A Justice-Based Approach to the Anti-Trafficking Movement
Tings Chak, Chanelle Gallant, Elene Lam, and Kate Zen
On October 11, 2014, Evelyn Bumetay Castillo was murdered. Forty-three years old and a Filipino citizen, Evelyn came to Canada as a temporary foreign worker in January 2013. While caring for a family with three children, Evelyn was also working as an independent sex worker. Evelyn is one of millions of migrants who are displaced each year and seek ways to support their families abroad. Instead of finding justice and dignity, she found precarious work in Canada, where the laws criminalize and illegalize lives and livelihoods.
In July 2004, a sixteen-year-old woman from Grenada who had reported a sexual assault to the Toronto Police was handed over to immigration enforcement. In 2013, Lucia Vega Jimenez took her own life in immigration detention after a public transit officer turned her over to immigration enforcement for failing to pay her bus fare. Simply carrying out one’s daily life or trying to access basic services as a nonstatus person means facing the risk of detention and deportation—daily life is a challenge to borders.
Between April 27 and April 29, 2015, uniformed cops showed up unannounced at twenty massage parlours and private residences where, according to Ottawa police Sergeant Jeff LeBlanc, “a lot of foreign nationals were working.” They targeted “mainly Asian” businesses to “determine if there was any exploitation.” Though no human trafficking was found, eleven women were detained by Canadian Border Services and later deported. Rather than being given help, these migrant workers were treated as criminals and punished by a joint operation of bylaw enforcement, immigration control, and the police Human Trafficking Section.
The Migrant Sex Worker Project was formed in 2014 to honour the lives of Evelyn, Lucia, and all the unnamed migrants and sex workers. In the following, we discuss how we came together and outline our struggle for permanent immigration status, safety, and dignity for all women and mothers, migrants and sex workers—for all workers.
In 2014, three long-time grassroots activists in Toronto who had been working on the intersections between race, migration, and sex work came together to found the Migrant Sex Worker Project (MSWP). The project aimed to deal with problems facing migrants in the sex trade. We saw that migrant sex workers of all genders were constantly being endangered by law enforcement, immigration enforcement, and bylaw enforcement, and harassed, abused, and deported by the state—yet completely abandoned by those who claimed to be protecting their human, legal, or labour rights. We saw that in the migrant justice movements we were involved in, there was often an absence of sex worker voices and leadership, and likewise in sex workers’ rights organizing, an invisibilization of migrants and racialized peoples. The last attempts to organize around migrant sex work had taken place over a decade ago, but there was clearly a need and a desire to refocus on the particular needs of migrant sex workers and bring together our movements and struggles. We demanded and continue to demand more than this.
We are a grassroots group of migrants, sex workers, and allies who demand safety and dignity for all sex workers regardless of immigration status. We use a justice-based framework that places sex worker rights on an equal footing with racism, settler colonialism, and border imperialism. We create tools that migrant sex workers use to protect themselves against human rights violations, educate the public about the dangers of anti-trafficking rhetoric that contributes towards criminalization and border enforcement, and advocate to change policies that hurt and exploit migrants in the sex trade.
We came together at a time when the old sex work laws in Canada had been struck down and there was the possibility of creating something new and visionary that supported the lives of migrant sex workers. We saw the potential of bringing together migrant justice and sex work justice to counter the dominance of anti-trafficking propaganda and policies and their harmful effects.
In 2015, our first year, the Migrant Sex Work Project did culturally relevant outreach and creative arts-based organizing with both documented and undocumented migrant sex workers. This has required persistence and experimentation. The organizing is focused on three areas of work: legal education, public education, and alliance building. Since we began in 2014, we have produced practical guides for migrant sex workers on changes to sex work and immigration regulations, offered support to our sister organization Butterfly, which does direct outreach to hundreds of migrant sex workers in Toronto, presented at dozens of conferences and panels on everything from sexual violence to migrant rights to LGBTQ refugees and forced labour. Currently, we are working to build cross-movement alliances, change municipal policy on sex work, and create a multilingual, easy-to-read comic book that will use real-life experiences to help migrant sex workers protect themselves from abuse in their interactions with enforcement.
We want a strong, effective voice for sex workers, one where sex workers are always at the table where decisions about their lives are being made. We believe that we need to organize as and alongside migrant sex workers, building a range of coalitions, including with migrant labour organizations, anti-incarceration and anti–racial profiling campaigns, and anti-poverty and global justice projects.1 Doing this work means going beyond “sex positivity” and other politics of sexual freedom and prioritizing the experiences of those who are most marginalized.2 It means making space for migrant sex workers to take leadership in addressing the issues that most concern their lives. It means that we all understand how various communities are differently impacted by criminalization, colonization, and racism, and that we work to fight them together.
