Conference Agenda

The 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act reformed the preference system for the admittance of immigrants into the United States. It sought to protect US-born workers from competition from both skilled and unskilled “foreign” labor by requiring prospective immigrants to obtain labor certification from the Department of Labor. By 1969, the greatest number of applications were for household workers. For would-be employers, the intimate labor of the home loomed larger than the national or global political economy. Obtaining a live-in maid appeared the only way white business and professional women could meet family responsibilities while continuing their own employment. Their requests for reconsideration of rejected applications to employ immigrant domestic workers illuminate a crisis in social reproduction that developed during the 1960s and 1970s, the period of the rights revolution when African American women refused maid jobs and a new feminism encouraged women’s labor force participation. But these applications—often shepherded by for-profit employment agencies, nanny services, and other registries—reveal a traffic in immigrant women’s labor. Employers targeted women from the Americas to obtain cheap labor, while avoiding the civil rights protests of African American women. This paper explores the demand for domestic workers through the hundreds of appealed visa applications filed at the National Archives in the years following the 1965 reform. These letters and forms represent a unique source for the dynamics of gendered labor migration. They tell us most about prospective employers and the discourse generated by the political economy of intimate labor, though they can be read for aspects of worker lives. As such they allow us to probe the question of reproductive labor, the meaning of household employment, and the role of the state in shaping both.

In the first half of the 20th century, industrialised countries came to terms for the first time with the phenomena at the centre of this conference: the expansion of global (re)production networks, a certain ease of cross-border mobility, and the rise of new sending states promoting migrant exports. Women have been central to these phenomena, particularly those employed in intimate labour: women who migrated from Europe to the southern shores of the Mediterranean, for example, to work as nannies or maids in European families settled in colonies. There were also women who moved freely within the international brothel circuit, especially the colonial one crafted to meet the 'needs' of the European male population abroad. This paper, which draws largely on the documentation of the international police produced in Italy, and documents from the League of Nations in the interwar period, addresses the following points from the Italian case: 1. The relationship between the state and female labour migration was marked by strong ambivalence: on the one hand, it was the Italian government that promoted the migration of female workers; on the other hand, these women were strongly stigmatised as immoral, even when they were the main breadwinner, 2. I aim to analyse the intertwining of domestic work and sex work, and the common shift from one job to the other, highlighting the importance of considering the nexus between women's work, the home, and informal markets, and 3. Finally, I will discuss recruitment, in particular the importance of family members and partners in recruiting women for the sex trade, an element that reveals how the gender order influences migration and labour in both history and the present day.

What if we recast the moral panic of “trafficking” as a key moment in migration history? How did anti-trafficking activism promote migration controls while policing the boundaries of work? The early twentieth-century “trafficking archive” was assembled to document the coerced migration of young women and girls, curtail their mobility, and target undesirable subjects. Yet it can be mined for examples that disrupt the narrative of forced movement and sexual slavery, revealing a history of women’s migration. My paper centers on questions of vulnerability, victimhood, age, and consent, using documentation on “white slavery” from the French consulates in Latin America. I examine the plight of female minors who migrated to Argentina, Uruguay, and Mexico for sexual labor, along with the national laws and international agreements that governed their mobility. Juridically speaking, even female minors who had consented to migrate and sell sex were to be labelled as “trafficked.” They were therefore entitled to state-sponsored repatriations—which I view as a form of return migration to France. At the local level of the consulate, however, state officials struggled to reconcile young women’s consent with their status as victims, especially for those with criminal records, or who had previously sold sex in France. The line between girlhood and victimhood, and adulthood and the banality of gendered labor exploitation, was not easy to draw.

The United States celebrated its commitment to decent work and free labor by passing immigration laws that outlawed migrants who participated in the sex trades, starting with the 1875 Page Act, and reinforced by the Immigration Acts of 1903, 1907, 1910, 1917, and 1924. Combined, these laws demonstrated the United States’ growing engagement in the international anti-trafficking movement that used immigration control and deportation as a method of limiting single women’s mobility. These laws forbade any migrant from profiting from the sex trades by running a brothel, pimping and procuring, working in a brothel in any capacity, or selling sex. Yet, enforcement of these laws remained challenging along the 8,891 km (5,525 mi)-long border. During the Great Depression, border control emerged as a way to ensure that foreign nationals were not competing for jobs with Americans. Consequently, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the Border Patrol increased enforcement along the USCanadian border, policing both the labor mobilities of workers engaged in decent, waged labor, and the mobilities of people engaged in indecent, sexual labor. This paper draws upon the rich historiography on labor mobilities in the US-Mexico borderlands to consider how the USCanadian borderlands constituted a uniquely liminal space, with its racial logics, within transborder communities. It takes seriously the economic value of intimate labor and the sex trades, while also contending with the ways the Depression heightened people’s precarity and prompting many to work in the sex sector, on the one hand, and the ways that the New Deal ushered in the growth of the federal government.