican immigrants in the border zones of Arizona, and the social responsibilities and mutuality within the Mexican community at large and in intimate relationships. This angle might have brought out more succinctly the contractions within the migration management in Arizona, such as treating Mexican women and men differently, and of permitting irregular migrants some level of formalisation while denying them full legalisation. I would be interested in reading more about the ways in which norms and values linked with gender identities and class are effected by the processes of marginalisation in Arizona, and how people within the Mexican community related to race inequalities.

Sanchez’s narrative in Human Smuggling and Border Crossings is a noteworthy and timely contrast to mediatized stereotypes of human smugglers and thus an important contribution to understanding the effect of regimes of migration in the global north. This book will be of interest to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students, academics, journalists, and people concerned with mixed flows of migration, border control and migration management. As the ethnography is presented without anthropological jargon, it is an uncomplicated introduction to the kind of detail and insights ethnographic studies offer.

(This blog is a re-posting of the review first published on Oxford's Border Criminologies on 22 July 2016)

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How to cite this blog post (Harvard style):

Thorsen, D. (2016) Book Review: Human Smuggling and Border Crossings. Available at: https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2016/05/book-review-3 (Accessed [date]).

Trafficking of women, chasing away our own demons and women’s rights

By Igor Bosc

 

We have all heard the shocking accounts of women seeking jobs, who are subsequently tricked and trapped into sexual slavery, sweatshops, domestic bondage and other forms of abuse.  While human trafficking is of enormous concern, perhaps, on this day that recognises the rights of women, we need to think about whether the way we are framing the problem of “trafficking in women and girls” fuels further or poses different problems for aspiring female migrants.

Might there be something insidious about what these accounts of trafficking in women say and do not say?

The discourse that warns us about the risks related to trafficking starts at home with stories of the little red riding hood, Sita and the laxman rekha, or women advised to stay at home and avoid engaging with “non muhrams” if they do venture outside. A similar discourse emerges in popular culture. For instance blockbuster movies show villains and creeps kidnapping and abusing women seeking to earn a living. Again the same discourse emerges in media: news services and newspapers routinely feature stories of women who were pimped into prostitution, domestic workers who were beaten, raped or killed. Police and politicians report to the media their latest crack downs on human traffickers. Aid agencies issue press releases highlighting the staggering numbers of women who are regularly trafficked across the globe.

Many narratives about human trafficking have something in common. In a closer reading, a common implicit message appears to be that women who venture out are treading into a dangerous world where they risk violence or sexual abuse. While in some cases, these reports may be true, these tales or the way the issue is framed rarely give a full and complete picture of female migration. For example, the narratives rarely delve into why women might leave their homes (e.g., devastating poverty, hopes for a better future, restrictions or even violence at home). These perspectives seldom explain what motivates middlemen and employers to seek out and employ them. Violence and sex is brought to the fore while making a living and employment are glossed over. Patriarchal archetypes seem to frame many perceptions.    

We may think we’re familiar with hearing about this violence and that we therefore know how to address it, but do we? Violent images and text that we remember from such accounts can have powerful lasting effects on the way we view the world and what we chose to do about it. It stokes visceral fears of what might happen and it fuels search for protection—maybe ‘over-protection’. Accounts of violence shape our feelings, our behaviours and the moral discourse of how to respond to the perceptions of vulnerabilities of women who seek to improve their lives and the lives of their families.

Imagine a different way of framing the discourse: how about approaching trafficking in women by addressing women’s need for employment, focusing on issues such as domestic violence, women’s rights, gender equity, unemployment and under-employment of women in home communities, by looking for solutions to these problems in both source communities as well as destination areas. While such reporting does exist, more of it is necessary.

Unfortunately a lot of the efforts to combat trafficking of women are in fact rooted in deep patriarchal biases. According to research by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the Global Alliance against Trafficking of Women (GAATW), bans on women migrating actually make it more difficult for women to seek a living—and do not necessarily reduce their risk of abuse. Governments have used bans on women migrating in the belief that this will protect them and increase their safety. However in a recent policy brief for Governments in South Asia, the ILO in fact recommends measures to uphold the human rights of migrant women, emphasizing women’s right to mobility to reduce their vulnerability to human trafficking. Other policies that restrict women’s mobility include sponsorship policies inciting employers to limit the mobility of migrant domestic workers outside their homes. On this day when we celebrate women, it is important to confront many of the social and gender stereotypes about efforts to combat trafficking of women and reframe these dialogues in terms of women’s rights to gender equitable home lives, mobility and employment.

Women who work with the ILO in the Work in Freedom Programme

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Igor Bosc is Chief Technical Adviser at the International Labour Organization (ILO) working on the Work in Freedom Programme - a UK Aid funded partnership initiative to find effective ways of preventing trafficking of women in South Asia and the Middle East. See also his questions and thoughts on the framing of the human trafficking discourse, Why framing the discourse on human trafficking is important - some thoughts.