Social Reproduction of Exclusion: Exploitative Migration and Human Insecurity

Abstract

This chapter tries to show how the socioeconomic security of the victims of exploitative migration is violated by states and criminal organizations. It explores, for example, how governments exercise formal (legal, publicly regulated) control over the national labor market and Mafiosi exert informal (illegal, unregulated and often violent) control over the workforce in the sex industry. These two agents thus give formal and informal support to exploitation within the sex industries and thus, directly and indirectly, reproduce particular and extreme forms of social exclusion and economic exploitation of the victims of coercive migration who form part of the workforce of the sex industries. Indeed, what I call exploitative migration highlights wider issues connected to the movement of people in the context of neo-liberal patterns of globalization, as well as pointing towards ways to understand wider world order problems such as the “terrorism” of anti-systemic movements at the start of the twenty-first century. The criminal organizations can be best viewed as part of the “anti-social” movements.¹