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

Introduction

‘My body will get my family out of debt,’ Lek explained to me while sitting in her home village in Northeastern Thailand (Interview 1). ¹ She had just received a tourist visa and was now on her way to Denmark via Spain to sell sex. Her family had extensive debt – a hospital admission for her father suffering from cancer, a failed corn-farm project, a tractor, a new roof and gambling debts had resulted in one loan after the other. They still had a small piece of land, and they could repay all the debt if they sold it. But, Lek explained, ‘it’s better to keep the land than to use it to repay our debt. . . . My body is my piece of land that I can take with me now, but it’s falling in value all the time. Land in Thailand doesn’t.’ Lek had borrowed 30,000 euros on top of the debt the family already had to pay for the tourist visa to Spain, which an unofficial migration broker in Bangkok had arranged for her. While working in Denmark, her plan was to repay both the old debts and the newly obtained migration debt.

Two years later, I met Lek in Denmark. She sat alone behind the blinds in a brothel in a forest in a rural area, waiting for clients. She had overstayed her tourist visa to Spain and now had no legal papers. It was hard and lonely work, she said, but she earned well. When a car drove up the gravel track behind the house, she looked out through a crack in the blinds. She kept an eye open for the police, scared of being discovered and deported to Thailand. After these two years in Denmark, she had taken her family out of its 20-year-long mire of debt. I had known her family for several years, and when Lek started to remit money back home, I drove around with her mother in Thailand as part of my research project on women’s irregular migration to Europe. I saw how her mother could finally repay the family’s old and crippling debts with the money, while Lek proudly followed our journey via Facetime. Lek still owed some of the new debts she had obtained in order to migrate, but she had managed to begin saving up money for a new house, for the education of her teenage son, who was living with Lek’s mother in Thailand, and for future critical situations in the family. Her migration was a long-term investment to get to this point. Now her biggest fear was to be deported before she had repaid the final debt and earned what she considered enough not just to clear the debts but also to begin a period of socially upward mobility.

Lek works in the forest because here she keeps all the money from each client for herself and can thereby repay her debts faster. She would be safer in the brothels where women work together, but there she might not get as many clients and would have to pay 50% of her income to the owner of the brothel – usually another Thai woman with a Danish residence permit. Yet working alone in the forest is far riskier: Outside the protection offered by a shared working space with other sex workers, she has to deal with violent clients and watching for the police on her own. The police routinely visit brothels to check whether there are what they consider ‘victims of trafficking’ or undocumented women working without visas and working permits, who then would face deportation.

Lek is but one example of how the migrant women that I work among are taking ever greater risks in order to become debt free and avoid deportation. Private debt – both related and unrelated to migration – has grown among the women migrants whom I have been following as an anthropologist and migration researcher for 20 years. The harder it is to enter Europe, the more debts the women have – and the more vulnerable they are to pressure, unfair deals and exploitation from the private moneylenders, brokers, migration facilitators, madams and mamasans who make money out of Europe’s migration politics.

Set at the intersection of debt and deportability, this article analyses how undocumented migrant women navigate deportability and its effects. Moving away from either a criminalizing or a victimizing framework for understanding sex-work migration, the article shows the complex interlinkages of debt and deportability that need to be better understood within the study of contemporary migration, border control and security.

Thailand and Nigeria: Gendered migration sites

The article draws on my long-term ethnographic fieldwork among migrant sex workers and their families in two sites, Thailand’s Isaan province and Benin City in Nigeria’s Edo State, where migration has become a familiar social phenomenon, with many families having a female relative in Europe (IOM, 2011, 2017; Lapanun, 2013; Plambech, 2014). ² Women from these two sites constitute two of the largest groups of undocumented migrant sex workers in Europe. Isaan in Thailand and Edo State in Nigeria share the specific characteristic that the ratio of women migrants to male migrants is significantly higher than that of other migration sites. ³ Other characteristics shared by the two sites include high levels of male unemployment and an increase in female-headed households and women resorting to migration on their own to sustain their livelihoods. The two groups of women, however, began to arrive in Europe at two different points in time, over a period in which the EU’s migration control policies became stricter, it became necessary to borrow more money to migrate, and the number of deportations increased. Thai women began migrating to Europe primarily via marriage and short-term sex-work migration in the late 1990s. Through remittances, they financed houses, education and healthcare at home (Osaki, 2003; Plambech, 2008). Nigerian women, by contrast, began migrating to Europe a decade later. Facing increased migration control, they resorted to undocumented high-risk migration through the Sahara Desert, across the Mediterranean, finding work in the European sex industry (Carling, 2005; Kastner, 2009; Plambech, 2017). The women and families in my study viewed migration as a livelihood strategy and potentially empowering. Some women are successful in their endeavours, while others end up being severely exploited in Europe or dying on the way. Migration has affected the family structure in these home communities so that children, particularly girls, are no longer just ‘old age security’, but are conceived of as vital economic components of a family’s financial well-being and their migration seen as a major accomplishment in their lives and for their families (Osezua, 2011). I also draw on fieldwork in Sicily among Nigerian women who had recently crossed the Mediterranean and now sold sex in Sicily, and among Nigerian and Thai women in Denmark selling sex in the streets or from massage parlours. The term ‘sex-worker migrants’ refers to the type of work the women were primarily engaged in while in Europe. In contrast to the Nigerians, who did not sell sex prior to migration, most of the Thai women in this study were also sex workers while in Thailand, who hoped to find a husband among their European clients in order to migrate to Europe and thereby escape sex work through marriage. Others planned to migrate to Europe to continue selling sex in order to increase their income (Plambech, 2008).

