The control of “wandering women”:the legacy of vagrancy laws in the contemporary governance of migrant sex work

This paper traces the contemporary governance of migrant sex work to early vagrancy laws aimed at controlling poor mobile populations and people not engaging in ‘honest’ labor. The paper argues that these notions of dishonest labor are still visible in the contemporary crimmigration controls. It uses a legal analysis of the development of prostitution and immigration laws together with ethnographic research in the Nordic region as a case study to develop an argument on the bifurcated regulation of domestic and foreign sex work and its roots in the vagrancy laws. It makes the case that with the influx of migrants into the sex trade since the 1990s the governance of commercial sex has shifted from prostitution policies to immigration controls.