For many sex workers who are not migrants, this means understanding migrant justice concepts and applying them to our work. With a migrant sex work justice framework, we start from the intersections of race, migration, and labour. Starting from the top, with the broader theory, and drilling down, migrant sex work justice means placing sex worker rights on an equal footing with the battles against racism, settler colonialism, and border imperialism. In our work, we draw much of our framework on migrant justice from the work of groups such as No One Is Illegal in Toronto, a group of immigrants, refugees and allies who fight for the rights of all migrants to live with dignity and respect. We believe in the freedom to move, return, and stay for all migrant peoples, while also being grounded in solidarity with Indigenous sovereignty struggles.
In concrete terms, our demands include:
Though there is no reliable research on this, we know from experience that migrants comprise a large percentage of sex workers in the United States and Canada, and yet they are largely absent from the North American sex worker rights movement. Facing greater risks of criminalization and deportation, as well as language and cultural barriers, it is no wonder that migrant sex workers face serious obstacles to organizing. At the same time, the lack of representation of migrants in the mainstream sex worker movement has made it easier for sex work prohibitionists to appropriate their experiences within the anti-trafficking movement.3 Always already assumed to be trafficking victims, migrant sex workers are spoken over by saviours who presume to represent them. Since the inception of a mainstream sex worker movement in the 1970s, anti–sex work feminists have used stereotypes of enslaved migrant workers as a means to dismiss the leaders of this movement as simply “happy hookers” who are out of touch with the realities of the harsher side of the sex trade.4
But most migrant sex workers are a lot like other sex workers—they engage in work that is not always “happy” or safe, yet it is nevertheless an economic choice made within a limited range of labour options. While they may often face various forms of exploitation in their workspaces, the vast majority of migrant sex workers are not victims of human trafficking. The dual criminalization resulting from immigration policies status and anti–sex work laws makes it doubly dangerous for migrant sex workers to be visible. However, their invisibility only serves to highlight the importance of decriminalization, which is necessary to bring their circumstances to light and safely out from the underground, and to offer (by offering) them protection and labour rights regardless of immigration status.
Many sex workers reject the label of victim. They make their own decisions, even if those decisions are often highly constrained because there aren’t many other work options. But some within sex worker movements buy into false hierarchies and see racialized migrant sex workers as “the real victims” or inaccurately blame migrants for bringing down wages. Some even support anti-trafficking policies as long as they only target migrant sex workers. Such racism and xenophobia divide and weaken our movement and our power.
Capitalism is the basis of labour exploitation, and restrictive immigration policies deepen that exploitation for poor racialized migrants. But choosing to accept working conditions that are less than ideal does not equate to being trafficked. Migrant sex workers have agency and their work is not trafficking.
We realize the problems with assuming that all migrant sex workers are the victims of trafficking; we witness the harm of anti-trafficking initiatives to migrant sex workers. As an example, in Toronto, the “human trafficking enforcement team” is located within the sex crimes unit.5 The enforcement team deals only with enforcing sex work laws through stings that keep sex workers on the run from police and without protection. The team has no mandate to deal with the ways that migrant workers in many industries face force and exploitation. This kind of approach to the sex industry is global, and we see it at the highest levels of policy such as with the UN Palermo Protocol, which distinguishes between “sex trafficking” and “labour trafficking.”6 This is to make it very clear that the UN does not consider forced sex work to be a labour issue but a “sex issue,” therefore not requiring the typical remedies such as labour protections and decriminalization.
If we make changes that mean migrants in the sex trade are protected and free to make their own decisions, that would mean that many, many more sex workers would get the same freedoms as well, including those who have very different lives. That’s because to make things right for migrant sex workers we have to get rid of so many systems that intersect with their lives. Challenging poverty, racist immigration policies based on colonial borders, the restrictions on sex work, and so on, would mean that we all get closer to collective liberation.
Migrant sex workers are members of our society, who live, work, play, and struggle in and with our communities. A migrant sex worker is anyone of any gender (including trans women and trans men) who has moved from one place to another, either through formal or informal avenues, and works in the sex industry. Migrant sex workers are undermined at every turn: from the immigration policies that try to keep them out or detain and deport them after armed raids on their workplace, to the anti–sex work laws that push them into working in isolation in the most dangerous parts of the sex industry. Migrant sex workers may be citizens, permanent residents, students, visitors, temporary workers, or nonstatus people. In places where sex work is legalized, there’s usually still at least one group of sex workers left to fend for themselves in underground parts of the sex industry: migrants who are undocumented.
Migrant sex workers are frequently poor and working-class women of colour. They often face struggles with immigration, housing, and accessing health services and labour protections. We honour migrant people’s ability and freedom to consent to sex work, and we recognize that their consent is relevant!7 We acknowledge that forced labour, though rare, exists in the sex industry and we work to end forced labour in all labour sectors.8 Migrant sex workers across the globe struggle to work in healthy and safe environments without the threat of arrest, detention, or deportation.
