Hotels, Business, Sex Trafficking, and The LAW

Every day, I wake up to a conversation about immigration and trafficking sparked by Donald Trump’s twitter page. His obsession recently is on women being duct tapped and thrown into vans to cross the border. The investigative reporting is comical as the public’s growing awareness that “trafficking”, is being used to justify racial persecution is finally coming to the mainstream. Certain media outlets, border patrol, and other agencies look for any evidence that could prove Trump’s justification for why a system of cruelty is necessary to maintain and increase. All they need is ONE story of a woman being duct tapped somehow, or taken into a van to spin it as a epidemic that requires suppression of rights of immigrants from south of the border. All they need Is ONE story to prove that it wasn’t just a made up lie to justify the unjustifiable.

So much of what the public understands about sex trafficking comes from xenophobic and racist horror stories that have existed for over a century. The idea of human trafficking comes from the Progressive Era, a time period that many link with “moral reform” like prohibition. Many people understand that prohibition (criminalizing the sell, distribution, and consumption of alcohol) caused it to go underground, made it more dangerous, and made it likely to be controlled by gangs. Many people never learn about the other moral crusades that were advocated for during the time, despite the myths being very popular today. The general ideas being pushed by Americans during the time was that Chinese women were inherently immoral whores that only came to the US to “sell themselves” and therefore were destroying American society. To protect society and “the children” from an “unarmed invasion” they passed the Page Act of 1875 (Aka The Oriental Exclusion Act of 1875).

In March 3, 1875, the Senate and House Representations of the United States of America in Congress approved a law stating that any immigration of Chinese, Japanese, or any Asian country, to the United States must be free and voluntary. There were five sections to the Page law. The second section stated that any citizen of the United States whotried to transport any Chinese, Japanese or from any of the Asian countries without their consent would be punished with a fine and jail time. The third section stated that any woman transported to the United States for the purpose of prostitution was forbidden and any contract made prior to the transportation would be voided and a fine and jail time sentenced. The fourth section stated that any person who made a deal in the present or past to illegally supply "coolie" labor would be penalized with a fine and jail time. The fifth section stated that any foreign person convicted of a crime not including political crimes and any woman transported to work as a prostitute would be denied access to the United States. All ships were subject to inspection if there was any suspicion of illegal immigrants on board or any one that is annoying or disturbing. All illegal immigrants that had been denied had the right to contest in a court of law. 

It was American’s first major federal restriction on immigration, marking an official end to open borders, and it was first federal law restricting prostitution (sex work). Every wave of immigrants including Irish and Italians had those that entered sex work, drug trade, or selling alcohol to make money. It’s interesting that such swiping legislation didn’t happen under the focus was on Asian immigrants. The act made it almost impossible for Asian women to enter the US, and it caused a crack down by police of Mexican and Asian communities, deporting women and breaking up families. Prostitution during the time increased because of the demand from Asian men no longer having partners. Just like how Chinese were singled out for discrimination and it impacted many other groups, so today the group singled out are Mexicans even the laws impacts all immigrants and citizens. The Page Law was advertised and passed as a way to prevent Asian immigrants who were “suspected of prostitution”, and to prevent Asian immigrants coming as “forced workers” (trafficked/enslaved). This is the way modern day “trafficking laws”, and anti immigrant bills are sold to the public to this day.

The Page Law prevented the immigration of women from “China, Japan or any other Oriental country” who were suspected of prostitution. Since many Chinese women at the time immigrated to the United States to participate in the prostitution industry by force or coercion, the Page Law functioned to effectively bring immigration of Chinese women to a complete halt. Kerry Abrams argues that while the Page Law was nominally concerned with preventing prostitution, it acted to pave the way for Chinese Exclusion Act and functioned to legitimize the concerns of anti-Chinese protectionists that branded Chinese immigrant families as deviant, despotic and wholly incompatible with citizenship in a democratic republic.