From trafficking to indentured sex-work migration

The types of migration of women described in this article could be understood as part of a broader global feminization of migration (domestic workers, marriage migrants and sex workers), wherein a particular burden is put on women to ensure development and the well-being of families in the Global South through migration (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2013). A key polarizing debate in past decades has circulated around whether, when and how women’s debt-bonded migration to the sex industry should be labelled trafficking. The boundaries are often blurry between human trafficking and brute exploitation of migrant workers, and the precise point at which tolerable forms of sex-work migration end and human trafficking begins often varies according to political and moral values and is not easily captured by legal definitions (Anderson and Davidson, 2003; Doezema, 2010). Therefore, undocumented migrant sex workers are often caught up in opposing policy regimes: one considers sex work a social problem requiring care and interventions; the other understand migrant women in sex work as trafficked, seeing human trafficking as part of criminal networks, smuggling and undocumented migration, requiring border enforcement and policy interventions. Yet what is often only mentioned briefly in debates around both approaches is how border enforcement in itself contributes to increased debt and thereby makes migrants dependent on undocumented journeys, criminal networks and dangerous working environments. Since many of the migrant women selling sex in Europe are undocumented, they are caught in between these seemingly opposing policies of care, criminalization and deportation.

It is the existence of debt and high interest rates that is often considered a definitive marker of the existence of trafficking. The other defining marker circles around the question of consent. The conflict over the definition commonly highlights the assumption that women’s migration or sex work are not matters of choice. Oftentimes, the primary question is whether an individual can give their consent to selling sex (Doezema, 2010). Consent is a notion that is not easy to define, and therefore ‘human trafficking’ has increasingly become a phenomenon that invokes uncertainty and tension more than it provides clear answers. In attempts to redefine human trafficking in the realm of debt, researchers have introduced and applied such terms as ‘debt bondage’ (Cole, 2006), ‘conditions of confinement’ and ‘third party–controlled prostitution’ (Andrijasevic, 2010), and ‘forced labor’ (Brennan, 2013). Yet, despite such important reconceptualizations, the conflict over how to define what trafficking is rests primarily upon conflicting perspectives on sex work and/or migration as a voluntary as opposed to an involuntary act, in which the concept of consent still remains the main yardstick by which trafficking is measured (Doezema, 2010).

In the Nigerian and Thai contexts, the ‘debt bargains’ that women make on the way to Europe and while in Europe elucidate the ways in which they are trying to take charge of their life situation and challenge conventional views that they are inexperienced helpless victims. Among the women in this study, I documented a range of exploitative practices and situations, including removal of freedom of movement, arbitrary and changing contractual arrangements, penalties (including financial ones) and punitive actions imposed on workers by employers, threats and intimidation, and degrading and substandard living and working conditions. Yet the women in this study did not necessarily feel that they had been exploited because they had sold sex. More often, they felt vulnerable and at risk because of the high interest rates they were charged and their deportability, and they could feel exploited and deceived by their madams, mamasans or migration facilitators when they realized just how difficult it was to live as an undocumented deportable person in Europe: the high prices for rent, food and other needs, which also meant that it would take far longer for them to repay their debts; the racism and sexual violence they experienced on the streets; their substandard and expensive accommodation options; and their lack of access to the formal labour market or healthcare system.

In this article, I argue for the concept of ‘indentured sex-work migration’ as a corrective to the narrative on sex trafficking. I draw on my findings, and those of many other scholars within critical trafficking studies, that emphasize the capacity of migrant women to make decisions in their lives even in situations of coercion (Andrijasevic, 2010; Kempadoo et al., 2005; Parreñas, 2011). Seen from that perspective, the women are not just victims but also decisionmakers who, despite having limited opportunities, manoeuvre through various challenges in their search for a form of livelihood and security in their lives. By using the term ‘indentured sex-work migration’ instead of ‘human trafficking’, I want to pay attention to the ways in which contemporary migrant labour is organized and the ways in which debt and the risk of deportation are significant, yet often analytically overlooked, parts of this organizing. Indentured labour is defined as borrowing money and then voluntarily agreeing to work off the debt during a specified term, sometimes under a restrictive contract of employment in a foreign country in exchange for payment of passage, accommodation and food (Encyclopedia Britannica, 2014). Indentured labour, furthermore, carries a temporal aspect, as the women’s aspirations for a better life and remitting more money are tied to an imagined future in which the debt is repaid and the money earned is the women’s own. Furthermore, Nigerian and Thai women migrating to Europe are often self-recruited, which complicates the idea that these women are forcefully recruited into sex work against their will. The women or their families contacted individuals who they knew could provide them with travel documents and arrange their trip to Europe. Yet indentured sex-work migration can at times result in very exploitative situations consistent with those defined in the UN’s Palermo protocol on human trafficking – situations that, from a legal point of view, constitute human trafficking (United Nations, 2000).

