Trespassing legal and moral boundaries: Ethiopian domestic workers returned from the Middle East

International human rights and anti-trafficking entities predict that the combined effects of environmental change, economic hardship and protracted conflict situations will increase women’s vulnerability to human trafficking. Thus, specific protection measures are needed. A derivative effect of the coinciding focus vulnerability and protection is that women’s irregular migration routinely is conflated with human trafficking among state and nonstate actors. The chapter examines the economic, political and social factors prompting Ethiopian women to migrate as well as the politics around global migration governance that circumscribe how their migration is understood and categorized. It suggests reorienting the analytical focus away from questions of (il)legality and introduces the notion of legal and moral trespassing as an alternative analytical entry point.