Migrant Sex Workers’ Resistance Offers a Blueprint for Fighting Authoritarianism

Few people think of their local massage parlor as a site of anti-fascist resistance. But we’ve spent years working with migrant women in the sex industry, and we can tell you — if you want to learn how to resist authoritarianism in the United States, ask those already resisting it: migrant sex workers.

President Donald Trump has wasted no time launching the first wave of his administration’s draconian anti-immigrant, anti-worker and anti-woman Project 2025 agenda. But much of Project 2025’s program for attacking the wider immigrant community has long been a reality for certain migrants — including those in the sex industry. From them, we can learn how the U.S. government might intensify attacks on undocumented people. But more importantly, they show us how everyday people evade, defy and resist vicious state control and punishment.

Because they sit at the intersection of racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia and anti-sex work sentiment (whorephobia), migrant sex workers have been one of the most effective scapegoats for U.S. ruling-class elites. This has allowed the U.S. state to test, fund and normalize surveillance, criminalization and punishment such as travel bans, terrorizing worksite raids and seizing wages from workers.

Migrant sex workers are outlaws. Hundreds of thousands of them live in a kind of mini-police state within the U.S., where it is illegal for them to enter the country, and they cannot associate with each other, organize their workplace, unionize, open a bank account, rent an apartment or cross state lines without risk of arrest. All of these activities are criminalized under municipal, state, federal and immigration laws. They live, move and work in these illegal contexts, evading every form of surveillance, civilian reporting/snitching, law enforcement and racist neighbors and lawmakers. They do it by building community, through organizing, creativity, persistence and above all, noncompliance. They defy borders, immigration law and a capitalist system that demands that migrants like them labor in only certain highly controlled and exploited ways, such as in farms and factories. They are braver than most of us, but too few of our friends on the left see them as radical comrades engaged in everyday resistance to authoritarianism.

Stripping Away Legal Rights

The Trump administration promises to attack migrants in many ways, including by slashing pathways to legal immigration status. For some migrants, this means a return to earlier Trump policies that attempted to ban people based on region and religion, like the revived Muslim ban. For those in the sex industry, those pathways to legal immigration status have never existed.

Migrant sex workers have been the target of the U.S.’s first and longest continuous travel ban: The Page Act of 1875 prohibited any Chinese woman that U.S. agents suspected of engaging in sex work from entering the U.S. The Page Act was later replaced by the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned nearly all Chinese migrants until it was repealed in 1947. But to this day, the U.S. continues to forbid the entry of persons who have engaged in sex work in the past 10 years or who plan to sell sex in the U.S. Based on this travel ban, migrant sex workers of any immigration status are subject to surveillance, worksite raids, detention and deportation, such as the raid on the Orchids of Asia Day Spa, which became famous for accidentally ensnaring billionaire Robert Kraft. His charges were all dropped. Meanwhile, four Chinese women workers were arrested, convicted and forced to pay fines of up to $45,000.

Migrant sex workers are also assaulted, robbed, and killed in worksite raids, murdered by vigilante border agents or deported to their death, as in the case of Melissa Nuñez, a Honduran trans woman sex worker who was murdered only weeks after she was deported from the U.S. due to arrests for sex work.

In our book Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice, we reveal how the U.S. government has created a web of criminalization to capture migrant sex workers no matter how they work or where they live. U.S. immigration regulations bar them from working in the sex industry (or entering the country at all), while state and federal criminal laws also define migrant sex work as “organized crime” or as “sex trafficking.” Those in power stoke fears of the racialized sexual predator by framing migrant sex work as a crime committed by “gangs,” “pimps” and “illegals.” Migrant massage workers are subject to much of the same surveillance and criminalization, whether or not they also sell sexual services, due to their association with sex work.

How do migrant sex workers survive this degree of hyper-criminalization? They defy it.