Removals of sex workers: Deportation as migration politics

The removal of sex workers from the streets and brothels of Europe is deeply embedded in more general European migration control politics of return, removals and deportations. Immigration law has long labelled certain categories of immigrants ‘undesirable’, and one of the most longstanding of these categories is that of migrant women selling sex, subjecting sex-worker migrants to an inconsistent array of immigration penalties, raids and interventions, including bars to entry as well as detention and deportation.

Seen from a liberal state perspective, deportation generally has two distinct dimensions (Kanstroom, 2007). On the one hand, deportations operate as a form of extended border control, deporting those who have entered illegally, overstayed their visas, had their asylum applications turned down or been found working illegally in workplace raids (Anderson et al., 2011). The Nigerian and Thai women selling sex without a legal work permit or legal migration documents belong to this first group. The second group are those who are non-citizens but are legal residents violating criminal laws. In these cases, the commission of crime has invalidated the lawful residence (Anderson et al., 2011).

While in Europe, the migrant women are deportable owing to their undocumented status and/or because they are working without a work permit. Previous research has documented the severe consequences of deportation and conceptualized deportability as a key factor that produces and sustains immigrant illegality (De Genova and Peutz, 2010; Enriquez and Millán, 2021). Most scholarship suggests that police and immigration enforcement are the main actors that spark deportation fears among undocumented immigrants (with such fears being particularly salient among undocumented migrant sex workers working in the streets and alone at brothels). Like Lek, these women constantly seek to identify protective social and spatial locations that lower the risk of police interactions, ultimately mitigating fears of deportation. Given the growing risk and significant impact of deportation, much of the literature has characterized deportability as ‘a constant threat’ (Gonzales, 2011: 605), referring to ‘the omnipresent threat of deportation’ (Menjívar and Abrego, 2012: 1388) and ‘the constant fear of deportation’ (Jefferies, 2014: 285).

Some women in my research had officially been identified as ‘victims of trafficking’ and participated in assisted voluntary return programmes (AVR) managed by the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The deportations of migrant sex workers are entangled with the anti-trafficking ‘rescue industry’ (Agustín, 2007), where the return of women identified as trafficked is subcontracted via governments to the IOM, NGOs and religious associations. Yet these women explained how it felt forced to be voluntarily returned – to accept the assisted voluntary return programme – under the threat of a forced deportation, and in general the women I met back in Nigeria and Thailand would label their return a deportation. Oftentimes, authorities would have labelled their experiences differently: return, repatriation, rejection or voluntary return. Yet the migrants called it and experienced it as a deportation. For that reason, I use the term ‘deportation’ here. That is, while they are technically termed ‘return’ and ‘repatriation’ rather than ‘deportation’, such return practices should be incorporated into broader analyses of deportations. In this realm, William Walters has identified a number of terms commonly used to describe the process, such as ‘return’, ‘repatriation’, ‘removals’ or ‘expulsions’, that mute what might actually be conceptualized as deportations. In this way, deportation remains embedded within the contemporary administrative practices of Western states, yet ‘the language makes deportation strike us as less remarkable’ (Walters, 2010: 70).

In line with this argument, Nathalie Peutz and Nicholas de Genova (2010) suggest that the technical terms often used by migration authorities conceal the fact that deportations are indeed taking place. According to Peutz and De Genova, the problem is that when removals are labelled technocratically as ‘voluntary’ and ‘returns’, we end up seeing them as isolated incidents, rather than what Peutz and De Genova argue is a ‘deportation regime’. That is, even though some of these women underwent so-called voluntary returns through the IOM as identified victims of trafficking, and even though their journeys took place without handcuffs and officers on the plane, the migrants refer to such a process as deportation as they did not have any opportunities other than that of being sent home. Whereas deportation is historically viewed as punitive and even forceful, the IOM’s return activities point to a new model that has been referred to as ‘neoliberal deportation’. Andrijasevic and Walters (2010) argue that the term ‘voluntary’ in ‘voluntary returns’ instead should be understood as a ‘neoliberal deportation’ because such removals enlist the cooperation of migrants in their own expulsion through the provision of financial inducement.