During the Progressive Era religious figures, feminists, and other activists would pass out pamphlets about various social issues - one of the most popular was white slavery. The myth was that white girls were being tricked, trapped, and “taken” into a sad and ugly life of prostitution by foreigners. Much like how the KKK sold themselves as protectors of white women from colored “savages”, the myth was (and continues to be) wildly popular among pop culture, society, and the government. Many rallied to pass the Mann Act (Aka The White-Slave Traffic Act) in 1910, this law is still in place to this very day. In fact laws created with the words “sex trafficking” or just “human trafficking” are passed very easily by both parties to expand government control and exclusion. The law was used to target consenting adults in the sex industry as well as those having sex outside of marriage, cheating, people having interracial relationships, and predominately people of color.

Both the Page Act (later leading to the Chinese Exclusion Act) and Mann Act led to our highly surveillanced people, and restrictive laws around sex work, drugs, and immigration. Politicians have long learned this is how you get votes. You use the imagery of tied up women and girls being auctioned off for sexual slavery by a massive wave of foreign “illegals” to score votes. Companies using the imagery of young girls being traded by pimps through online advertisements, banks, hotels, airlines, and all parts of society as an excuse to increase surveillance, increase their worker’s responsibility, establish partnerships with government, and discrimination against anyone they perceive as a possible liability. In the past two years I have had my payment accounts through PayPal, GooglePay, Circle, and others shut down for selling adult content. Tumblr, the platform that was essential for me to build relationships, and my business decided it would kick out nudity from their platform. Like all moralistic crusades it led to sex workers, and LGBT creators being shut out of their platforms. There’s a disturbing web of power and control by politicians, the wealthy, and their charities to sell fear to the public. The solution they give is less freedom, and turning over social justice to companies and government’s “tough on crime” philosophy.

Finding numbers on sex trafficking is hard because of the situations many victims come from. The sex industry is a taboo, and is heavily criminalized. Being an immigrant is criminalized and a tough existence to navigate. Because of the criminalized nature of these social realities cases of abuses are rarely reported, and it doesn’t help that the government and sex trafficking orgs don’t have solid definitions, or a clear understanding of how it works.

The findings of the U.S. Department of Justice's 2011 report, include:

From 2008 to 2010, Federal anti-trafficking task forces opened 2,515 suspected cases of human trafficking.

82% of suspected incidents were classified as sex trafficking and nearly half of these involved victims under the age of 18.

Approximately 10% of the incidents were classified as labor trafficking.

83% of victims in confirmed sex-trafficking incidents were identified as U.S. citizens, while most confirmed labor-trafficking victims were identified as undocumented immigrants (67%) or legal immigrants (28%).

25% of the confirmed victims received a "T visa," part of a federal program designed to aid victims of trafficking.

While the findings represent the government's best estimate, the authors caution that "the data described in this report reflect the information that was available to, and entered by, these state and local law enforcement agencies," and such data systems are still being established and are likely not recording all incidents.

***I want to note 3 things here:

(a) That despite most evidence making it clear that most coerced and forced labor is happening in legal industries, such as labor and not in the sex industry, the government and most of these sex trafficking organizations show data showing that sex trafficking is the most common. This simply cannot be true even by their own admission.

(b) Victims of human trafficking can apply for the U visa or the T visa which is really hard to get and prove, and often takes years through a traumatic and expensive process. Teen Vogue wrote an article about a woman, named Shandra Woworuntu who had to go through that experience herself. Their story focused on the latest trend of companies like hotels pretending to fight against “sex trafficking” (more on that later). Anti-immigrant organizations like FAIR, and CIS want to eliminate or make it harder for victims to get the U visa and T visa.

(c) Most of the victims are US citizens. Ask yourself why this system is favoring “saving” US citizens and treating them like victims. You’ll see in other numbers that this treatment of victim hood and innocence is not evenly applied.

