THE SEX WORKPLACE: NO DAY WITHOUT AN IMMIGRANT

       Rachel Aimee

       ISSUE 3.3 (2007)

In a surprising move that would further widen the gap between documented and undocumented immigrants in New York State, Brooklyn assemblyman Félix Ortiz recently proposed a bill that would require exotic dancers to obtain permits in order to work. Surprising, because the assemblyman is otherwise well known for his advocacy on behalf of immigrants. Apparently intended to fight human trafficking, sex workers believe that if this bill becomes law it will do little more than push undocumented immigrant strippers underground or into other kinds of sex work. “I’m going to get out of New York before that happens, obviously,” says Vanessa, an exotic dancer from Spain who came to the United States five years ago on a now-expired training visa. Others think the change would create underground clubs and second-tier employment. Katana, originally from Montserrat, says she would “find a way to keep working under the table.” Not one of the dancers I have talked to believes the change would encourage strippers to leave the industry. Vanessa says she expects dancers would go along with licensing simply because they are not in a position to do much about it. “The dancers that got families over here, they’re not going to be moving, they’re going to accept it, that’s all. Just as they accepted the house fee¹, they’re going to accept this bill now.”

Vanessa has a point: It’s difficult for sex workers, especially those who are undocumented immigrants, to organize against legislation, even when it affects them negatively. An undocumented stripper won’t want to risk speaking to the media, lawmakers, or even sympathetic advocates, for fear of drawing attention to herself and her family. When I set out to write this article, I hoped to cover the lives of different kinds of sex workers across the United States, but I ended up focusing on exotic dancers in New York City because, for the most part, the only sex workers who were willing to talk to me about their personal immigration stories were those who already knew and trusted me.

When the long-anticipated immigration bill was defeated in the US Senate on June 7, immigrants across the country let out a collective sigh of disappointment and frustration. That sigh resonated particularly loudly in the sex worker community. The sex industry plays a vital and undeniable role in the lives of undocumented immigrants. If sex industry employers were a more socially conscious bunch, the door of every brothel, strip club, dungeon, and escort agency in the country would have been firmly closed on May 1 for A Day Without An Immigrant. Despite the fact that immigration is such a hot-button issue, sex work is rarely on the table for the legislative discussions, or indeed the activist ones.

Ruby Corado is a political activist and advocate for the Latino LGBT and sex worker community in Washington, DC. She works with Latin@s In Accion, a community organization that helps sex workers to gain skills so that they can obtain work outside of the sex industry. With laws getting tighter, she expects to see more undocumented immigrants entering the sex industry. “Right now, sex work is the big industry that a lot of Latinos are going into.” Considering the low-paying job options available to the undocumented, it’s easy to understand why.

Immigrants come to the United States seeking a better standard of living for themselves and their families; adult entertainment is one of the few industries that offers the opportunity to make a decent living to people without any education or working documents. Even American citizens with college degrees often choose sex work because it is more lucrative than other jobs, so for undocumented immigrants whose other options are largely underpaid and often involve hard physical work and long hours, the potential to earn more in the sex industry, working far fewer hours, is significant. This is particularly true for women, since most traditional women’s jobs available to immigrants pay even less than those available to men, whereas in the sex industry, women usually make more than their male counterparts. “If you can make $6,000 a month doing sex work or $500 cleaning houses, which one are you going to choose?” asks Ruby.

Twenty-six-year-old Katana came to the United States from Montserrat with her two-year-old son in 2002. At first she was working twelve-hour-days, including weekends, as a cashier to cover her basic living costs in New York City–while also sending money back home to support her family. In 2004, Katana began working as an exotic dancer. Since then she has been able to cut down dramatically on her hours. “Dancing brings in faster money, a little bit easier money, and you don’t have to work those long hours,” she says. “There’s a lot of people that are illegal and they’re trying to survive and support their family and they can’t go in a regular place like a cashier job without having [legal working documents], so this kind of business helps people to survive.”

While many immigrants find sex work preferable, being a sex worker and an undocumented immigrant in a culture in which both are looked down on can put one in an extremely vulnerable position. Anyone who does illegal sex work in the United States risks being arrested and serving jail time. Undocumented sex workers also face deportation and are at a greater risk for exploitation. Antoine, a twenty-nine-year-old undocumented escort from France, is well educated and gave up a good job to travel and explore a new continent, choosing to do sex work to support his adventures across the United States and Canada. Unlike most workers, if deported he could probably return to a decent standard of living in his home country, but it’s still something he worries about.

