Migration and Making an Income in the Context of ‘Human Trafficking’: Imponderable Experiences and Sense-Making at a South African Border

The book focuses on volatile processes at the South African-Zimbabwean border that arise from practices of migration and income generating activities. The processes are influenced by neoliberal developments and controversial discourses on migration, commercial sexual services, and human trafficking. In this unstable environment, different actors continuously negotiate, trying to achieve stable positions. By addressing issues related to migration and income generating activities, they maneuver between legal rules and their own moral values and interests. In their attempt to classify incidents in the border context that are unclear to them, actors’ explanations are partly based on the concept of transnational human trafficking. Thereby, they transfer the impenetrability discursively associated with this concept to what they see as obscure cross-border migration, disconcerting sexual services, and other alienating economic activities. Alternatively, actors understand undocumented cross-border migration, commercial sexual services, and other illegalised income-generating activities as common everyday practices at the border and also assume that human trafficking does not play an important role there. Read more