Like many countries, Canada has made it illegal to travel to Canada and engage in any sex work, legal or otherwise, such as stripping or webcam work (see operational bulletin 449 by Citizenship and Immigration Canada).9 This is also happening in an immigration context where there are fewer and fewer “formal” pathways for racialized migrants from the global south to enter Canada with permanent status, resulting in more precarious and illegalized migration. This is why recent research in Canada revealed that 95 percent of migrant women in the sex industry in Toronto would not call police even “if they experienced violence, harassment, abuse or exploitation.”10 They are smart enough to know that they’d be risking immediate detention, deportation, being outed to their families, and having all of their earnings stolen. Like many racialized people—migrant and not—they also know that involving police means risking physical or sexual abuse by police or prison guards.
Despite the “Sanctuary City” policy passed in Toronto in 2013, making it the first city in the country to declare municipal services (including police services) accessible to all residents regardless of immigration status, undocumented and precarious status migrants continue to face this daily threat of detention and deportation. A recent report launched by No One is Illegal –Toronto entitled Often Asking, Always Telling11 revealed that Toronto Police Service’s routine practice of race- and class-based profiling and carding has resulted in one hundred weekly immigration “status checks” on people who are suspected of being undocumented (namely, those who are racialized, low-income, and have an accent). This is in direct violation of the Sanctuary City policy. It is no wonder that migrants, especially those trading or selling sex, prefer their own networks to protect themselves. And as we know, helping sex workers is always criminalized in some way, for example through “pimping” laws or as “living off the avails of prostitution.”12 So migrant sex workers keep doing their own thing, carefully avoiding law enforcement, bypassing racist immigration restrictions, and making a living for themselves in spite of the sticky web of control and punishment they face at every turn.
Given the picture that we have described in this chapter, we don’t believe that the anti-trafficking and immigration systems are “broken.” We think they are intentional and effective systems that serve the interests of business, government, and nonprofits in wealthy “Western” countries. Central to these interests is the control over the movement of migrants from the global south to the north. The elite in wealthy northern countries use political and economic force to extract resources from the south then militarize the borders to retain control over those resources. This also ensures the availability of an impoverished pool of highly exploitable, disposable temporary workers. “Anti-trafficking” is a way to control the movement and labour of migrant women in particular. Some anti-traffickers are genuinely well meaning, but they are being used in the service of this larger project of controlling and exploiting migrants and sex workers. As a result, the strategies to resist the anti-trafficking movement cannot be based on “raising awareness” or “reforming a broken system” alone but must address the underlying forces of displacement, criminalization, and illegalization and fight to shift power towards those most directly impacted.
“No one is illegal,” the rallying cry of the migrant justice movement, is an assertion that people are not inherently “illegal” but are made illegal by an oppressive, racist, and exploitative immigration system. About three hundred thousand people enter Canada on a temporary basis each year—many more than are given permanent residency. Most undocumented people enter Canada with some sort of immigration status (as a visitor, student, migrant worker, refugee claimant, etc.) and subsequently lose that status because of restrictive immigration policies. Undocumented people are not “jumping the queue.” There simply is no immigration “queue” for many of us! As it becomes more difficult to enter through “legal” channels, people are pushed underground. And doing sex work certainly doesn’t earn you “points” in a “point-based” immigration system based on fake racist and classist notions of meritocracy.
For undocumented people (like the two hundred thousand living in the greater Toronto area) going about daily life is itself a challenge to borders.13 Enrolling a child in school, accessing a shelter or food bank, or taking public transit without immigration papers can result in detention and deportation. “Anti-trafficking” policies beef up immigration enforcement in our communities and at the borders. We are seeing increased collusion between immigration control and law enforcement here in Toronto. Policies like “Access Without Fear” and resistance to police carding are critical to pushing back on the ways that police racially profile people who look like immigrants, asking for their immigration documents, and then turn them over to immigration officials. This is also illustrated by the prominent raids of sex work establishments like massage parlours or strip clubs that happen under the guise of protecting “public morality” and “public health. These involve municipal officers checking for licensing, or immigration enforcement looking for “trafficking victims” or “illegal migrants.”14
As permanent residency becomes less and less attainable for most, many migrants, including women and youth sex workers who need or want to leave their homes for another country, are forced to seek out “irregular” methods of migrating, relying on third parties. However, instead of placing blame on the policies of nation states for increasing the vulnerability of migrant women, the government and public response is to criminalize the people who are facilitating migrants’ movement into the global north. Today, it is almost impossible to migrate without someone’s help—you can’t simply get on a plane or walk across a border without documentation (forged or otherwise). For many of the world’s migrants, migration is only possible through illegal means. These means are very similar to those used by other forcibly displaced peoples. Indeed, Harriet Tubman could be considered a “human smuggler” for assisting the passage of slaves through the Underground Railroad.
Increasing options for people to migrate keeps power in the migrant’s hands. It isn’t sex work that makes people of all genders working in sex industry more vulnerable to violence. Rather, as this chapter has amply demonstrated, the migrant sex workers’ vulnerability is produced through the criminalization of sex work and migration and the lack of access to permanent status.