In general, most deportation scholarship shares an understanding of deportation as being a systemic regime and not merely an instrument of immigrant policy (Kanstroom, 2007). These works theorize the global framework within which ‘deportations’ take place in terms of the deportation regime (De Genova and Peutz, 2010), a deportation system based on a growth in social control deportation (Kanstroom, 2007), an anthropology of removal (Peutz, 2006), the deportation terror (Buff, 2018) and the deportation turn (Gibney and Hansen, 2005). These strands of literature identify ways in which deportation is linked to a range of other processes of removal of poor people, native people and people of colour, and Muslims – out of fear of terrorism, political combatants – and sex workers.

Indebted deportation

‘Why do you borrow money?’, I asked a young woman in Nigeria (Interview 2). ‘We haven’t got time to wait and save up like my grandparents in the olden days,’ she explained. ‘We’ve only got one life, and we want to get the most out of it.’ Being in a hurry to fulfil one’s dreams makes sense in a country like Nigeria, where life expectancy, in some areas, is around 55 years. When mired in debt, the calculation for a Nigerian woman looks something like this: In a worn brothel in Nigeria’s biggest city, Lagos, the women earn approximately 2 euros per costumer. If they are selling sex from the refugee camps in Sicily, they earn about 4.5 euros per costumer. However, the camps are crowded, there are many migrants, and the unemployment rate in Italy is high. Therefore, most women quickly travel onward towards the north, where in Copenhagen, Denmark, they can earn about 80 euros per costumer. The more they earn, the quicker they might be able to repay their debt. In Denmark, she has ten customers per week on average and thus might have a monthly salary of 3200 euros (this figure can fluctuate significantly). After two to three years, she might have repaid her debt, while at the same time she has paid her fixed expenses in Denmark and remitted money to Nigeria. In comparison, it costs around 75,000 euros to build a house in Edo State in Nigeria, where she is from. If everything goes according to plan and according to what the women dream of (which it rarely does), the woman might possibly have a house for her family after some six to seven years in Europe. Therefore, debt is considered a long-term investment in a better future. But, for these groups of women and families, it is not always easy to borrow the money.

Even when supporting family back home is taken as a matter of course by most migrants, this duty is, because of deportability, a fraught one for the migrant women (Kastner, 2009). Often, family members back home idealize Europe as an easy place in which to earn money. As one Thai woman deported from Denmark explained, ‘My family did not understand the price I paid to send them money’ (Interview 3). While the families – particularly the women’s mothers – were aware of the sex work, it was difficult to explain the complexity of the challenges of living deportable lives in Europe. Almost everything was a challenge, including obtaining affordable housing, living undocumented, getting health services without documents, social relationships and being targets of racism.

Thus, migrants like Lek make riskier high-gain decisions that might make them vulnerable because they could be deported at any time – what Nicholas de Genova (2002) refers to as the ‘condition of deportability’. Because they are in a constant state of deportability, their calculation is to earn as much as possible, as quickly as possible. Lek has several times had to act as though she were not in the brothel because a client she did not trust was ringing the doorbell; she has had to run from a client out of the back door; and she has run from the police in the middle of the night into the forest, waiting there alone for several hours before she could return to the house. Most of the women have migrated to find work, in order to pay off old debts as well as the new debts they obtained to finance their undocumented migration. At the same time, they have faced increased migration control – including the risk of deportation after arrival – and thereby the risk of being deported to their home country while still indebted – a development they seek to avoid at all cost.

In 2017, the price for a plane ticket and a counterfeit visa and passport in Benin City, Southern Nigeria, ranged from US$6,500 to US$12,000, and usually required the migrants to borrow the money or pawn ancestral land. Upon arrival, this amount often increased, and in the most extreme cases migrants ended up owing US$70,000. While migrant women trying their luck in Europe may not know all of the conditions and hazards of their job upon arrival, they do know that they will work under a ‘madam’ in the Nigerian case or a ‘mamasan’ in the Thai case, and they often explained that they would be prepared to accept two to three hard years to repay their debt. But then they hoped to have repaid their madams and mamasans and work for themselves. Thus, rather than understanding the debt and migration as merely forced upon them by ‘traffickers’, they viewed their arrangements for migration to Europe as a joint effort between the women, their families and the individuals who arranged their travels to Europe – or, as many of the Nigerian interlocutors in this study put it, ‘na 50–50’, meaning ‘it’s half and half’. ⁴

Some of the women plan to repay their debt entirely from their earnings from selling sex; others try or hope to repay the debt doing other kinds of work, such as cleaning or picking tomatoes or oranges. Their madams or mamasans do not always require that the debt be paid back by the earnings from sex work, as long as the instalments are in the agreed amount and are somewhat steady. Yet the women quickly realize that, as undocumented migrants without access to the formal labour market, repaying debt through sex work is often the only or ‘the quickest way to make money’ (Interview 4). Thus, sex work appears both as a problem, which the women hope will be temporary, and as a solution, since it is the fastest way to get out of debt and remit as much money as possible.

