Sine Plambech

Sex, Deportation and Rescue: Economies of Migration among Nigerian Sex Workers

ABSTRACT This contribution explores the economies interlinked by the migration of Nigerian women sex workers. The literature and politics of sex work migration and human trafficking economies are commonly relegated to the realm that focuses on profits for criminal networks and pimps, in particular recirculating the claim that human trafficking is the “third largest” criminal economy after drugs and weapons. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Nigerian sex worker migrants conducted in Benin City, Nigeria, in 2011 and 2012, this study brings together four otherwise isolated migration economies – facilitation, remittances, deportation, and rescue – and suggests that we have to examine multiple sites and relink these in order to more fully understand the complexity of sex work migration. Drawing upon literature within transnational feminist analysis, critical human trafficking studies, and migration industry research, this study seeks to broaden our current understanding of the “economy of human trafficking.”

Back from “the Other Side”: The Post-deportee Life of Nigerian Migrant Sex Workers

The chapter sheds ethnographic light on the post-deportee phase among Nigerian sex-worker migrants. Scholars have previously pointed to the ways in which anti-trafficking efforts unwittingly support the deportation of migrant sex-workers under the guise of securing women’s protection. They further reveal how the interventions that take place in the name of protecting women migrants often complicate the women’s situation, or even work against their interests. The ethnographic fieldwork, on which this chapter is based, extends these insights by shedding light on the particular gendered aspects of this post-deportee phase of migratory trajectories, practices, and policies.

God brought you home – deportation as moral governance in the lives of Nigerian sex worker migrants

ABSTRACT Set in Nigeria among deported sex worker migrants and the institutions that seek to intervene in their migration, this article explores how deportation serves the dual function as a tool for migration governance as well as a tool for moral governance. Deportation has often been analysed from a Global North perspective and as a technology of migration governance imposed upon migrants and their nation states in the Global South. Yet, among Nigerian institutions working with deportees, such as anti-trafficking institutions, as well as among the deportees, the analysis shows how invoking the powerful languages of God, morality and nation-building, deportation emerges as a technology of moral governance – a site for reconfiguring, circumscribing and actively practicing what it means to be a legitimate Nigerian citizen.