‘My body is my piece of land’: Indebted deportation among undocumented migrant sex workers from Thailand and Nigeria in Europe

Abstract

Set at the intersection of debt and deportability, this article analyses how undocumented migrant sex workers in Europe navigate deportability and its effects. While sex trafficking into the EU has received mounting attention as part of global migration dynamics, the role of debt in the lives of migrant women has been overlooked. The migrant women in this study arrive in Europe heavily indebted after traveling through the Sahara Desert and across the Mediterranean, or via migration facilitators in Southeast Asia, to find work in the European sex industry. Their deportation might therefore entail returning to their home countries still indebted. The article draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the home areas of two of the largest groups of undocumented migrant sex workers in Europe –Thailand’s Isaan province and Benin City in Nigeria’s Edo State – where women’s migration has become a familiar social phenomenon. Moving away from either a criminalizing or a victimizing framework for understanding sex-work migration, I argue for the concept of ‘indentured sex-work migration’ as a meaningful corrective to the narrative on sex trafficking and that the situation of ‘indebted deportation’ need to be better understood within the study of contemporary border control and security.