Excluding or dismissing the earnings of debt-bonded migrant sex workers is a recurrent theme, as the debate on trafficking continually stresses that the women are kept as ‘slaves’ and not paid any money for their sexual labour and, thus, only trafficking networks and private moneylenders profit from it. Yet my data, as well as the data of others, show that migrant women selling sex in European cities, and those in a state of indenture, despite their difficult situations and debt, do manage to remit money. ⁵ The amounts may differ significantly, and are often much less than the woman anticipated, but they manage to send enough to meet the most pressing demands of their families. During certain periods, if they were low on money, they did not contact their families and instead waited until the crisis was over and they could resume remitting. Thus, what the women extract, despite debt, must not be ignored or dismissed as pocket money. The amount is enough for the women to avoid deportation, as they still find it more profitable to stay in Europe than to return to their home country, despite their, at times, very difficult circumstances.

The economies of debt and deportation

Deportation is migration politics, but simultaneously deeply embedded in far more hard currency economies of global capitalism. This story of Tessy, whom I met in Nigeria upon her deportation from the UK, where she was found selling sex undocumented, illustrates how. Tessy was detained in Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre, the UK’s largest and main removal centre for women migrants (UK Border Agency, 2011). As detention is outsourced to private companies by the UK government, Yarl’s Wood is run by the private service company Serco. Serco is based in the UK but contracted globally by national governments to operate public transport, military and nuclear weapons contracts, schools, prisons and detention centres. While detained in Yarl’s Wood, with assistance from a local anti-trafficking NGO, Tessy filed for asylum on the grounds of human trafficking, but was deported, in her understanding, while her asylum case was still under consideration. While Serco runs the detention centre, it was another private company, G4S, that handled Tessy’s deportation and accompanied her and the other Nigerian migrants on the EU chartered flight (Frontex, 2012). ⁶ When Tessy arrived in Lagos International Airport, there was no one to pick her up and she got back to Benin with help from a local NGO adjacent to the airport. From the time of her arrest in London until I met her in Benin months after her deportation, Tessy had encountered 11 institutions, illustrating how a range of for-profit and non-profit actors are connected through the dynamics of the deportation industrial complex, and they incorporate multiple migrant categories and identities that connect a variety of governmental, private and social constituencies.

The state-funded deportation of migrants has emerged as a business opportunity for private companies. The business profits increase as the number of migrants that are detained and deported increases. ⁷ Three women in my study (including Tessy), deported from the UK, Italy and Spain, described how they felt pressured by the security personnel to board the chartered deportation plane despite feeling sick and having been diagnosed as such by the doctor at the detention centre. As service providers to the state, the private companies continually have to pay attention to efficiency and the costs involved in not filling up the chartered planes heading for Nigeria. Exploring the multiple localities in which a deportation economy is generated through migrant women illustrates how the economies of debt and deportability are deeply interconnected.

The migration lending industry

Just as deportations are not just an issue of migration politics but also of economy, indenture is not just a result of the increasingly high costs of migration to Europe. It is also a direct product of the brutalities of global capitalism. The issue of the high interest rates collected by private lenders is a central yet often overlooked part of the economic analysis of debt, deportation and risk. The unregulated profit of private lenders is hugely responsible for debt-bondage migration vulnerabilities. Thus, while private lenders make migration possible for precarious workers without access to formal lending schemes for migration, they are also a grievous source of vulnerability and harm, not only for migrant sex workers but also for precarious workers around the globe.

In Thailand, I interviewed the manager of the local branch of one of Thailand’s largest banks. ‘We don’t lend money for migration. It’s an uncertain investment,’ he said (Interview 5). ‘Neither do we lend money to people with seasonal work, day workers or the unemployed. They’re all unreliable payers.’ So, migrant families borrow money from private lenders with high interest. In this context, moneylending, like deportation, becomes a business opportunity. Therefore, debt to private lenders is common in migration communities in Thailand and Nigeria, and the money is often borrowed from a combination of local moneylenders (‘big men’), family members, social networks and criminal networks. Since it is very difficult to borrow money from the bank – even for the educated middle class – loans to facilitate migration for poor people are not obtainable from the banks. Instead, people borrow money privately.

In general, the women interviewed for this study decided to migrate, incur debt, accept a high interest rate and travel as indentured migrants because they felt their life situation – not their madam, mamasan, trafficker or private lenders – gave them no other choices. Yet they did try, though often without success, to reduce the debt and interest prior to migration. Two of them, for instance, had insistently down-bargained the price of their migration from US$100,000 to US$70,000, arguing with the madam on the phone that they knew of other women who had not had to pay US$100,000 and that they were not willing to agree on that price. They explained that agreeing to a figure of US$100,000 would require them to work for the madam for ‘the rest of their lives’ (Interview 4), and they were not willing to do that. But they primarily incurred debt through private lenders because they had no other options.