To compare some numbers, the Federal anti-trafficking task force opened 2, 515 cases of possible trafficking, very few of which actually led to persecution. In those same years between 2008-2010, there were 209,027 arrests for prostitution and commercialized vice. The numbers average around to 70k arrests every year. Of those arrests from 2008-2010 there were 3867 arrests of juveniles (0-17 years old). These numbers are much higher because these are voluntarily submitted, and an estimated 20% of police departments make the choice to not report their arrests records. What this shows is that the system imprisons way more people than it ever “saves”, and most of the victims have to face a long uphill battle to prove that they are perfect victims in order to get any justice. The public saw this with the case of Cyntia Brown, who was only 16 years old when she began serving a 51 year prison sentence for shooting a man in self defense. Because she was in the sex industry she was criminalized immediately, and the complexity of the situation wasn’t taken into consideration. She was only granted clemency after a huge public uproar, and is currently still in prison and is set to be released on August 7, 2019. She will remain on parole for 10 years after serving 15 years. This system already stole so many years from her, and she has survived near death at the age of 16, and years of violence in the prison industrial system. This system is VERY unforgiving, and it’s functioning the way it’s supposed to. Many children and teens are behind bars for being in the sex industry regardless of circumstance, or how victimized they are. Many juveniles who engage in survival sex work are charged with other things like curfew and loitering law violations, running away, drug violations, drunkenness, disorderly conduct, and much more. Police often force them back into abusive situations/households, fine them or imprison them. Police are agents of state violence and force, they aren’t social workers. Reports like the US Department of Justice’s report on “Prostitution of Juveniles: Patterns From NIBRS” state that “police are more likely to categorize juveniles involved in prostitution as offenders than as crime victims”. There is bias as to who gets to be a victim and who doesn’t, and because our society views “criminals” as non human people don’t want to discuss our unfair the system truly is.

As I stated before that the tech world is eliminating sex workers online, businesses are always more than willingly to throw out specific groups with the changing of laws. People are excluded from being served by businesses, the government, and the law. Historically businesses didn’t serve people of color and while that is changing, it shows that businesses remain profitable even if they exclude various groups. Airlines, fast food chains, and various businesses are quick to turn over undocumented immigrants they know they are exploiting. Many of these companies continue to hire undocumented immigrants after reporting their workers, and giving the feds permission to raid them. These workers have to work knowing that they can be imprisoned and deported at any time without the company paying them, and abusing them. Having worked at retail and watching undocumented immigrants (who unlike me didn’t have the right to work) being exploited, I can tell you that business owners lie and tell their employees to lie. Many CEOS, and managers will tell the public and reporters they are shocked (SHOCKED!!) that undocumented immigrants are working, or that forced labor/child labor is happening in their company. If you were to believe their statements, the hiring of undocumented immigrants is happening, because undocumented immigrants are extremely sneaky and inherently greedy criminals. They might sell themselves as the good ethical employer who is so busy, they don’t notice how much profits they’re making from underpaying and overworking immigrants. I think it’s complete bullshit but it hasn’t stopped 7-eleven and motel 6 from calling the feds on their employees and guests, and claiming innocence. The justification of these actions is to “save” people from “trafficking”. Employees at motel 6 were trained to share guest information with ICE, every morning they would send ICE a list. What we are seeing is the corporate world’s scary amount of power. Motel 6 pays their workers shitty wages, and was giving their worker’s additional responsibility that was meant for the federal government. Companies are not supposed to do this unless they are given a warrant, and yet they are bypassing civil rights meant to protect the people. They are exploiting workers, leading the fight against social issues, aiding law enforcement in surveillance and working with the feds at a huge cost to everyone’s freedoms and trust. I would say the reason they do this is because it’s good PR for them to make their for profit business, look charitable and a part of a global fight for change. If you look behind the sales pitch, it’s corporations controlling more and more aspects of our lives, including our ideas of social change, progress, justice, and charity. I don’t think private businesses should be getting as involved as they are. They employ people to create profit, and they should stay in their lane.

"ICE spokeswoman Yasmeen Pitts O'Keefe said Wednesday the agency receives 'viable enforcement tips from a host of sources' but declined to discuss its possible interactions with Motel 6. She added that motels and hotels have 'frequently been exploited by criminal organizations engaged in highly dangerous illegal enterprises, including human trafficking and human smuggling.'

