ANTH Exam #1

Concept Of Gridlock

• A situation where social, economic, and political systems intersect to trap migrant workers in vulnerable conditions.

Restrictive Border Regimes

• Borders are not simply lines across countries.

• Embodied and are a social practice - material and symbolic divisions.

• Regulate who can move safely and who cannot.

• Doesn’t eliminate movement.

• They shape how risky movement (migration) becomes.

—> Border M_____

• Treating migration as a national security threat rather than people seeking safety or opportunity.

• Adopting military technology and tactics to manage migration is called an enforcement ____.

  • Walls, fences, and fortified barriers

  • Surveillance technologies and patrols

  • Detention and Deportation systems

• Border ____ alter how people move, pushing them away from safer routes and into less visible more dangerous spaces, impacting health of migrants.

Race and Space in Sex Work

• Sex workers in Dubai were divided into spaces based on ethnicity/nationality

—> Women’s perceived race/ethnicity affects:

• Where they could work

• Income

• Safety

• How others view them

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• Geography of sex work - runs along racial and economic lines

• 3 main groups of sex workers - identifies black, brown, and white

  • 1: White - found in wealthier parts, mostly private apartments and fancy hotels

    • Russia, Eastern Europe, Morocco, and Iran

    • Clients are white, Arab expats, wealthy foreigners, businessmen

    • Main threat of wives reporting them - Legal investigation

• Brown - Clubs, hotel lobbies

  • South Asia, Pakistan, Philippines, Thailand, Bangladesh

  • Brown middle class, usually the same nations as the women.

  • Police discrimination is the main threat - raids.

• Black women - on the streets - not allowed in certain spaces - homeless

  • Ethiopia/Kenya, Sudan, Nigeria, Somalia

  • Black/brown working-class men

  • Challenges include police brutality, raids, and violence from clients.

Kefala Labor System

• Labor Sponsorship Program

  • ____ sponsor/employer

• Worker’s legal status depends on the employer

  • Can lead to:

    • Passport confiscation

    • Limited ability to change jobs

    • undocumented status

    • exploitation/abuse

• The ___ __ _ restricts workers’ mobility and gives employers significant power.

• Withheld passports, debts, and the threat of deportation can keep migrants trapped in abusive jobs.

• Ties migrants worker’s legal status to employers/sponsors

• With weak labor protections, this can create vulnerability even when migration itself is legal.

  • Employers may control worker’s:

    • Mobility

    • employment

• Police/law often favor the employer.

• Domestic work happens inside private homes —> abuse can remain hidden

Dominant Anti-Trafficking Narratives

• Trafficking does not automatically mean sex trafficking

  • Shaped by the media

  • Drug trafficking makes migrants seen as (threats/weapon importers/criminals)

• This leads to sex trafficking meaning migration and that victims are only young adults, kids, non-educated

• More raids and arrests can lead to innocent sex workers being detained or deported.

• Restricting migration pushes workers toward exploitative recruiters.

• The U.S TIP report ranking can reflect political bias and weaken international cooperation

• Migration is not all trafficking; migration is voluntary, not forced, agency, free will, taking risks, and a journey to seek better opportunity

• Problem: applying one universal model to different places

• Policies should be based on actual migrant experiences, not assumptions

• These take away migrants’ agency in choosing sex work.

Trafficking vs. Exploitation

• They’re not the same

• Victims of other exploitation

  • Low-wage labor occupations

  • Not legally protected

  • Easily hurt/disability

  • Physical/sexual abuse

  • Kicked out of the house/employment (domestic servant)

  • Withholding pay/fraud

• Migrants who are not trafficked can still be victims, exploited, or harmed.

Migrant Agency

• Ability to make choices + act on them

• Migrants May:

  • Make decisions about work

  • Find ways to survive

  • navigate difficult situation

  • make choices despite restrictions

Rescue and Criminalization Efforts by Gov. and NGOs

• Anti-trafficking campaigns may raid brothels, arrest, and deport women.

  • Some women did not want to be ‘rescued’ because they:

    • Did not want to return home

    • wanted to continue working

    • feared stigma at home

• Policies can therefore harm the women who they claim to help.

Sex Work Stratification

• Sex work is ____ by race, class, and nationality

  • Structures and influences the experiences of sex workers.

