Saskia sassen global cities and survival circuits

Societies In The World Discussion

1) Please explain in your own words what Ferguson means by the following statement: "But as the contemporary African material shows so vividly, the ‘global’ does not ‘flow,’ thereby connecting and watering contiguous spaces; it hops instead, efficiently connecting the enclaved points in the network while excluding (with equal efficiency) the spaces that lie between the points." Why is this relevant to the social life of people in Africa?

2) In your opinion, do you think that Sassen would attribute some of Covid's disproportionate impact on people of color to globalization? Explain why or why not. Please see the data here for reference: https://data.newamericaneconomy.org/en/immigrant-workers-at-risk-coronavirus/ (Links to an external site.)

In an additional 250 words, please respond to both of the following.

1) Why does Farish Noor compare historical records that might appear contradictory in the way that they acknowledge, or erase, colonial violence in Southeast Asia?

2) Mann mentions that a "domestic racism" and an "international racism" are connected. What does this mean? In her eyes, are these also connected to domestic and overseas expansion?

Global Cities and Survival Circuits (2002)

Saskia Sassen

When today’s media, policy, and economic analysts define globalization, they emphasize hypermobility, international communication, and the neutralization of distance and place. This account of globalization is by far the dominant one. Central to it are the global information economy, instant communication, and electronic markets – all realms within which place no longer makes a difference, and where the only type of worker who matters is the highly educated professional. Globalization thus conceived privileges global transmission over the material infrastructure that makes it possible; information over the workers who produce it, whether these be specialists or secretaries; and the new transnational corporate culture over the other jobs upon which it rests, including many of those held by immigrants. In brief, the dominant narrative of globalization concerns itself with the upper circuits of global capital, not the lower ones, and with the hypermobility of capital rather than with capital that is bound to place.

The migration of maids, nannies, nurses, sex workers, and contract brides has little to do with globalization by these lights. Migrant women are just individuals making a go of it, after all, and the migration of workers from poor countries to wealthier ones long predates the current phase of economic globalization. And yet it seems reasonable to assume that there are significant links between globalization and women’s migration, whether voluntary or forced, for jobs that used to be part of the First World woman’s domestic role. Might the dynamics of globalization alter the course or even reinscribe the history of the migration and exploitation of Third

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Original publication details: Saskia Sassen, “Global Cities and Survival Circuits,” in B. Ehrenreich and A. R. Hochschild (eds), Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy (H. Holt, 2002), pp. 254–74, 310–16. Reproduced with permission from S. Sassen.

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World laborers? There are two distinct issues here. One is whether globalization has enabled formerly national or regional processes to go global. The other is whether globalization has produced a new kind of migration, with new conditions and dynamics of its own.

Global Cities and Survival Circuits

When today’s women migrate from south to north for work as nannies, domestics, or sex workers, they participate in two sets of dynamic configurations. One of these is the global city. The other consists of survival circuits that have emerged in response to the deepening misery of the global south.1

Global cities concentrate some of the global economy’s key functions and resources. There, activities implicated in the management and coordination of the global economy have expanded, producing a sharp growth in the demand for highly paid professionals. Both this sector’s firms and the lifestyles of its professional workers in turn generate a demand for low-paid service workers. In this way, global cities have become places where large numbers of low-paid women and immigrants get incorporated into stra- tegic economic sectors. Some are incorporated directly as low-wage clerical and service workers, such as janitors and repairmen. For others, the process is less direct, operating instead through the consumption practices of high-income professionals, who employ maids and nannies and who patronize expensive restaurants and shops staffed by low- wage workers. Traditionally, employment in growth sectors has been a source of workers’ empowerment; this new pattern undermines that linkage, producing a class of workers who are isolated, dispersed, and effectively invisible.

Meanwhile, as Third World economies on the periphery of the global system struggle against debt and poverty, they increasingly build survival circuits on the backs of women – whether these be trafficked low-wage workers and prostitutes or migrant workers sending remittances back home. Through their work and remit- tances, these women contribute to the revenue of deeply indebted countries. “Entrepreneurs” who have seen other opportunities vanish as global firms entered their countries see profit-making potential in the trafficking of women; so, too, do longtime criminals who have seized the opportunity to operate their illegal trade globally. These survival circuits are often complex; multiple locations and sets of actors constitute increasingly far-reaching chains of traders and “workers.”

