This paper examines how the European Union´s (EU) securitised approach to migration (characterised by the tightening of external border controls, restrictive visa regimes and the criminalisation of irregular entry in the states) does not protect migrant women from sexual exploitation but, on the contrary, intensifies the structural conditions that make such exploitation possible. By combining a feminist abolitionist theoretical framework with a critical analysis of EU institutional and legal immigration policy, this research advances the argument that the vulnerability of migrant women to human trafficking and sexual exploitation cannot be understood in isolation from the architecture of migration governance that purports to address it. 

This anaylsis is grounded in the intersection of feminist migration scholarship and abolitionist theory. Drawing on Rutvica Andrijasevic´s (2010) ethnographic research on migration, agency and citizenship in the sex trade, as well as the broader abolitionist tradition represented by scholars such as Kathleen Barry and Catharine MacKinnon, this research understands prostitution as a system of objectification rooted in patriarchal structures of domination. From this perspective, sexual trafficking is not an aberration of the migration system but one of its gendered outcomes: it is brought about the low income and social status of women and sustained by male demand for commercial, violent and dominating sex, both of which are structurally reproduced by conditions of economic precarity, legal irregularity and social injustice within migrant women cases. 

A central argumen of this academic work is that border controls and visa policies do not prevent migration; they channel it through dangerous and irregular routes, generating profit for trafficking networks and third parties while rendering women´s precarity invisible behind the discourse of "organised crime" and victimehood. When formal migration channels are inaccesible (due to prohibitive costs, bureaucratic obstacles or deliberate policy restrictions), migrants become dependen on third-party intermediaries. The debt accrued through irregular crossings binds women to these parties, while thier undocumented status foreclosses access to legal employment, healthcare and institutional protection. The fear of deportation further prevents women from seeking help into institutions, deepening their confinement and strengthening third-party control over their bodies. 

This structural feminist analyisis critically evaluates three dominant EU policy frameworks: the MacKinnon rights-based approach, the Palermo Protocol and the EU´s security-centred anti-trafficking architecture. And it is found that each shares a common structural flaw, they target individual traffickers rather than the conditions that produce trafficking. Anti-trafficking campaigns such as the International Organization for Migration (IOM) are similarly critiqued for relying on victimising and passive representations of female bodies that discourage informal migration withouth acknowledging the role of EU immigration policy in generating the vulnerability they claim to addres. The result is a policy paradox in which the institutional response to exploitation reproduces the conditions it seeks to dismantle. 

In response, it is proposed a reorientation of EU policy along three axes: a shift towards financial sanctions and asset seizure targeting the economic infraestructure of the trafficking networks, the development of victim-centred legal protections that decouple residence permits for law enforcement cooperation and recognise trafficked women as rights-bearing subjects rather than passive objects, and a comprehensive immigration reform that expands legal migration pathways and addresses the structural socioeconomic inequalities that drive vulnerability to migrant women. Ultimately, this paper makes the case that effective action against the sexual exploitation of migrant women requires a essential consideration of the migration governance model, one grounded in feminist analysis, structural reforms and the full recognition of migrant women as political and legal subjects.