Some people who live outside of their country of origin don’t really count as migrants. They might be expats; they might not be named at all. But Australian backpackers, French nannies, and international bankers are not really what we mean when we talk about migrants. If, however, you are the kind of person we mean when we talk about migrants—i.e. you are racialised and/or poor—then you are generally portrayed as either a victim or a villain. Migrants are constructed as victims and villains by a range of actors, including the state, journalists, politicians, judges, migrant advocates, and academics.
Gender and race are central to determining who goes where within this framework. In my work on ‘foreign criminals’, I examine the mechanics of gender and race in producing villains. ‘Foreign criminals’ have attracted much media and political interest in recent years. They are discursively constructed as racialised men who commit acts of hypermasculinist violence, often sexual, thus imperilling ‘our’ streets and, importantly, ‘our’ women. This construction of the ‘foreign criminal’ as a monstrous villain works to justify, on moral grounds, policies of imprisonment, indefinite detention, and deportation. This narrative is a gross simplification that relies on imaginaries familiar to those who work on issues surrounding ‘trafficking.
The Victim of Trafficking (VoT for short) is not a human type. It’s an administrative category produced by immigration controls. This is not to deny that some migrant sex workers—women, men and trans people—find themselves in truly awful situations. Rather, it is to suggest that such administrative constructs do not necessarily reflect meaningful distinctions, from the perspective of the individuals concerned.