“It is funny how paranoid I can get sometimes about immigration stuff, doing an illegal job in a country where you can’t even work [legally],” he says. “When I see a new client, it is all about, ‘Am I going to be caught by the police? Is this a trap?’ To make my ad more attractive, I emphasize the fact that I am French—some clients get really excited about it—[but] I know that whoever [sees that] could find out that I am some kind of illegal worker.”

Ruby Corado sees many less privileged Latina sex workers being exploited by men looking to take advantage of their ability to make what is often perceived by non-sex workers as “easy money.” “There is a certain type of man who particularly targets illegal immigrants because [he] knows they are vulnerable so [he] can threaten them, [and say he will] call the police. Even if you have a green card it can be taken away [if you are convicted of a crime] and these men know that.”

When sex workers are being exploited they face the additional burden of having nowhere to go for help, sometimes even within their own communities. Immigrants who come from cultures with a more conservative view of sex work, such as many Latino cultures, may be labeled as sinful and dirty and lose status within their own communities: “The stigma is so much that they can’t leave to do some other job. They cannot be accepted anywhere else, so they get stuck,” says Ruby.

While sex worker and immigrant activists have long been working with local police departments across the country to improve legal protection for those who are being exploited, lack of consciousness, anti-immigrant sentiments, bad laws, and police corruption mean that sex workers and undocumented immigrants still have a lot to fear from dealing with the police. Most sex workers don’t report crimes at all.

Exploitation, when reported, can sometimes be used to get legal status, often on the grounds of political asylum or even, in some extreme cases, as a victim of human trafficking. Ruby Corado gives the example of a woman from Mexico who had been working as a prostitute by choice for many years but now wanted to leave the industry. A group of men she was working for tried to prevent her from quitting. “She was able to prove that she wanted to leave but they were trying to stop her.”

The fact that the line between voluntary and forced sex work is not always clear-cut presents real problems for workers using these arguments to get green cards. Nonetheless, Ruby advises anyone who thinks they might be able to prove that they were forced to do sex work to speak to a lawyer and see if they have a human trafficking case. She also advises those who have been victims of persecution in their countries of origin to seek legal counsel to find out if they have a political asylum case; however, most undocumented workers do not fall into either the trafficking category or the political asylum category and must find another way to apply for a green card.

Harsh anti-prostitution policies can make the naturalization process even tougher for sex workers than it is for others. An applicant will be asked whether she has worked as a prostitute in the last five years and if she says yes, she’s automatically rejected on the basis that she lacks “good moral character.” Of course, most sex workers know better than to reveal something like that on legal paperwork, but a sex worker’s reluctance or inability to reveal anything about her occupation can be a significant handicap when it comes to applying. While many undocumented workers in other industries can ask their employers for help to prove that they’ve been in the country for a certain length of time, sex workers may not have that option. Similarly, while regularly filing taxes is one of the best ways to prove you’ve been living in the country and obeying the law on a green card application, sex workers are especially wary of reporting their income to the IRS because of the nature of their jobs, so many opt not to file taxes. However, failure to file taxes is a felony-level crime that can not only result in deportation but also make it more difficult to get documented status.

Vanessa takes precautions to conceal her profession. “I always try to avoid even giving [my social security number] to strip clubs, because one day I might fix my situation and [the government] would know that I’d been stripping over here and that just doesn’t look good. I don’t see why I should be in the category of the stripper, which is then thought to be a prostitute, and I’d rather really that they wouldn’t know about what I do.”

However, for those who are “stuck” working here, supporting families back home but unable to travel back and forth to visit for fear of not being able to get back into the country, getting legal documentation can be a priority, no matter what it takes. With the immigration bill dead in the water and no comparative new legislation in sight, undocumented immigrants don’t have many easy options. It is virtually impossible to obtain a green card through employment unless you can provide a compelling reason why a US citizen couldn’t do your job. For many, finding a US citizen to marry can seem like the easiest path.