It is difficult to estimate the role of debt and interest rates in the calculation of profits for the lenders. Interest rates and debt inflate profits, yet the empirical reality in Nigeria and Thailand certainly raises a number of questions. Although the women and their lenders might agree to a loan of US$60,000 (including interest), at times the women would end up paying back ‘only’ US$20,000. Often, the debt and interest were not paid back in full for a number of reasons, one main one being because of deportation and detention. Additionally, some women would relocate to other cities to avoid paying back their debt, or they would make less money doing sex work than expected, which happened in Southern Europe during the financial crisis of 2008. In other circumstances, lenders would lower the debt. Thus, while loans with high interest rates certainly seem profitable for networks, and some are, in most cases women did not repay their debt entirely.

The women’s stories mirror the lives of millions of people in the Global South who are seasonal workers, day workers, without a contract and unemployed. Therefore, when serious illness, a new roof, an essential scooter or a business start-up demands cash, the women have to resort to the ‘no questions asked’ policy in the private market, with interest rates of up to 100% and brutal debt-collection methods. Private debt is often kept secret; it is complex, shameful and sometimes criminal. In Thailand, people watch in terror when young men in anonymous crash helmets arrive in their villages on motorbikes. Everyone knows that they have come to collect unpaid debt. The Microfinance Barometer 2016 confirms that private debt due to informal quick-loan companies, local big men, rich landowners, mafia, wealthy families and middlemen is growing explosively in the Global South. The World Bank is also concerned. As it wrote in 2015, approximately 70% of micro-, family-run and slightly larger businesses have no access to a formal and reasonable market in which to borrow money. They therefore resort to private and black-market loans at extortionate rates of interest. The problem is particularly serious in Asia and Africa, from where most migrants to Europe originate – those who at the same time can often only enter Europe undocumented and thereby become deportable.

The social fabric of moneylending

In Nigeria, the women and their families would often refer to the migration offers involving debt and sometimes deception (regarding the conditions awaiting them upon their arrival in Europe) as an incident of ‘419’. Named after a section in the Nigerian criminal code that describes such types of crimes, ‘419’ is how Nigerians refer to fraud (Smith, 2007). In popular language, ‘419 men’ refers to individuals who gain ‘fast wealth’ through fraud, corruption and internet scams and display their wealth buying new German cars, iPhones and tiled houses (Smith, 2007). Sonia, deported from Italy, explained, ‘Yes, now there are some from Nigeria – they buy a ticket to go to Europe and eat every day. They have money. They go to Europe and come back. They go there for lunch, every day and come back’ (Interview 6).

Though Sonia points here to the ultimate elite version of 419, for the women and their families the typical notion of 419 in Benin also encompassed private moneylending, armed robbery, theft, internet fraud, selling of other people’s houses, kidnapping and in general what anthropologist Daniel Jordan Smith (2007) conceptualizes as everyday deception. Likewise, the migration facilitation and lending economy is comprised of a mix of illicit and semi-illicit activities that have to be placed within the broader field of other types of (illicit) businesses and crimes. In this scenario, migration facilitation, moneylending and indentured sex-work migration emerge as precarious business opportunities in a site of unemployment. The ability to migrate is just one commodity among many bought by loaned money, and moneylenders usually lend out money for a range of purposes, not merely migration.

The women often voiced ambiguous perspectives on the men and women facilitating the migration and lending them money. They would call them ‘wicked’ and evil, and yet they would also voice a certain understanding about their need to charge high interest rates. They often saw it as just another effect of poverty. They would also voice gratitude because the ‘sponsors’ or ‘madams’, despite the debt, served as vehicles for social mobility and refused to turn them in to the police in Europe. In the moral economy of migration, the women displayed normative ideas and dismissed other women and families who ended up having substantial debt as greedy or ignorant, explaining that it was their own fault because they were ignorant enough to become victims of everyday deception and did not care to think about how the promised wealth in Europe might not be the reality upon arrival. In this way, the women and their families simultaneously displayed anger, fearfulness and respect for the moneylenders and disrespect for those families that had not been smart enough to juggle their debt. Thus, moneylending cannot be understood outside the context of the social fabric of migrant communities.

Because of the dynamics of the sex market and moneylending, the state of deportability can also continue for some time even after a debt is repaid. The women explained that, just before or right after the debt was repaid and they could work more or less debt free, some experienced that they were taken to a detention camp. They explained this in terms of the rationalities of the sex market. The women incurred their debt in the process of migrating to Europe. Now that the women were no longer income generators, they were considered competition to other women who had not yet repaid their debts. The deportees recounted how they were sure that other women would turn them into the police because of jealousy and competition. One woman explained what happened to her just a few months before her debt was repaid: ‘One day my madam asked me to leave the money [i.e. forget about the remaining debt] and face my family [i.e. return to Nigeria]. . . . Then the police took me to the deportation camp’ (Interview 7). The women would rarely explain that they were deported by the police or immigration authorities, but would often state that other migrant women caused their deportation because of jealousy, personal conflicts and other relational disputes. In these explanations, whether factual or not, experiences of deportability were shaped by the dynamics of the market and viewed as a tool for social control among migrants and not merely as a technology of migration control.