There have been several articles written about this trend of hotels now starting programs to “train” workers to spot sex traffickers. I’m going to focus my analysis on two of them (Quartz At Work, and Teen Vogue) about Marriot International (sheraton’s parent company).

Over a 9 year time period, Polaris through their free 24/7 hour phone and texting service that anyone can use without any followups, or verifications, only got 1434 claims of human trafficking. Those numbers (like all their numbers) are inflated, and often completely made up. There’s no way to verify them either because all they offer is to talk to you, text you, and direct you to services that already exist – homeless shelters, catholic charities, local lawyers etc. The other thing they do via their hotline and texting service is call the police. That’s all they do through their service.

1,434 cases of human trafficking in hotels and motels*

294 cases of labor exploitation in hotels and motels*

7 recommendations to help hotel owners and employees stop human trafficking

*Cases reported to the National Hotline and Polaris’s BeFree Textline (Dec. 2007 - Feb. 2015)

Compare to arrests for prostitution based on numbers from the Bureau of Justice Statistics:

2008 : 75,004

2009: 71,355

2010: 62,668

2011: 57,345

2012: 56,575

2013: 48,620

2014: 47,598

31,534

Total : 450699 arrests

 For juveniles

2008: 1,471

2009: 1,354

2010: 1,042

2011: 974

2012: 790

2013: 757

2014: 741

2015: 590

Total: 7719 arrests

The website itself is highly disturbing to me, due to their very blunt racial coding. Their most prominent photos on their site are of beautiful white models. When you look up the different types of trafficking the racial coding gets worse, labor trafficking is shown as people of color, whereas sex trafficking is shown as young beautiful white girls. Still more disturbing is that DHS in 2017, had been entertaining the idea of taking children away from parents at the border, to “deter” immigration and asylum seekers through sheer cruelty. The justification for this is that the parents were “traffickers”, or that they could be sexually trafficked by “pimps”. Instead evidence came out that DHS was handing children off to traffickers, children were being detained and treated like criminals in for private detention centers, two children died in their custody, thousands of children went missing, border patrol killed several migrants and justified it, another border patrol murdered 4 woman believing he was cleansing America. Around the same time DHS has started a twitter page of its Blue Campaign which has been operated since 2010, to raise awareness about trafficking. The number to call according to DHS for trafficking is ICE, or a Polaris number.  One of the Blue Campaign’s biggest priorities and partnerships right now is with the hospitality industry, they actually have a toolkit you can access online of how they train hotel and motel staff to spot trafficking.

Reading the articles on this training for employees was like reading an advertisement for Marriott, Hyatt, and Hilton. These trainings, of course aren’t free. Companies start partnerships with Polaris because they want to ramp up their reputation. The hotel industry is very exploitative, Marriott itself had undocumented immigrants courageously come forward and protest last year. Marriott has been exploiting undocumented immigrants and not paying them. They have a third party hire them to try to avoid responsibility, and similarly their sex trafficking classes are transferring responsibility for trafficking away from the company and law enforcement and onto their employees. With the passing of SESTA/FOSTA and immigrants like myself facing the possibility of losing the right to work, many sex workers are forced underground. Many sex workers have disappeared from the internet and have gone back to the old fashioned way of working for an escort agency, working with a friend, or street work to survive. Companies not wanting to be liable under the new law are cutting our ability to work, make money, or exist. Far from saving people, the training, ads, and messaging behind sex trafficking organizations is to clean up society from undesirables. The ugly truth is that real trafficking victims, and the most exploited in society are likely to be working for the hotels themselves, then being one of their guests.