Resisting in and Against the Legal System

For migrant sex workers, creative noncompliance is a matter of survival. Without it, they lose everything. For reasons we outline in our book, many migrant sex workers choose to live at work. If their worksite is shut down due to arrests — as happened to over two dozen women during a series of forced-entry worksite raids at Seattle massage parlors in 2019 — they not only lose their livelihood, they lose their home. On top of that, officers often seize (or steal) all of their wages, their phones, even their jewelry. So migrant sex workers have to get creative about how to fight attacks on their worksites.

Migrant sex workers have been the target of the U.S.’s first and longest continuous travel ban.

In one example, a few years ago, in 2022, politicians and business interests in the wealthy, majority white town of Newmarket, Ontario, began to wage a campaign to shut down massage businesses — almost all of which were Asian-run. They used false claims that these businesses were sites of sex trafficking despite having no evidence of coercion or violence. The real reason for the campaign may have been revealed when an elected council member spoke glowingly about how the massage workers who’d lost their jobs would be able to fill the staffing shortages at local care facilities.

One of the tactics that Newmarket’s city council used was to change local regulations so that only those who’d completed formal massage training could work in massage businesses. This was a sneaky way of pushing out working-class immigrant workers who can’t afford expensive, full-time English-language massage training programs. At first it worked, and many migrant women were pushed out of their jobs.

An organization called Butterfly: Asian and Migrant Sex Worker Support Network (founded by one of this article’s authors, Elene Lam) helped the workers respond to the city’s underhanded tactics by mobilizing over 100 organizations to protest the new rules and organizing workers to design their own trilingual massage training program with a local university to attain the required credentials. Some of the migrant massage businesses are still targeted by the city, but many workers have been able to keep their jobs through creative defiance and traditional organizing strategies.

Worksite Raids

Project 2025 seeks to remove marginalized communities from public life — from trans people in bathrooms to refugees in urban centers. For migrant workers, this looks like more inhumane Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids at worksites, racially targeting communities where they live and work, as well as the recent rollback of policies that restrict immigration agents from arresting or detaining migrants in “protected areas” like schools, churches and hospitals.

Terrifying forced-entry worksite raids are a regular occurrence for workers in massage businesses run by migrants. Using racial profiling, police officers target migrant massage businesses for surveillance; officers extort sex from workers, conduct raids, arrest and detain everyone and seize all of the workers’ earnings through asset forfeiture laws.

Migrants in the sex trade have never been protected by being in or near schools, hospitals and churches. In fact, this puts them at an even higher risk of arrest. A surprising number of people can be convinced to enthusiastically collaborate with the police — so long as they believe that they are helping the police to protect the world from a dangerous “other.” This can be true even among progressives and leftists. For example, some advocacy nonprofits run campaigns to harass, surveil and close migrant massage businesses that are located near schools, with no evidence these businesses pose any threat to children. Conservative Christian churches organize campaigns to surveil and shut down Asian massage businesses they view as sinful and a threat to the Christian family. And many health care workers across the U.S. have been trained to view migrant sex workers as sex trafficking victims and report them to the police. This turns the site of care into a site of surveillance, making it dangerous for migrant sex workers to seek health care. Even anti-violence organizations like World Without Exploitation collaborate extensively with far right, extremist Christian organizations like Exodus Cry on campaigns that would criminalize the immigrant massage sector.

Bold Solidarity

Over the past few years, more racial justice organizations have been coming to understand their shared stake alongside migrant sex workers who are used as scapegoats to justify broader surveillance, more cops, tighter border restrictions and racist narratives that immigrants bring crime and sexual violence.

As part of researching Not Your Rescue Project, we spoke to Yves Tong Nguyen, an organizer with Red Canary Song in New York City, and Emi Koyama of Massage Parlor Outreach Project (MPOP) in Seattle, who both described being part of coalitions fighting for the shared goals of ending police surveillance and arrests in their areas. MPOP has worked with organizations like Chinatown/International District Coalition fighting gentrification happening via raids on migrant massage parlors, and Red Canary Song works in coalition with Survived & Punished, Centro Corona, Desis Rising Up and Moving and Trans Equity Consulting against increased policing and surveillance. In Toronto, the previously mentioned Butterfly: Asian and Migrant Sex Workers Support Network has a coalition of over 100 organizations that have been willing to take action alongside migrant sex and massage workers. These organizations are not always completely aligned in their views of sex work, but they share the understanding that attacks on migrant sex workers legitimize and expand the power and budgets of police and border agents, creating danger for all racialized people.

