"Migrants", not "Expats"

If you picked up, moved to Paris, and landed a job, what would you call yourself? Chances are, if you’re an American, you’d soon find yourself part of a colorful community of “expats.” If, while there, you hired an Algerian nanny—a woman who had picked up, moved abroad, and landed a job—how would you refer to him or her? Expat probably isn’t the first word that springs to mind. Yet almost no one refers to herself as a “migrant worker.”

Laura María Agustín’s Sex at the Margins catalogues the many ways in which wealthy Westerners cast immigrants as The Other....

Comparing the ways immigrants describe their experiences and the ways NGO personnel and theorists describe immigrants, she writes, “The crux of the difference concerns autonomy; whether travellers are perceived to have quite a lot versus little or none at all.” Theories of migration portray migrants as unsophisticated and desperate people who are “pushed” and “pulled” along a variety of dimensions. “The tourism and pleasure seeking of people from ‘developing societies’, rarely figures, as though migration and tourism were mutually exclusive,” she writes, “Why should the travels to work of people from less wealthy countries be supposed to differ fundamentally from those of Europeans?” “Migrants” travel because they are poor and desperate, “expatriates,” travel because they are curious, self-actualizing cosmopolites. But Agustín searches in vain for an immigrant whose self-identity reflects the wretched portrait of the [model] migrant drawn by those who would help.

As Agustín shows, nowhere are these human caricatures more exaggerated than in the contemporary conversation about human trafficking, or—to use a term Agustín detests—“sex trafficking.” While selling sex may be a rational choice for some, governmental and charitable anti-trafficking initiatives rarely discriminate between those who would prefer sex work to the relevant alternatives and those who have been wronged. Sex slavery statistics are so tenuous that debunking them is a sport for skeptical journalists, while genuine labor abuses go ignored.

Collective anxiety about women who traverse sexual and spatial boundaries is anything but new. As Agustín writes, “Women who cross borders have long been viewed as deviant, so perhaps the present-day panic about the sexuality of women is not surprising.” Immigrants are human beings with the courage to leave the comforts of home. In Sex at the Margins, Agustín asks readers to leave behind easy stereotypes about migrants and welcome the overlooked expats among us...

Agustín: Women are sometimes called “boundary markers”: When States feel threatened, women's bodies become symbols of home and the nation. This is a common sexist idea in patriarchal societies. The idea that women are domestic and symbolize home and hearth —but also that they should stay home and be home—is deeply entrenched all over the world. And while richer countries might favour gender equity for their own women, they often “domesticate” women from poorer contexts.

The U.N. protocols on trafficking and smuggling of human beings are gendered. The trafficking protocol mentions women and children, and mentions sexual exploitation, but doesn't say anything about voluntary leaving. The smuggling protocol talks about men who want to travel but have crossed a border in a less than kosher way—and sex is not mentioned.

People talk about a contemporary "feminization" of migration, but the evidence for this is shaky. There have been other waves of women migrating in numbers, as in the late 19^th century from Europe to Argentina, where they were often accused of being prostitutes. Europeans didn’t want to think these white women would set out on their own like this or end up selling sex, which is where the term "white slavery" derives from. The phenomenon was similar to what we see today, only the direction has shifted...

reason: Is there a romanticization of home at work here? The idea that it's always best to stay in the place you come from?

Agustín: Immigration procedures still assume that everyone calls some country “home”, but many people’s situations don’t easily fit this idea. They’ve got more than one home or don’t want to call anyplace home. The collective fantasy says home is always a lovely place, but many people have a contrary experience.