Through their work in both global cities and survival circuits, women, so often discounted as valueless economic actors, are crucial to building new economies and expanding existing ones. Globalization serves a double purpose here, helping to forge links between sending and receiving countries, and enabling local and regional practices to assume a global scale. On the one hand, the dynamics that converge in the global city produce a strong demand for low-wage workers, while the dynamics that mobilize women into survival circuits produce an expanding supply of migrants who can be pushed – or sold – into such jobs. On the other hand, the very techno- logical infrastructure and transnationalism that characterize global industries also

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enable other types of actors to expand onto the global stage, whether these be money launderers or people traffickers.2 It seems, then, that in order to understand the extraction from the Third World of services that used to define women’s domestic role in the First, we must depart from the mainstream view of globalization.

Toward an Alternative Narrative about Globalization

The spatial dispersal of economic activities and the neutralization of place constitute half of the globalization story. The other half involves the territorial centralization of top-level management, control operations, and the most advanced specialized services. Markets, whether national or global, and companies, many of which have gone global, require central locations where their most complex tasks are accom- plished. Furthermore, the information industry rests on a vast physical infrastruc- ture, which includes strategic nodes where facilities are densely concentrated. Even the most advanced sectors of the information industry employ many different types of workplaces and workers.

If we expand our analysis of globalization to include this production process, we can see that secretaries belong to the global economy, as do the people who clean professionals’ offices and homes. An economic configuration very different from the one suggested by the concept of an “information economy” emerges – and it is one that includes material conditions, production sites, and activities bounded by place.

The mainstream account of globalization tends to take for granted the existence of a global economic system, viewing it as a function of the power of transnational corporations and communications. But if the new information technologies and transnational corporations can be operated, coordinated, and controlled globally, it’s because that capacity has been produced. By focusing on its production, we shift our emphasis to the practices that constitute economic globalization: the work of pro- ducing and reproducing the organization and management of a global production system and a global marketplace for finance.

This focus on practices draws the categories of place and work process into the analysis of economic globalization. In so broadening our analysis, we do not deny the importance of hypermobility and power. Rather, we acknowledge that many of the resources necessary for global economic activities are not hypermobile and are, on the contrary, deeply embedded in place, including such sites as global cities and export processing zones. Global processes are structured by local constraints, including the work culture, political culture, and composition of the workforce within a particular nation state.3

If we recapture the geography behind globalization, we might also recapture its workers, communities, and work cultures (not just the corporate ones). By focusing on the global city, for instance, we can study how global processes become localized in specific arrangements, from the high-income gentrified urban neighborhoods of the transnational professional class to the work lives of the foreign nannies and maids in those same neighborhoods.

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Women in the Global City

Globalization has greatly increased the demand in global cities for low-wage workers to fill jobs that offer few advancement possibilities. The same cities have seen an explosion of wealth and power, as high-income jobs and high-priced urban space have noticeably expanded. How, then, can workers be hired at low wages and with few benefits even when there is high demand and the jobs belong to high-growth sectors? The answer, it seems, has involved tapping into a growing new labor supply – women and immigrants – and in so doing, breaking the historical nexus that would have empowered workers under these conditions. The fact that these workers tend to be women and immigrants also lends cultural legitimacy to their non-empowerment. In global cities, then, a majority of today’s resident workers are women, and many of these are women of color, both native and immigrant.

At the same time, global cities have seen a gathering trend toward the informaliza- tion of an expanding range of activities, as low-profit employers attempt to escape the costs and constraints of the formal economy’s regulatory apparatus. They do so by locating commercial or manufacturing operations in areas zoned exclusively for res- idential use, for example, or in buildings that violate fire and health standards; they also do so by assigning individual workers industrial homework. This allows them to remain in these cities. At its best, informalization reintroduces the community and the household as important economic spaces in global cities. It is in many ways a low- cost (and often feminized) equivalent to deregulation at the top of the system. As with deregulation (for example, financial deregulation), informalization introduces flexi- bility, reduces the “burdens” of regulation, and lowers costs, in this case of labor. In the cities of the global north – including New York, London, Paris, and Berlin – informalization serves to downgrade a variety of activities for which there is often a growing local demand. Immigrant women, in the end, bear some of the costs.

