In addition to the many excellent writings by Laura Agustin (many of which are here), the abstract from Nandita Sharma’s “Anti-Trafficking Rhetoric and the Making of a Global Apartheid” (NWSA Journal, 17.3, 2005):
the historical and contemporary discursive practices of anti-trafficking campaigns […] within the global North, often led by feminists, constitute the moral reform arm of contemporary anti-immigrant politics that targets negatively racialized migrants. As in the past, current campaigns collude with a state-backed international security agenda aimed at criminalizing self-determined migrations of people who have ever-less access to legal channels of migration. I argue that only by recognizing the agency, however constrained, of illegalized migrants can we come to understand how processes of capitalist globalization and the consequent effects of dislocation and dispersal shape the mobility of illegalized migrants. Within the current global circuits of capital, goods, and people, I argue that along with a call to end practices of displacement, a demand to eliminate immigration controls is necessary if feminists are to act in solidarity with the dispossessed in their search for new livelihoods and homes.
The rest is here as a pdf.
Also, while not on ‘trafficking’, Mandy Thomas’ piece on the garment industry might be of some interest. Part of it - the part about watching horror films - reminds me of why I think the Zombie Shuffle might resonate more than do EuroMayDay-type actions with the experience of precarious work (and without the latter’s recourse to strategies of inclusion-regulation).