Demonization and Dehumanization

Polk County, Florida, Sheriff Grady Judd, describing the results of a police worksite raid on a local massage business that led to the arrest of 21 women, said: “There’s some interesting facts about this: All 21 of these ladies are not only Asian, they are from the Republic of China — a communist country … all of them are from China. It makes you wonder.”

What did Sheriff Judd want us to wonder about regarding the race of the arrested workers and the fact that they were from China? His comments evoke a racist narrative of “infiltration” by the dangerous outsider — Asians from communist countries.

For migrant sex workers, creative noncompliance is a matter of survival. Without it, they lose everything.

Project 2025 demonizes migrants, using terms like “illegal aliens” and “infiltrate.” Migrant sex workers have been called that — and much worse — for over a century by not only the right, but also liberals and so-called feminists as well. From white suffragettes who referred to Asian men as “Oriental monsters,” to the 2021 Atlanta shooter — a young white Christian man who went on a killing spree in massage spas against women he considered “temptations” he needed to eliminate — U.S. elites have promoted the view that migrants in the sex industry are “filthy,” and the areas where they work are “sex-plagued,” and that they do not deserve dignity, safety or freedom of movement. Contemporary feminists do their part by characterizing migrant sex workers as mute, nameless victims, such as when AF3IRM, a “transnational feminist organization” alleged that the women who were arrested at Orchids of Day Spa were part of an “international sex trafficking ring,” in spite of their insistence otherwise.

These workers have been so demonized as threats to the American family, morality and the U.S. border for so long that their total criminalization has already been thoroughly normalized. Few people know that federal anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution laws can make it illegal to assist migrant sex workers in almost any way, including providing them with food or a ride, loaning them money or letting them live with you. Their work, migration, all their relationships and all of their personal communication are criminalized. Being under complete assault by the state like this leaves people isolated and without the supports that protect against violence, such as stable wages and housing.

Community Networks of Care

Mutual aid is not new for racialized, oppressed people, for criminalized communities, and migrants who cannot safely or legally access any state support. They rely on their friends and family, even to get health services. Red Canary Song’s Tong Nguyen told us in a 2023 interview for Not Your Rescue Project:

Before Red Canary Song, migrant massage and sex workers in New York were already taking care of each other. They were showing up at the jails for each other; showing up at the trials; when someone is abused, when someone is trying to escape, when someone is fighting off their client. They were showing up when someone didn’t have money to pay rent; when people didn’t have money to get food; when people needed child care. That has always been true, though it has been historically overlooked. Every single day, the government and the prison industrial complex try to isolate people. Yet people have survived for decades and decades and decades. From the moment that migrants — especially those who are undocumented and criminalized — show up in Red Canary Song, they see each other and they’re like, “We are all we have.”

Amid a second Trump term, the U.S. ruling class are doing what they have done for at least a century — advocating for racist anti-migrant policy by blaming migrants for the crises that the wealthy themselves are responsible for, such as inflation, housing shortages, and the deaths and mass disabling due to COVID-19. It is deeply important that we recognize how much we need each other, and that an attack on migrant sex workers opens the doors to attacks on everyone. Project 2025 and other right-wing attacks on workers, LGBTQ people and women will require a far higher degree of solidarity and commitment to each other.

But we know from our 20-plus years of organizing that it is not easy to align with people across such vast class and race experiences. It’s why we decided to write a book about migrant sex workers — some of the most hyper-criminalized people in the U.S. — and their resistance. Because we should all ask ourselves: How can we be more like migrant sex workers? Defiant, bold risk-takers, creative problem solvers, and above all, noncompliant — a true threat to the power of the U.S. empire.