As the demand for high-level professional workers has skyrocketed, more and more women have found work in corporate professional jobs. These jobs place heavy demands on women’s time, requiring long work hours and intense engage- ment. Single professionals and two-career households therefore tend to prefer urban to suburban residence. The result is an expansion of high-income residential areas in global cities and a return of family life to urban centers. Urban professionals want it all, including dogs and children, whether or not they have the time to care for them. The usual modes of handling household tasks often prove inadequate. We can call this type of household a “professional household without a ‘wife,’” regardless of whether its adult couple consists of a man and a woman, two men, or two women. A growing share of its domestic tasks are relocated to the market: they are bought directly as goods and services or indirectly through hired labor. As a consequence, we see the return of the so-called serving classes in all of the world’s global cities, and these classes are largely made up of immigrant and migrant women.

This dynamic produces a sort of double movement: a shift to the labor market of functions that used to be part of household work, but also a shift of what used to be

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labor market functions in standardized workplaces to the household and, in the case of informalization, to the immigrant community.4 This reconfiguration of economic spaces has had different impacts on women and men, on male-typed and female-typed work cultures, and on male- and female-centered forms of power and empowerment.

For women, such transformations contain the potential, however limited, for autonomy and empowerment. Might informalization, for example, reconfigure certain economic relationships between men and women? With informalization, the neighborhood and the household reemerge as sites for economic activity, creating “opportunities” for low-income women and thereby reordering some of the hierar- chies in which women find themselves. This becomes particularly clear in the case of immigrant women, who often come from countries with traditionally male- centered cultures.

A substantial number of studies now show that regular wage work and improved access to other public realms has an impact on gender relations in the lives of immi- grant women. Women gain greater personal autonomy and independence, while men lose ground. More control over budgeting and other domestic decisions devolves to women, and they have greater leverage in requesting help from men in domestic chores. Access to public services and other public resources also allows women to incorporate themselves into the mainstream society; in fact, women often mediate this process for their households. Some women likely benefit more than others from these circumstances, and with more research we could establish the impact of class, education, and income. But even aside from relative empowerment in the household, paid work holds out another significant possibility for women: their greater participation in the public sphere and their emergence as public actors.

Immigrant women tend to be active in two arenas: institutions for public and private assistance, and the immigrant or ethnic community. The more women are involved with the migration process, the more likely it is that migrants will settle in their new residences and participate in their communities. And when immigrant women assume active public and social roles, they further reinforce their status in the household and the settlement process.5 Positioned differently from men in rela- tion to the economy and state, women tend to be more involved in community building and community activism. They are the ones who will likely handle their families’ legal vulnerabilities as they seek public and social services. These trends suggest that women may emerge as more forceful and visible actors in the labor market as well.

And so two distinct dynamics converge in the lives of immigrant women in global cities. On the one hand, these women make up an invisible and disempowered class of workers in the service of the global economy’s strategic sectors. Their invisibility keeps immigrant women from emerging as the strong proletariat that followed ear- lier forms of economic organization, when workers’ positions in leading sectors had the effect of empowering them. On the other hand, the access to wages and salaries, however low; the growing feminization of the job supply; and the growing feminiza- tion of business opportunities thanks to informalization, all alter the gender hierar- chies in which these women find themselves.

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New Employment Regimes in Cities

Most analysts of postindustrial society and advanced economies report a massive growth in the need for highly educated workers but little demand for the type of labor that a majority of immigrants, perhaps especially immigrant women, have tended to supply over the last two or three decades. But detailed empirical studies of major cit- ies in highly developed countries contradict this conventional view of the postindus- trial economy. Instead, they show an ongoing demand for immigrant workers and a significant supply of old and new low-wage jobs that require little education.6

Three processes of change in economic and spatial organization help explain the ongoing, indeed growing, demand for immigrant workers, especially immigrant women. One is the consolidation of advanced services and corporate headquarters in the urban economic core, especially in global cities. While the corporate head- quarters-and-services complex may not account for the majority of jobs in these cities, it establishes a new regime of economic activity, which in turn produces the spatial and social transformations evident in major cities. Another relevant process is the downgrading of the manufacturing sector, as some manufacturing industries become incorporated into the postindustrial economy. Downgrading is a response to competition from cheap imports, and to the modest profit potential of manufac- turing compared to telecommunications, finance, and other corporate services. The third process is informalization, a notable example of which is the rise of the sweat- shop. Firms often take recourse to informalized arrangements when they have an effective local demand for their goods and services but they cannot compete with cheap imports, or cannot compete for space and other business needs with the new high-profit firms of the advanced corporate service economy.

