The Trafficking Deportation Pipeline: Asian Body Work and the Auxiliary Policing of Racialized Poverty

In the past decade, a wave of municipal ordinances has swept through North America seeking to police Asian massage work in the name of combating human trafficking. These municipal ordinances have led to sensationalist sting operations that nearly universally subject massage workers to policing and, for those who are undocumented, deportation. This paper thinks through the enduring virility of the trafficking-deportation pipeline by considering forms of auxiliary policing that anti-trafficking responses have enacted on working-class immigrant communities. They justify increasingly diverse modes of criminalization while upholding notions of legitimate and illegitimate labor organized within racial capitalism. This paper extends Bill Ong Hing’s concept of “vigilante racism” (Hing 2002) to understand how the neoliberal policing of poverty has collided with the anti-trafficking movement. This paper focuses on new municipal license regimes for Asian massage workers to reveal how these mechanisms configure hierarchies of labor predicated on markers of race, gender, poverty, and citizenship.