  • Shapes where it is done in the landscape

• The socioeconomic environment reproduces inequalities, vulnerabilities, and violence.

• Sex workers in Dubai were divided into spaces based on ethnicity/nationality

  • Women’s perceived race/ethnicity affected:

    • Where they could work

    • income

    • safety

    • How others viewed them

Structural Violence

• systems/polices create conditions that limit people’s safety, rights, and opportunities.

  • Ex: Women can experience this:

    • in their home country

    • during migration

    • in the host country

• The Kefala system restricts workers’ mobility and gives employers significant power.

• Withheld passports, debts, and the threat of deportation can keep migrants trapped in abusive jobs.

Informal Economies

• Undocumented migrants may work illegally to survive, leaving them more vulnerable to exploitation.

• Ex: Women migrants in large numbers are entering sex work.

  • These women make a lot of money - to send home

  • Money is distributed among families, buy land, build houses, invest it, save it, and pay for children’s education

  • Money made from sex work supports entire economies back home.

  • Women are the backbone of large global economies and support formal economies back home.

• Working under the table, freelancers control their own earnings and are vulnerable to police brutality, sexual violence, and rape, and have no legal protections.

• Support and are connected to formal economies back home.

• Can still be connected to and depended on by the formal economy

Perverse Integration

• Informal systems and activities that help people survive within a larger system that disadvantages them.

• Marginalized people enter the informal/illegal economy because it gives them opportunities unavailable in the formal economy.

• Domestic work: formal, but highly restrictive

• Sex work: informal/illegal, but sometimes provides higher wages + autonomy

• Women are not necessarily choosing sex because it is ideal —> they may see it as better than their available alternatives.

Feminization of Migration

• More women migrate internationally for work. —> Women are overrepresented among migrants in global flows across borders.

  • Lots of men in home countries are unemployed, which pushes women to fill in the gap

  • These women face many challenges and are forced to migrate for better job opportunities.

• Global labor system: seeking out women from the Global South = lower labor costs.

• In the Gulf, many women migrate for domestic/care work.

• Some later move into informal sex work because domestic work can mean:

  • low wages

  • debt

  • abusive employers

  • little/no time off

  • restricted movement

  • lack of legal protections

• Key Argument: Laws meant to protect women or prevent trafficking can sometimes increase their vulnerability.

Embodiment

• The physical body is the primary vehicle through which a person experiences, navigates, and responds to the process of moving across spaces, borders, and cultures

Abscond

• Workers may flee employers because of abuse, unpaid wages, or poor conditions.

• To leave somewhere suddenly and secretly, usually to avoid the law, capture, prosecution, or responsibility.

  • Ex: Ravi

Criminalization of Sex Work

• Treating sex work as an illegal activity and punishing people involved in it through policing, arrest, or deportation.

• Can make migrant women more vulnerable instead of protecting them.

• Fear of arrest and deportation

  • Women may avoid seeking help because they fear being punished or removed from Dubai.

• Less protection from exploitation

  • Criminalization can make it harder for sex workers to report abuse or unsafe working conditions.

• Confusing sex work with human trafficking

  • Not every sex worker is a trafficking victim. Mahdavi emphasizes that women's experiences differ in terms of coercion, choice, and working conditions.

• Ignoring migrant rights

  • Policies focused on arresting sex workers and combating sex trafficking can distract attention from broader problems involving migrant workers' rights and exploitation.

• Limited choices for migrant women

  • Mahdavi explains that some women enter sex work because other jobs, such as domestic work, may involve low wages, abuse, and restricted freedom

Structural Reform

• Long-term policy changes that alter the fundamental institutional and regulatory framework of an economy to boost productivity, competition, and sustainable growth

Climate-Induced Migration

• Environmental or climate migration refers to population movement influenced by changes in the natural environment that undermine livelihood, safety, or health.

• Climate change rarely acts alone, as it multiplies existing vulnerabilities.

  • Poverty, weak infrastructure, colonial land policies, and political factors.

• Migration in this context can be proactive and adaptive, such as seasonal labor migration

  • deeply coercive, when people have no safe alternative.

• Most climate migration today is internal, but international migration is increasing.

Slow-Onset vs. Sudden-Onset Events

• ______ disasters force rapid displacement and that overwhelm health systems immediately.

  • Floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires, heatwaves.

• ___ ____ processes, by contrast, erode health gradually.