In brief, that major cities have seen changes in their job supplies can be chalked up both to the emergence of new sectors and to the reorganization of work in sectors new and old. The shift from a manufacturing to a service-dominated economy, par- ticularly evident in cities, destabilizes older relationships between jobs and economic sectors. Today, much more than twenty years ago, we see an expansion of low-wage jobs associated with growing sectors rather than with declining ones. At the same time, a vast array of activities that once took place under standardized work arrange- ments have become increasingly informalized, as some manufacturing relocates from unionized factories to sweatshops and private homes. If we distinguish the characteristics of jobs from those of the sectors in which they are located, we can see that highly dynamic, technologically advanced growth sectors may well contain low-wage, dead-end jobs. Similarly, backward sectors like downgraded manufac- turing can reflect the major growth trends in a highly developed economy.

It seems, then, that we need to rethink two assumptions: that the post-industrial economy primarily requires highly educated workers, and that informalization and downgrading are just Third World imports or anachronistic holdovers. Service- dominated urban economies do indeed create low-wage jobs with minimal educa- tion requirements, few advancement opportunities, and low pay for demanding

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work. For workers raised in an ideological context that emphasizes success, wealth, and career, these are not attractive positions; hence the growing demand for immi- grant workers. But given the provenance of the jobs these immigrant workers take, we must resist assuming that they are located in the backward sectors of the economy.

The Other Workers in the Advanced Corporate Economy

Low-wage workers accomplish a sizable portion of the day-to-day work in global cities’ leading sectors. After all, advanced professionals require clerical, cleaning, and repair workers for their state-of-the-art offices, and they require truckers to bring them their software and their toilet paper. In my research on New York and other cities, I have found that between 30 and 50 percent of workers in the leading sectors are actually low-wage workers.7

The similarly state-of-the-art lifestyles of professionals in these sectors have created a whole new demand for household workers, particularly maids and nannies, as well as for service workers to cater to their high-income consumption habits. Expensive restaurants, luxury housing, luxury hotels, gourmet shops, boutiques, French hand laundries, and special cleaning services, for example, are more labor-in- tensive than their lower-priced equivalents. To an extent not seen in a very long time, we are witnessing the reemergence of a “serving class” in contemporary high- income households and neighborhoods. The image of the immigrant woman serv- ing the white middle-class professional woman has replaced that of the black female servant working for the white master in centuries past. The result is a sharp ten- dency toward social polarization in today’s global cities.

We are beginning to see how the global labor markets at the top and at the bottom of the economic system are formed. The bottom is mostly staffed through the efforts of individual workers, though an expanding network of organizations has begun to get involved. (So have illegal traffickers, as we’ll see later.) Kelly Services, a Fortune 500 global staffing company that operates in twenty-five countries, recently added a home- care division that is geared toward people who need assistance with daily living but that also offers services that in the past would have been taken care of by the mother or wife figure in a household. A growing range of smaller global staffing organizations offer day care, including dropping off and picking up school-children, as well as com- pletion of in-house tasks from child care to cleaning and cooking. One international agency for nannies and au pairs (EF Au Pair Corporate Program) advertises directly to corporations, urging them to include the service in their offers to potential hires.

Meanwhile, at the top of the system, several global Fortune 500 staffing companies help firms fill high-level professional and technical jobs. In 2001, the largest of these was the Swiss multinational Adecco, with offices in fifty-eight countries; in 2000 it provided firms worldwide with 3 million workers. Manpower, with offices in fifty-nine different coun- tries, provided 2 million workers. Kelly Services provided 750,000 employees in 2000.

The top and the bottom of the occupational distribution are becoming internation- alized and so are their labor suppliers. Although midlevel occupations are increasingly

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staffed through temporary employment agencies, these companies have not interna- tionalized their efforts. Occupations at the top and at the bottom are, in very different but parallel ways, sensitive. Firms need reliable and hopefully talented professionals, and they need them specialized but standardized so that they can use them globally. Professionals seek the same qualities in the workers they employ in their homes. The fact that staffing organizations have moved into providing domestic services signals both that a global labor market has emerged in this area and that there is an effort afoot to standardize the services maids, nannies, and home-care nurses deliver.