The idea that these articles are pushing is that companies are caring entities, and if they behave and are seen to “advocate for social justice” they will be rewarded by consumers. The government and businesses have been fighting to destroy worker’s rights, and employers disdain workers demanding better treatment. Mass surveillance and criminalization creates a dangerous culture of silence, oppression, and makes survival harder. Undocumented immigrants are criminalized, and that means we are less likely to report abuse by employers, so we suffer in silence. The government and trafficking organizations will insist that making it illegal for us to work, have bank accounts, a hotel room, homes, and other rights will “save” us by “deterring” us from being “illegal” or going into sex work. The idea is to cut of our society, make our existence as deadly as possible. to warn others to not be like us, and to force us to stop being undocumented and sex workers.

Even more terrifying is that we have hard evidence of how discriminatory “sex trafficking” campaigns have been for over a century. To this day, sex trafficking laws and enforcements puts many marginalized groups and juveniles into prison, puts them into our overwhelmed orphanages, deports them, or worse leads to their deaths.  Even a spokesperson who worked the state department and other companies with a focus on sex trafficking stated in the article that”

1)      There is no empirical evidence that such awareness programs work

2)      Reliable data on sex traffic and its prevalence are scarce, period

Which leads one to wonder, why is sex trafficking advertised the way that it is? During Trump’s administration we are constantly reminded that every matter of cruelty that we were witnessing is how our government fights trafficking. People who lead the fight against trafficking are shocked at the public outrage. Afterall this is how the government has combated trafficking for decades, why the sudden alarm now? What we are witnessing is a disturbing trend of businesses survillancing customers, collecting data, and turning it over to the government without a warrant, a reason, and without notice.

Despite the questionable legality of calling police on guests for vague reasons, hotels are portrayed as protecting human rights, even as it is made clear that it was defend their hotel’s reputation, business, and avoiding legal liabilities. Just like hotels keep salaries low, benefits scarce, and hire third party and don’t pay undocumented workers, their motivation for sex trafficking training is economic.

Tu Rinsche, the director of social impact for Marriott International claims that the only difference is that now they are alerting managers of suspicions rather than approaching people themselves. In other words, employees are already taught to report abuses, and suspicious activity.

“Unfortunately, we see these cases all too often where immigrant workers are exploited,” Fiester said. “The janitorial industry is one of the leading violators.”

Sex trafficking narratives that reach the public have a pattern and lack diversity. The stories tend to be of what we call a “perfect victim”, they have no agency at any point (despite the fact that sex workers are more likely to be victims of forced labor and abuse), and they always have a happy ending. You don’t usually hear the common stories of juveniles and adults serving long prison sentences and being marked “criminals” for years for being in the sex industry. You don’t hear about sex workers traveling for work and being banned from countries for 10 years because of facial recognition software that governments and police are now using. You don’t hear the VERY common stories of sex workers being raped or beaten by police, or having their money stolen. You don’t hear the stories of police going to sex workers, and fining them, or handcuffing them to jail afterwards. You won’t hear of women fleeing abusive relationships, and using sex work to survive and escape abuse. Even the stories of sex trafficking are heartbreaking, because the system does not care for survivors, or trafficking victims. If you read the stories it takes years of battle by the victim to convict someone of trafficking, and to reclaim a life for yourself. This is because our criminal justice system puts a huge burden on victims of sexual crimes, often the justice system dismisses crimes against sex workers, or punishes them for coming forward. If you add immigration, the process is even more damaging on survivors because they have to navigate an unforgiving and confusing process just to be allowed to stay.

Criminalized people are very unlikely to get help because they know the system is set up against them. I say this because as long as we continue to live in a system that criminalizes sex work, and undocumented immigrants, victims are unlikely to come forward. Likewise an organization that gets grants from the government, and works with law enforcement is unlikely to help the most vulnerable. Hence why most Polaris data shows that most victims of sex trafficking are American citizens. I’ve seen my family members and friends suffer sever exploitation, working the fields for $5 an hour, and having a major accidents at work that they refuse to sue for or complain about. It’s why businesses like the hotel industry love undocumented immigrants so much, we’re so criminalized, and have so few rights that we make the best workers. We are human beings and we should be allowed the freedom to move and work with dignity. These organizations work with power entities to make us more silent, and more criminalized.