Migrant Women and Their Vulnerability in the Trafficking-Migration Continuum: Evidence from Asia

Abstract

A spate of recent studies on women engaged in crossborder migration underscored how such movements have come to form part of the regional and global service economy characterized by gender-based labour market niches (Agustín 2003). Parreñas (2000) and Hochschild (2002) for instance, analysed how global care chains are structured by differences in class and ethno-racial power hierarchy involving female labour (Hochschild 2000). Other studies offer historical and structural accounts of the expansion of sex industry in industrialized countries, materialized through the constant supply of foreign migrant labour that satisfies particular sexualized images (Macklin 2003; Tyner 1996). Limoncelli (2009) emphasizes the gender-based structure in international political economics responsible for gender-based niches of labour markets. To date, the debate on trafficking largely disregards this point by either ignoring women’s economic rights or defining the scope of such rights in a limited way. Taking all these views into consideration, there is a need to reorient the debates on women’s migration towards the intersecting inequalities that reinforce their vulnerability.