Producing a Global Supply of the New Caretakers: The Feminization of Survival

The immigrant women described in the first half of this chapter enter the migration process in many different ways. Some migrate in order to reunite their families; others migrate alone. Many of their initial movements have little to do with global- ization. Here I am concerned with a different kind of migration experience, and it is one that is deeply linked to economic globalization: migrations organized by third parties, typically governments or illegal traffickers. Women who enter the migration stream this way often (though not always) end up in different sorts of jobs than those described above. What they share with the women described earlier in this chapter is that they, too, take over tasks previously associated with housewives.

The last decade has seen a growing presence of women in a variety of cross- border circuits. These circuits are enormously diverse, but they share one feature: they pro- duce revenue on the backs of the truly disadvantaged. One such circuit consists in the illegal trafficking in people for the sex industry and for various types of labor. Another circuit has developed around cross-border migrations, both documented and not, which have become an important source of hard currency for the migrants’ home governments. Broader structural conditions are largely responsible for form- ing and strengthening circuits like these. Three major actors emerge from those conditions, however: women in search of work, illegal traffickers, and the govern- ments of the home countries.

These circuits make up, as it were, countergeographies of globalization. They are deeply imbricated with some of globalization’s major constitutive dynamics: the formation of global markets, the intensifying of transnational and translocal networks, and the development of communication technologies that easily escape conventional surveillance. The global economic system’s institutional support for cross-border markets and money flows has contributed greatly to the formation and strengthening of these circuits.8 The countergeographies are dynamic and mobile; to some extent, they belong to the shadow economy, but they also make use of the reg- ular economy’s institutional infrastructure.9

Such alternative circuits for survival, profit, and hard currency have grown at least partly in response to the effects of economic globalization on developing countries. Unemployment is on the rise in much of the developing world; small and medium-sized

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enterprises oriented to the national, rather than the export, market have closed; and government debt, already large, is in many cases rising. The economies frequently grouped under the label “developing” are often struggling, stagnant, or even shrinking. These conditions have pressed additional responsibilities onto women, as men have lost job opportunities and governments have cut back on social services. In other words, it has become increasingly important to find alternative ways of making a living, pro- ducing profits, and generating government revenues, as developing countries have faced the following concurrent trends: diminishing job prospects for men, a falloff in traditional business opportunities as foreign firms and export industries displace previous economic mainstays, and a concomitant decrease in government revenues, due both to the new conditions of globalization and to the burden of servicing debts.10

The major dynamics linked to economic globalization have significantly affected developing economies, including the so-called middle-income countries of the global south. These countries have had not only to accommodate new conditions but to implement a bundle of new policies, including structural adjustment pro- grams, which require that countries open up to foreign firms and eliminate state subsidies. Almost inevitably, these economies fall into crisis; they then implement the International Monetary Fund’s programmatic solutions. It is now clear that in most of the countries involved, including Mexico, South Korea, Ghana, and Thailand, these solutions have cost certain sectors of the economy and population enormously, and they have not fundamentally reduced government debt.

Certainly, these economic problems have affected the lives of women from devel- oping countries. Prostitution and migrant labor are increasingly popular ways to make a living; illegal trafficking in women and children for the sex industry, and in all kinds of people as laborers, is an increasingly popular way to make a profit; and remittances, as well as the organized export of workers, have become increasingly popular ways for governments to bring in revenue. Women are by far the majority group in prostitution and in trafficking for the sex industry, and they are becoming a majority group in migration for labor.

Such circuits, realized more and more frequently on the backs of women, can be considered a (partial) feminization of survival. Not only are households, indeed whole communities, increasingly dependent on women for their survival, but so too are governments, along with enterprises that function on the margins of the legal economy. As the term circuits indicates, there is a degree of institutionalization in these dynamics; that is to say, they are not simply aggregates of individual actions.

Government Debt: Shifting Resources from Women to Foreign Banks

Debt and debt-servicing problems have been endemic in the developing world since the 1980s. They are also, I believe, crucial to producing the new countergeographies of globalization. But debt’s impact on women, and on the feminization of survival, has more to do with particular features of debt than with debt tout court.