Two years ago, Katana married a friend who offered to help her get a green card in exchange for $6,000. “I had to find somebody to help me out, even if it means paying him a little something. At first he was saying he would do it for free, but I offered to give him something on my part.” When she gets her green card, Katana intends to go to nursing school and save enough money to buy a piece of land back in Montserrat. “I want to stay [in the United States] but I also want to come and go. I want to have a house there, you know, so that when I go there I’ve always got a place to stay instead of staying with people.” She also intends to have her son—who is now seven years old—join her in the United States when he is older.

Ruby cautions, however, that marrying for a green card doesn’t always bring a happy ending. “Some might find a client who is willing to help them, but it’s not like Pretty Woman!” Of course, many “real” marriages end badly, but an undocumented sex worker who is dependent on a spouse is more likely to end up in situations where she is being exploited or extorted by a man who understands the power he holds over her.

Thirty-eight-year-old Patricia moved to the United States sixteen years ago from Hungary and has been working as an exotic dancer for thirteen years. For a long time she tried to find someone to marry for a green card but eventually decided it was the wrong path for her. “I was attracting the wrong kind of men because I was always thinking about [getting a] green card, never about love. I was attracting men with anger problems and no money, men who wanted to use me.” Like many strippers and other kinds of sex workers, Patricia feels that working in the sex industry makes it more difficult to find decent romantic partners. “You have to lie about your job. If you tell the truth they don’t trust you. You have to be very lucky.”

Patricia was hoping the immigration bill would give her the opportunity to apply for legal residency, but since it was defeated she has decided to leave the country and return to Hungary. “I want to move on, get a regular job. I’m sick of this job, year after year, the same thing—no money, no future, you cannot visit your family, they cannot visit you. In the end you either have to pay somebody a lot of money for a green card or you have to wait for your luck to come, but it may never come.”

While it seems irrefutable that undocumented immigrants are here to stay, policymakers have refused this reality. On August 10, the US Department of Homeland Security announced they would begin enforcing a rule that employers are required to fire any employee without a valid social security number or risk a fine of up to $10,000 per worker. At print time, the move had been temporarily blocked by a federal judge as a result of a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and other labor rights organizations. If the court ultimately allows the rule to be enforced, virtually every other immigrant organization—along with many national labor and business groups—predicts chaos.

Ruby Corado believes that the impact will totally disrupt normal labor patterns. “We talk about having twelve to twenty million people illegally, so now ten million of those people are going to be out of a job. There will be no one in the McDonald’s—get your own burgers, honey! No one in Safe-ways, in the grocery stores. They don’t think about that, but it’s going to happen. Employers are not going to want a fine so they are going to let them go.” She believes that many of the immigrants who lose their jobs will go into the sex industry, further crowding the supply side of an industry that is already becoming saturated. “Five or ten years ago you could make a lot of money in sex work, maybe $1,000 a week. Now you’re lucky if you can make $1,000 in a whole month.”

While falling prices in the sex industry can be attributed to several factors, from the loss of disposable income of clients affected by the dot com crash to the rise of Internet porn, the sheer number of people going into the industry in recent years has undoubtedly played a role. Just as in the “straight” world there are those who complain that immigrants are “taking our jobs,” anyone who has worked in the sex industry knows there is plenty of immigrant-bashing going on in our own community. The derogatory remark that a strip club is “full of Russians” is understood to mean that it’s full of girls who are willing to do more for less, lowering standards for “the rest of us.” The current anti-immigrant climate only serves to perpetuate this kind of prejudice.

The reality is that anti-immigrant, anti-sex work legislation pushes people into more precarious, underground situations, rather than magically making them disappear. As long as there is poverty somewhere, people will come to the United States seeking work. As long as sex work pays more than other jobs, many of those people will work in the sex industry. Immigrants and advocates are hoping that after the 2008 elections a new administration will bring a change in direction and a more realistic approach to immigration. It is hard to imagine any politician ever explicitly standing up for sex workers, but a bill that prioritizes immigrant rights would, in many ways, be a bill for sex worker rights in disguise.

RACHEL AIMEE cofounded $pread magazine in 2004 and was an editor-in-chief for four and a half years. Now a parent and freelance copy editor, she also organizes for strippers’ rights with We Are Dancers. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

1. Exotic dancers in most strip clubs across the United States are required to pay “house fees” to work. Although it’s illegal to charge house fees, few dancers take legal action against club owners.