These experiences produced anxiety and everyday stressful moments of running and hiding from the police in order not to be detained and deported. Some explained how they would be fearful to walk into a grocery store, or take the bus or the metro, because being in such public spaces exposed them to the police, security guards and ticket controllers.

Yet to meet clients in the street they had to be visible, and this visible versus invisible life situation was a daily conflict. Indeed, two of the women came in contact with the police and were deported following allegations of shoplifting by security guards in grocery stores (in the UK and Spain). That allegations of shoplifting could lead to deportation for the migrant women – and for migrants in Europe in general – provides a vivid illustration of what De Genova (2002) has called the condition of ‘deportability’: the consequences for non-citizens of living in a state where deportation is an ever-present possibility (even if not actually effected). For sex workers, this particularly affects their willingness to report rapes, violence, theft and assaults they encountered in fear that doing so would bring them to the attention of immigration authorities.

Typically, the madams or mamasans have themselves previously been in a state of indenture in relation to their migration to Europe but have repaid their debt and have been in Europe for several years, have returned home, or travel back and forth. The ways in which the migrant women described their madams and mamasans were ambiguous. On the one hand, they have at times significant control over the women because of the debt; on the other hand, some of the women envied them and aspired to have the same position. While they found the madams and mamasans restrictive and controlling, the migrants also accepted this sometimes because they found that they knew the sex market and migration control systems better. It was not just the madam who profited from such knowledge, but the migrant woman also benefitted as she could repay her debt faster, while avoiding the implications of migration control as she travelled to and within Europe.

That is, the madams, mamasans and moneylenders are not one-dimensional figures, but simultaneously the individuals that profit from (and at times exploit) the migrants’ sex sale and the ones who made their travel to Europe possible. The women would also refer to them as their ‘sponsors’. This refers to the way in which the journey is organized, where the travel to Europe is paid for by individuals who sponsor the migration. Their function as such is not different from that of ‘sponsors’ within legal migration systems, where prospective immigrants require an invitation from a sponsor to be granted a visa. Here, the role of the sponsor is to provide the documents or guarantee the financial means for a migrant to arrive in the destination country. The relationship with the ‘sponsor’ and the state of indenture sets the women in long-term relationships with their sponsor or madam. Thus, the madams and mamasans are important figures in the lives of the migrants prior to migration and particularly while they are in Europe. I meet more women now who finance their own migration by recruiting others. Accordingly, it is crucial to understand that migrant women are not just passive victims being transported. Women are typically the ones who take out loans, find brothels, and arrange documents, transportation and itineraries. And, oftentimes, these women have once been in a similar situation themselves.

Debt and remigration after deportation

During fieldwork with the Copenhagen Police, I witnessed a deportation from Kastrup airport (Plambech, 2017). They had picked up a Nigerian woman, ‘Ann’, in Vestre Prison and drove to Vesterbro to find her belongings. Ann had previously sold sex in Copenhagen. Prior to that, she had been to Spain and Italy but later moved into a small brothel close to a highway in Funen, Denmark, until police one day knocked on the door and asked to see her residence permit. She ran out of the back door, was caught and was placed in the Center Sandholm detention centre, from where she was deported to Nigeria – after having been recognized as a victim of human trafficking twice and, against that background, unsuccessfully seeking asylum. Ann had been living in a small room together with two other Nigerian women in one of the dilapidated migrant pensions located unnoticed in the middle of Copenhagen. She did not have a suitcase, only some small bags and a large black plastic bag. She collected her small shampoo bottles, clothes and a pair of boots, and stuffed them into the plastic bags.

We drove to the airport behind tinted windows. From an enclosed parking lot, two officers in civilian dress escorted Ann to the check-in area at the effective business travelers counter. Ann made several phone calls to individuals in Nigeria and Italy while walking between the two officers on their way to the gate. She told the people on the phone that she was on her way to the airplane: ‘I am being sent out of this country.’ The officers delivered Ann’s ID documents to the aircraft’s captain and watched her as she entered the plane and found her seat. The officers and I remained standing until the plane had left the gate and the wheels of the plane had left the ground. The Danish state sent her home with 70 euros in her hands.

When these women are deported, the flow of remittances is impeded. This has consequences both for the individual women and for their families. From being providers, the women turn into financial burdens, and family members often still expect that they will migrate again or can draw upon connections in Europe to earn money. On the one hand, most of the women were relieved that the deportation, at least momentarily, was an excuse for not selling sex and remitting; on the other hand, they still had the responsibility to provide for their families, and now they did not have a job.