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A considerable amount of research indicates that debt has a detrimental effect on government programs for women and children, notably education and health care. Further, austerity and adjustment programs, which are usually implemented in order to redress government debt, produce unemployment, which also adversely affects women11 by adding to the pressure on them to ensure household survival. In order to do so, many women have turned to subsistence food production, informal work, emigration, and prostitution.12

Most of the countries that fell into debt in the 1980s have found themselves unable to climb out of it. In the 1990s, a whole new set of countries joined the first group in this morass. The IMF and the World Bank responded with their structural adjust- ment program and structural adjustment loans, respectively. The latter tied loans to economic policy reform rather than to particular projects. The idea was to make these states more “competitive,” which typically meant inducing sharp cuts in var- ious social programs.

Rather than becoming “competitive,” the countries subjected to structural adjust- ment have remained deeply indebted, with about fifty of them now categorized as “highly indebted poor countries.” Moreover, a growing number of middle-income countries are also caught in this debt trap. Argentina became the most dramatic example when it defaulted on $140 billion in debt in December 2001 – the largest ever sovereign default. Given the structure and servicing of these debts, as well as their weight in debtor countries’ economies, it is not likely that many of these coun- tries will ever be able to pay off their debts in full. Structural adjustment programs seem to have made this even less likely; the economic reforms these programs demanded have added to unemployment and the bankruptcy of many small, nation- ally oriented firms.

It has been widely recognized that the south has already paid its debt several times over. According to some estimates, from 1982 to 1998, indebted countries paid four times their original debts, and at the same time their debt increased four times.13 Nonetheless, these countries continue to pay a significant share of their total revenue to service their debt. Thirty-three of the officially named forty-one highly indebted poor countries paid $3 in debt service to the north for every $1 they received in development assistance. Many of these countries pay more than 50 percent of their government revenues toward debt service, or 20 to 25 percent of their export earnings.

The ratios of debt to GNP in many of the highly indebted poor countries exceed sustainable limits; many are far more extreme than the levels considered unmanage- able during the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s. Such ratios are especially high in Africa, where they stand at 123 percent, compared with 42 percent in Latin America and 28 percent in Asia.14 Such figures suggest that most of these countries will not get out of their indebtedness through structural adjustment programs. Indeed, it would seem that in many cases the latter have had the effect of intensifying debt dependence. Furthermore, together with various other factors, structural adjustment programs have contributed to an increase in unemployment and in poverty.

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Alternative Survival Circuits

It is in this context – marked by unemployment, poverty, bankruptcies of large num- bers of firms, and shrinking state resources to meet social needs – that alternative circuits of survival emerge, and it is to these conditions that such circuits are articu- lated. Here I want to focus on the growing salience of the trafficking of women as a profit-making option and on the growing importance of the emigrants’ remittances to the bottom lines of the sending states.

Trafficking, or the forced recruitment and transportation of people for work, is a violation of human, civil, and political rights. Much legislative effort has gone into addressing trafficking: international treaties and charters, U.N. resolutions, and various bodies and commissions have all attempted to put a stop to this practice.15 Nongovernmental organizations have also formed around this issue.16

Trafficking in women for the sex industry is highly profitable for those running the trade. The United Nations estimates that 4 million people were trafficked in 1998, producing a profit of $7 billion for criminal groups.17 These funds include remittances from prostitutes’ earnings as well as payments to organizers and facilita- tors. In Poland, police estimate that for each woman delivered, the trafficker receives about $700. Ukrainian and Russian women, highly prized in the sex market, earn traffickers $500 to $1,000 per woman delivered. These women can be expected to service fifteen clients a day on average, and each can be expected to make about $215,000 per month for the criminal gang that trafficked her.18

It is estimated that in recent years, several million women and girls have been traf- ficked from and within Asia and the former Soviet Union, both of which are major trafficking areas. The growing frequency of trafficking in these two regions can be linked to increases in poverty, which may lead some parents to sell their daughters to brokers. In the former Soviet republics and Eastern Europe, unemployment has helped promote the growth of criminal gangs, some of which traffic women. Unemployment rates hit 70 percent among women in Armenia, Russia, Bulgaria, and Croatia after the implementation of market policies; in Ukraine, the rate was 80 percent. Some research indicates that need is the major motivation for entry into prostitution.19

