Sex Work and Migration Policy: An Ongoing Entanglement
Sex work is recognized as legitimate work in Switzerland. However, this recognition is increasingly being questioned. In a position paper, the women of the Swiss Center Party portray particularly migrant sex workers as victims. Among other demands, they call for clients to be required to check the residence status of sex workers. Since the 1990s, sex work and migration policy have been closely intertwined. The current neo-abolitionist trend is reinforcing long-standing calls for a more restrictive approach to migration.
In a position paper published in April 2025, the women of the Center Party call for stricter regulations in the sex industry. The majority of sex workers, they argue, are migrant women and therefore particularly vulnerable to coercion and exploitation. Among other demands, the women of the Center Party intend to hold clients more accountable, for example, by requiring them to check the age, working environment, residence status, and work permit of sex workers. Sex buyers should report any irregularities to the police. The Center Party is currently considering launching a popular initiative to advance its demands.
The position paper and recent public statements by the women of the Center Party are based on a neo-abolitionist view of sex work or prostitution. This assumes that prostitution is fundamentally to be understood as violence against women. The neo-abolitionist approach is expressed in the “Swedish model,” which criminalizes the purchase of sexual services and is intended to help women leave the sex trade. The Swedish model was rejected by the Swiss Federal Council in 2015 and by the National Council in 2022. However, the neo-abolitionist narrative is gaining ground in the public debate in Switzerland, as it is in Europe (Rubio Grundell 2021). Sweden has recently decided to tighten its ban on buying sexual services: paying for online sexual services will also be criminalized.
The Regulation of Sex Work and Migration Policy
Between 1992 and 2022, a total of 213 political initiatives on sex work were submitted in the Swiss cantons, most of them with the declared aim of improving the protection of sex workers (Stalder 2025b). Despite this, progress is slow or non-existent (Stalder 2025a). Two examples stand out: Sex work on digital platforms is still completely unregulated, and the question of how labor law provisions for the protection of workers can be extended to these platforms remains unanswered. Secondly, although sex work has been largely decriminalized in Switzerland since 1992, its “immorality” was only overruled by the Federal Court in 2021. It took 29 years and 192 cantonal political initiatives “for the protection of sex workers” before sex workers were finally able to claim their right to payment for their work.
One of the reasons for this is that the regulation of sex work is strongly influenced by the migration policy debate. In my dissertation on the regulation of sex work in Switzerland since the early 1990s, I show that this regulation reflects the migration discourses of the time and, conversely, serves to control migration and mobility, even under the comparatively liberal Swiss framework of the recent decades. Political initiatives to protect sex workers, if they went beyond the declaratory rejection of exploitation in the sex trade, often resulted in stronger regulation of mobility from the EU and the enforcement of restrictive migration policies instead of improvements in labor law protection for sex workers (Stalder 2025b).
A New Attempt to Control Unwanted Mobility
Some of the current demands of the women of the Center Party are in line with the many attempts of the last three decades to control undesired forms of migration and mobility by regulating sex work. This applies particularly to the demand that clients should check the residence status of sex workers and excludes similar demands of sexual assistance, which tends to be associated with white middle-class Swiss women.
According to the position paper by the women of the Center Party, sexual assistance for people with disabilities is considered work and should therefore be excluded from the regulations applying to sex work. In contrast to sexual assistance, sex work is not recognized as work, no social value is attributed to it, and its legitimacy is called into question, not least as a motive for cross-border labor mobility. The rules to be introduced are therefore not about the protection of people in general who offer sexual services for payment, but about a very specific category of sex workers, namely migrants.
Paradoxically, according to the vision of the women of the Center Party, the men who buy sexual services, and who are held responsible for the suffering of women who sell sex in the neo-abolitionist narrative, are given a central role. They are expected to verify the identity papers of sex workers and report those they suspect are working illegally to the police, based on these documents, but perhaps also on skin color or accent. The consequence of this would be that migrant women with an irregular status could be tracked down and deported more easily. Since the 1990s, even deportation has repeatedly been presented as protection, and female sex workers have been portrayed as helpless victims denied the ability to make independent mobility decisions. As a result, their country of origin and their family are regarded as the safest places for them.
The call for “more protection for sex workers” can be mobilized to advance very different political agendas. The task of social science research is to examine such demands in the light of social power relations. Recent efforts to partially or fully criminalize sex work reflect both the current, broader backlash against feminism and LGBTQ rights, and the growing push for a more restrictive migration policy, trends that have become increasingly normalized in mainstream political discourse over the past few decades.
Lisa Katarina Stalder is a postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Forum for Migration and Population Studies (SFM).
References:
–Rubio Grundell, Lucrecia. 2021. The Rise of Neo-Abolitionism in Europe: Exploring the role of the Neoliberalism-Vulnerability-Security Nexus in the Prostitution Policies of the United Kingdom, Spain, France, and Ireland. Social Politics 29 (3): 1034-1056.
–Stalder, Lisa K. 2025a. New (Sex) Work? Digitalization, Circular Mobility, and Recognition in the Regulation of Sex Work in Switzerland. Swiss Journal of Sociology 51 (1): 143-161.
–Stalder, Lisa K. 2025b. The Migration Politics of Sexual Liberalism: Sex Work Regulation as Subnational Migration Policymaking in Switzerland from 1992 to 2022 (Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis). Université de Neuchâtel.