The loss of livelihood opportunities, the debt and the abruptly interrupted remittances result in many women (and men) returning to economic conditions poorer than those they left behind. Several women were in acute despair upon deportation, constantly unsure of what to do to make ends meet. As a result, migration policies and deportations cannot be seen as unlinked to local remittance economies, as the structural context of European migration policies often hinder the mobile livelihood strategy of the migrants and their families. Typical stressors upon deportation include returning or reunifying without money while still confronting debt burdens to family members, loan sharks or banks. Many are ashamed to reunite with no money or other material goods. Among the returnees I met in Lagos, Nigeria, some decided not to return to their rural communities, but to stay in Lagos or Abuja to avoid familial pressure and possible stigma. Reconnecting with children who have grown in the returnees’ absence can be particularly challenging. Children may live with dread and worry that their parent might leave again. They have reason to worry. As Eastmond (2007: 8) argues, returns do not necessarily ‘heal the social body’ by repairing those who were ‘uprooted’, but rather re-illuminate the factors that led to out-migration in the first place.

In Europe, the women had access to money and other commodities, and many families get used to a specific type of lifestyle when there is access to money from Europe – a lifestyle that then cannot resume after the women have returned home. Suddenly, the everyday life of the entire family, not only of the women, changes. Along with unpaid debts, this places an enormous pressure on the women to continuously obtain money or travel again. When I asked them to portray their lives upon deportation, they would often show me pictures of family members – cousins with newborn babies, abandoned children, sick relatives, etc. – that had all been sent to their homes either while they were in Europe or even after their return, as they were now considered potentially resourceful. One of the women now had nine people to provide for beside herself, her mother and her two children.

The problem is that the women frequently are just as poor and indebted when they return as they were when they left. They have an entire life in front of them, and their journey to Europe was part of a larger family investment. I asked a woman how she felt while sitting on the deportation flight together with 150 other deportees on their way out of Europe. At first, she explained: ‘Sine, it is not an airplane for tourists. It was only us and then those guards. Some of us were speaking normally. Some were crying. Some were very angry. Others were quiet. I was not crying. I was sitting with the feeling of flying backwards in my life. . . We were sitting in the passenger seat of the deportation flight and agreed to throw our bodies from side to side – we wanted to cause the flight problems, to turn back. Back to Europe’ (Interview 7).

In Nigeria, I met people who had been deported three times. Deportees rarely stay where they are placed. If conflict, debt and unemployment continue, they leave again. As a result of the many deportations, in the case of Nigeria, Benin City is no longer just a city from where the women leave, but has increasingly become a ‘deportation city’ that the women involuntarily arrive at. Unemployment upon return leads some deportees to now earn money on their migration experiences. Some Nigerian women deported from Italy make money out of their knowledge of and connections to Europe. In Thailand, I met women deported from Germany who obtained visas for the women in their villages who want to go to Germany. Both in Thailand and Nigeria, I have met deportees who now survive on helping other migrants to leave.

In relation to migrant sex workers, the fear that traffickers would wait for them at the airport upon their deportation to cash in on unpaid debts has often been used as a persuasive argument against deportation, the logic being that European countries might in fact return the women right back into the arms of their traffickers. Yet, in my fieldwork in the home communities of the women, I found that while some of the women were exposed to threats of violence in Europe if they did not keep up with debt instalments, these threats rarely materialized into actual violence either in Europe or upon return. Rather, being deported indebted required the women to figure out how to continue repaying the debt and return to Europe or other destinations. The women explained their need to remigrate as a result of disrupted debt instalments, unemployment and family responsibilities. In these cases, the women would still be connected to the private moneylenders and migration facilitators via their debt, and this could be their only opportunity to remigrate – as the women want to migrate and the moneylenders want their money, and they thereby share a common agenda.

Cynthia and Grace were two women who were deported indebted and still owed money to their madams. Grace explained that the people to whom she owed money had not contacted her upon return, and she was not fearful since she knew that if those individuals came and made demands, her neighbours would help her, and she would then go to the police. The women explained that because the madams had so many women going to Europe, they did not turn to violent means to collect the unpaid debt of the deported women.

At times, however, when the women still owed money upon return, they would often make a mutual agreement with their moneylenders that the women would migrate again at a later stage (often after several years) and resume the debt instalments. Such situations have been labelled ‘re-trafficking’, yet for the women such prolonged indenture carried the threat of potential exploitation and a return to the sex industry in Europe, while simultaneously carrying future opportunities to migrate again despite their deportation.

Conclusion

This article analysed how undocumented sex-worker migrants in Europe navigate deportability and its effects. When migrant women arrive in Europe heavily indebted, they also risk facing an ‘indebted deportation’. Migrants consequently seek to avoid this situation and the risks involved. Yet indebtedness and indentured sex-work migration cannot be explained simply as a result of the high costs of migration to Europe, as we must also take into account how private moneylending is part of global capitalism for precarious workers. But private debt is often invisible to outsiders – it is kept as a complex shameful secret within the family. Yet exploring the multiple localities in which a deportation and debt economy is generated through migrant women illustrates the broader global structures of indebted deportation and how deportation is part of a range of other processes of removal of poor people, native people, people of colour – and sex workers.

Suggesting the concept of ‘indentured sex-work migration’ as a meaningful corrective to the narrative on sex trafficking, the article showed the complex interlinkages of debt and deportability that are important to understand in studies of contemporary women’s migration, border control and security.