The sex industry is not the only trafficking circuit: migrant workers of both sexes can also be profitably trafficked across borders. According to a U.N. report, criminal organizations in the 1990s generated an estimated $3.5 billion per year in profits from trafficking migrants. Organized crime has only recently entered this business; in the past, trafficking was mostly the province of petty criminals. Some recent reports indicate that organized-crime groups are creating strategic inter- continental alliances through networks of coethnics in various countries; this facilitates transport, local distribution, provision of false documents, and the like. These international networks also allow traffickers to circulate women and other migrants among third countries; they may move women from Burma, Laos, Vietnam, and China to Thailand, while moving Thai women to Japan and the

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United States.20 The Global Survival Network reported on these practices after it conducted a two-year investigation, establishing a dummy company in order to enter the illegal trade.21

Once trafficked women reach their destination countries, some features of immi- gration policy and its enforcement may well make them even more vulnerable. Such women usually have little recourse to the law. If they are undocumented, which they are likely to be, they will not be treated as victims of abuse but as viola- tors of entry, residence, and work laws. As countries of the global north attempt to address undocumented immigration and trafficking by clamping down on entry at their borders, more women are likely to turn to traffickers to help them get across. These traffickers may turn out to belong to criminal organizations linked to the sex industry.

Moreover, many countries forbid foreign women to work as prostitutes, and this provides criminal gangs with even more power over the women they traffic. It also eliminates one survival option for foreign women who may have limited access to jobs. Some countries, notably the Netherlands and Switzerland, are far more tolerant of foreign women working as prostitutes than as regular laborers. According to International Organization for Migration data, in the European Union, a majority of prostitutes are migrant women: 75 percent in Germany and 80 percent in the Italian city of Milan.

Some women know that they are being trafficked for prostitution, but for many the conditions of their recruitment and the extent of the abuse and bond- age they will suffer only become evident after they arrive in the receiving country. Their confinement is often extreme – akin to slavery – and so is their abuse, including rape, other forms of sexual violence, and physical punishment. Their meager wages are often withheld. They are frequently forbidden to protect themselves against AIDS, and they are routinely denied medical care. If they seek help from the police, they may be taken into detention for violating immi- gration laws; if they have been provided with false documents, there will be criminal charges.

With the sharp growth of tourism over the last decade, the entertainment sector has also grown, becoming increasingly important in countries that have adopted tourism as a strategy for development.22 In many places, the sex trade is part of the entertainment industry, and the two have grown in tandem. Indeed, the sex trade itself has become a development strategy in some areas where unemployment and poverty are widespread, and where governments are desperate for revenue and hard currency. When local manufacturing and agriculture no longer provide jobs, profits, or government revenue, a once marginal economic wellspring becomes a far more important one. The IMF and the World Bank sometimes recommend tourism as a solution to the troubles of poor countries, but when they provide loans for its development or expansion, they may well inadvertently contribute to the expansion of the entertainment industry and, indirectly, of the sex trade. Because it is linked to development strategies in this way, the trafficking of women may continue to expand in these countries.

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Indeed, the global sex industry is likely to expand in any case, given the involve- ment of organized crime in the sex trade, the formation of cross-border ethnic net- works, and the growing transnationalization of tourism. These factors may well lead to a sex trade that reaches out to more and more “markets.” It’s a worrisome possi- bility, especially as growing numbers of women face few if any employment options. Prostitution becomes – in certain kinds of economies – crucial to expanding the entertainment industry, and thereby to tourism as a development strategy that will in turn lead to increased government revenue. These links are structural; the signif- icance of the sex industry to any given economy rises in the absence of other sources of jobs, profits, and revenues.

Women, and migrants generally, are crucial to another development strategy as well: the remittances migrant workers send home are a major source of hard- currency reserves for the migrant’s home country. While remittances may seem minor compared to the financial markets’ massive daily flow of capital, they are often very significant for struggling economies. In 1998, the latest year for which we have data, the remittances migrants sent home topped $70 billion globally. To under- stand the significance of this figure, compare it to the GDP and foreign currency reserves in the affected countries, rather than to the global flow of capital. For in- stance, in the Philippines, a major sender of migrants generally and of women for the entertainment industry in particular, remittances were the third largest source of foreign currency over the last several years. In Bangladesh, which sends significant numbers of workers to the Middle East, Japan, and several European countries, remittances totaled about a third of foreign-currency transactions.

