2 - Desiring Undesirable Women

Summary

This chapter reveals how ideological notions of French decadence, US sexual restraint, and Cuban moral regeneration shaped immigration law and anti-trafficking protocols. Undercover investigations and social scientific studies discovered a flood of European women, especially from France, migrating for work in prostitution. The same studies described the erotic cachet afforded to Frenchness, the global marketing of vice, and what exactly French women offered for sale. According to US and Cuban reformers, a debased European morality promoted these “undesirable” migrations. This premise bolstered exclusionary legislation passed in both countries, barring suspected prostitutes from crossing the border, along with traffickers and pimps. Thus the desire for undesirable women – and not the protection of trafficking victims – motivated immigration reform.