  • Rising sea levels, desertification, droughts.

• Distinction matters, as slow-onset displacement often falls outside the emergency framework and concerns.

  • Leaving migrants without recognition or support.

• Migration here can be an adaptation strategy, but only when people have resources and mobility.

  • For the lowest income —> climate change often traps people in place until crisis hits.

Climate Change as a Social Justice Issue

Hazards of Migration

• Border enforcement shapes health at every stage of migration.

  • Immediate injuries, infections, and dehydration.

• Mental health impacts: trauma, anxiety, depression, and grief

• Long-term consequences include chronic illness and disability.

  • migrants avoid healthcare or lack access.

• These outcomes are not side effects

  • They result from migration systems and border policy.

Structural Barriers to Healing

• These effects often persist long after physical rebuilding.

• Mental health services are rarely integrated into disaster or migration responses.

  • Especially for the undocumented or internally displaced populations.

• Climate displacement profoundly affects mental health.

• Sudden disasters produce trauma and grief.

  • Slow-onset displacement generates long-term anxiety and hopelessness.

  • Children experience disrupted schooling and social networks

  • Parents face stress over food, housing, and safety.

Anthropology

• Study of the human condition

  • Understand human diversity across contexts, past, present, and future.

  • Explore complex behavior and meaning-making.

  • Investigate human adaptation to environmental and understandings of the social worlds.

• Method: Participant observation, interviews, surveys, ethnography, and case studies.

• Ethnics: Informed consent, cultural sensitivity, confidentiality, non-exploitation.

Migrant Diversity

• Migrants from different countries and cultures to one city.

• Ex: Dubai

Migration as Structural Process and Lived Experienced

• Viewing human movement not just as a physical shift from one place to another, but as the intersection of large-scale macro-level systems and personal, human-level realities.

Deserving vs. Underserving Migrants

• Dreamers are often portrayed as a ‘model immigrant’

  • Most are DACA recipients who are youth.

    • Media emphasized:

      • Attending American schools

      • working

      • serving in the military

      • pursuing careers

      • speaking/acting culturally American.

—> This makes them appear similar to U.S. citizens.

Problem: It creates an idea that immigrants must prove their worth to be included.

• Creates a hierarchy of ____ and non_____ immigrants.

Roles of Narratives around access to Healthcare Services and Protection in the U.S

• U.S. spends money on the military

• U.S. we have to earn our healthcare - it’s privatized - profit

• Other nations frame healthcare as a human right.

• Healthcare is justified through economic benefits.

Structural Violence (Ex: TB)

• Also include legal systems and other institutions that restrict access to healthcare systems and to an overall good quality of life.

  • Policies that deny healthcare or social services to undocumented or asylum-seeking migrants.

  • Increases preventable morbidity, delays treatment, and exacerbates chronic conditions.

Embodiment of inequality

• Social inequalities reflected in physical space

• a concept in social epidemiology, medical anthropology, and sociology describing how external social, economic, and political disadvantages literally transform into physical and biological realities.

Social production of disease

• Long work hours, poor ventilation, fatigue, inadequate food, and overcrowding increase the risk.

• Scared of deportation and high medical expenses —> uses traditional methods and prayer.

Undocumented labor precarity

• Means the chronic instability, vulnerability, and lack of protection experienced by workers who lack legal residency or work authorization in a country

Global cities and inequality

• Lack of jobs, poverty, family responsibilities, debt, and political/economic problems at home

Sexual violence in migration

• Women experience a ‘continuum of violence’ before and after migration

• Violence is shaped by gender, race, and nationality.

• Italian laws and the reception/healthcare system can continue or worsen this violence.

• Many pregnancies resulted from sexual violence

Reproductive rights

• VTP: Voluntary Termination of Pregnancy.

• Barriers:

  • 3-month legal limit

  • No VTP hospitalization in Lampedusa

  • Requires transfer to Sicily

  • Bureaucratic delays.

Abortion access restrictions

• 3-month legal limit

• No VTP hospitalization in Lampedusa

• Requires transfer to Sicily

Legal time limits on abortion

• 3-month legal limit

• Bureaucratic delays.

Transit violence

• Refers to the physical, sexual, psychological, and structural abuse that migrants and refugees suffer while traveling through intermediate countries between their home nation and their ultimate destination