Understanding Migrant Sex Workers' Struggles: Reading "Not Your Rescue Project"

I'm reading "Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice" There are books that I get a hold of that I have to read more than once, and this is one of those books.

"When most people think about migrant sex workers, they think of them not as humans, but as objects of grave moral concern. Not as powerful and capable community members, but as social problems."

You can insert the homeless, sex workers, transgender people, or any other oppressed minority there, and it still works. The people at the center of any of these issues aren't the main focus of the saviors. They are seen as objects to save. The debates rarely include real voices of the people involved.

Like other working-class people, migrant sex workers suffer poor working conditions under capitalism. When migrant sex workers face exploitation at work, this is labor exploitation.When they face abuse at work, this is labor abuse or violence against workers. When they are forced to sell sex (or to sell sex in ways that they do not want to), this is forced labor. Their problems are worker problems.

The book explains a lot of the history of anti-trafficking laws in the USA, and it's roots in white supremacy:

Chinese migrant women were also some of the first targets of anti-trafficking laws, under which they were subjected to immigration investigations on whether they were being trafficked “for lewd and immoral purposes.” In 1910, the US Congress passed the White Slave Traffic Act to target sex-trafficking rings and to protect white girls from forced prostitution that they were lured into by “foreign immigrant traffickers.”

and

They face racist immigration restrictions and hostility from white supremacist countries that view them as permanent outsiders and expect them to be servile and impoverished, performing the backbreaking jobs that white people don’t want, without a right to citizenship, labor protections, or full participation in democratic governance. White supremacy frames migrant sex workers as a social problem and as a dangerous threat to Western values, families, and border security.

and explains how the anti-trafficking industry is a tool of the state to enact violence upon migrant sex workers:

Criminalization through anti-trafficking policies allows the state to emerge as the great “rescuer,” while leaving migrant sex workers more susceptible to violence and exploitation. Mimicking the “white slave panic” of earlier eras, today’s trafficking discourses are framed in the language of “modern-day slavery.” This white supremacist saviordom is a gross and glaring appropriation of Black liberation struggles to enable the very thing that abolition is opposed to: increased criminalization and violence.

The premise of anti-trafficking laws is that because vulnerable women and girls are “trafficked” against their will, they must be “sent back.” Like the oxymoron of feminist jails, these are supposedly “feminist deportations.” This state violence is gender-based violence. And ironically, this kind of coerced “rescue” seems a lot like actual trafficking. The purpose of anti-trafficking measures, then, is not to support migrant sex workers but to increase policing and to restrict the free movement and labor of migrant women.

That migrant sex workers suffer under capitalism in the same way that all working class people do.

Under conditions of poverty, limited opportunities, and social inequality, workers make choices about their best options. This includes migrant sex workers. Other labor activists do not need to prove that workers are capable of consenting to their labor, even though capitalism forces everyone to work to survive.

It’s not that sex work is necessarily good, it’s that it can often be better than other work. The jobs available to low-income racialized migrants in other sectors are some of the worst jobs in the world. Work in agricultural, manufacturing, construction, warehouse, and domestic labor sectors is notoriously poorly paid, punitive, relentless, exploitative, and dangerous.

When the alternative is deportation, arrest, and poverty, millions of migrants are coerced into brutally exploitative labor contracts. Migrant worker activists including, Harsha Walia, have described these conditions as modern indentureship, and in some cases, “systemic slavery.” The conditions of these work permits are deceptive, coercive, and unfree.

And discuss what a danger that "anti-trafficking" NGOs are to migrant sex workers:

In reality, anti-trafficking nonprofits do not combat human trafficking, violence, exploitation, and coercion in the sex industry; they facilitate, enhance, and expand state violence.

They are aligned not with a social justice movement fighting gender-based violence and “modern slavery,” but with right-wing and carceral feminist movements that are opposed to racial, social, and economic justice.

The anti-trafficking industry must be delegitimized, defunded, and abolished. It is designed for social control, and because it is founded on white supremacy, sexism, and state violence, it cannot be reformed.

and how SWERF/TERF feminism is and has always been a right of center operation that has held hands with conservative evangelicals.

Feminist anti-trafficking organizations work with these extremist anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ groups and with anti-trans feminists. One of the larger feminist, anti-trafficking and anti–sex work organizations in the US is World Without Exploitation (WWE), which leads campaigns against the decriminalization of sex work across the country and works in coalition with far-right Christian organizations, including NCOSE and Exodus Cry (whose founder describes Planned Parenthood as “Planned Assassination”).7 WWE is a US-based project of the Coalition Against the Trafficking of Women, the first anti-trafficking NGO of the modern era, which was shaped and formerly led by Janice Raymond, one of the leading architects of both trans-exclusive feminism and sex work–exclusive feminism.

Anti–sex work feminists are not “abolitionists.” They are prohibitionists who advocate for a type of criminalization and law enforcement that they claim is feminist.

Anti–sex work feminists do not join migrant sex workers in their campaigns for fair working conditions or safe migration, but instead organize against those campaigns.

They call for more rights for sex workers

Migrant sex workers must have control over their movement—and that means the power, resources, and information they need to reduce the risks and vulnerability that accompany different stages of migration.

No migrant workers, including sex workers, should be forced into exploitative temporary work visas, nor should they have their mobility tied to any employer.

and call the trafficking non-profit industry for what it is... an arm of the state who perpetuate harm of migrant sex workers, not rescue them.

In a time of escalating fascism, this book urges us to refuse right-wing, fear-mongering moral panics. Lam and Gallant drive home that the issue we should be concerned with is not trafficking or victim narratives (what they say function as “a concealed form of state violence”) but, rather, the control of migration, the criminalization of sex work, the exploitation of labor relations within capitalism, and the circuits of empire that manufacture vulnerability.

It was an eye-opening read from people organizing on the ground, helping, collaborating, and listening to migrant sex workers.