Exporting workers is one means by which governments cope with unemployment and foreign debt. The benefits of this strategy come through two channels, one of which is highly formalized and the other a simple by-product of the migration pro- cess. South Korea and the Philippines both furnish good examples of formal labor- export programs. In the 1970s, South Korea developed extensive programs to promote the exports of workers, initially to the Middle Eastern OPEC countries and then worldwide, as an integral part of its growing overseas construction industry. When South Korea’s economy boomed, exporting workers became a less necessary and less attractive strategy. The Philippine government, by contrast, expanded and diversified its labor exports in order to deal with unemployment and to secure needed foreign-currency reserves through remittances.

The Philippines Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) has played an important role in the emigration of Filipina women to the United States, the Middle East, and Japan. Established by the Filipino government in 1982, POEA organized and supervised the export of nurses and maids to high-demand areas. Foreign debt and unemployment combined to make the export of labor an attractive option. Filipino workers overseas send home an average of almost $1 billion a year. For their parts, labor-importing countries had their own reasons to welcome the Filipino gov- ernment’s policy. The OPEC countries of the Middle East saw in the Filipina migrants an answer to their growing demand for domestic workers following the 1973 oil boom. Confronted with an acute shortage of nurses, a profession that demanded

386 Saskia Sassen

years of training yet garnered low wages and little prestige, the United States passed the Immigration Nursing Relief Act of 1989, which allowed for the importation of nurses. And in booming 1980s Japan, which witnessed rising expendable incomes but marked labor shortages, the government passed legislation permitting the entry of “entertainment workers.”

The largest number of migrant Filipinas work overseas as maids, particularly in other Asian countries.23 The second largest group, and the fastest growing, consists of entertainers, who migrate mostly to Japan. The rapid increase in the number of women migrating as entertainers can be traced to the more than five hundred “entertainment brokers” that now operate in the Philippines outside the state umbrella. These brokers provide women for the Japanese sex industry, which is basi- cally controlled by organized gangs rather than through the government-sponsored program for the entry of entertainers. Recruited for singing and entertaining, these women are frequently forced into prostitution as well.

The Filipino government, meanwhile, has also passed regulations that permit mail-order-bride agencies to recruit young Filipinas to marry foreign men. This trade rapidly picked up pace thanks to the government’s organized support. The United States and Japan are two of the most common destinations for mail-order brides. Demand was especially high in Japan’s agricultural communities in the 1980s, given that country’s severe shortage of people in general and of young women in particular, as the demand for labor boomed in the large metropolitan areas. Municipal governments in Japanese towns made it a policy to accept Filipina brides.

A growing body of evidence indicates that mail-order brides frequently suffer physical abuse. In the United States, the Immigration and Naturalization Service has recently reported acute domestic violence against mail-order wives. Again, the law discourages these women from seeking recourse, as they are liable to be detained if they do so before they have been married for two years. In Japan, foreign mail-order wives are not granted full legal status, and considerable evidence indicates that many are subject to abuse not only by their husbands but by their husbands’ extended fam- ilies as well. The Philippine government approved most mail-order-bride brokers before 1989, but during Corazon Aquino’s presidency, the stories of abuse by foreign husbands led the Philippine government to ban the mail-order-bride business. Nonetheless, such organizations are almost impossible to eliminate, and they con- tinue to operate in violation of the law.

The Philippines may have the most developed programs for the export of its women, but it is not the only country to have explored similar strategies. After its 1997–1998 financial crisis, Thailand started a campaign to promote migration for work and to encourage overseas firms to recruit Thai workers. Sri Lanka’s government has tried to export another 200,000 workers in addition to the 1 mil- lion it already has overseas; Sri Lankan women remitted $880 million in 1998, mostly from their earnings as maids in the Middle East and Far East. Bangladesh organized extensive labor-export programs to the OPEC countries of the Middle East in the 1970s. These programs have continued, becoming a significant source

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of foreign currency along with individual migrations to these and other coun- tries, notably the United States and Great Britain. Bangladesh’s workers remitted $1.4 billion in each of the last few years.24

Conclusion

Globalization is not only about the hypermobility of capital and the ascendance of information economies. It is also about specific types of places and work processes. In order to understand how economic globalization relates to the extraction of services from the Third World to fulfill what was once the First World woman’s domestic role, we must look at globalization in a way that emphasizes some of these concrete conditions.