Sex Workers And Immigrants Are Under Attack. Don't Like It? Send DC A Fax

For all their differences, one thing America's sex industry and its migrant labor market have in common is a long and troubled history in which changes to technology and law have played a large part (like in most industries, and areas of life). Since 'Wild West' days, these workers have also gotten very little voice in the systems governing their work.

As a result, US officials have a tradition of ignoring their needs, and taking shots at their homes and incomes instead. In response to recent high-tech, misinformed (and/or misleading) attacks on some of our most vulnerable workers' financial and digital lives, industry members and supporters have started exploring new ways of making their voices heard — in some cases, with distinctly old-school methods.

This year, for example, the new platform Tribunus has allowed web users to weigh in on critical issues when petitions and digital comments are no longer viable steps. On Tribunus' simple site, US residents can contact legislators directly by placing a phone call, sending them a fax, or — if their fax machine is turned off — quickly sending them a paper letter instead.

Tribunus' creator, a Bay Area programmer who asked to be identified as Michael, said he first launched the platform to help defeat a legal measure threatening California sex workers (successfully, after protests and hundreds of letters). Later on, he added pages addressing immigrant family separation and net neutrality.

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In a phone interview, Michael said he decided to build and fund the platform himself after learning how seemingly popular, bipartisan laws can have devastating effects for groups caught in the middle.

As a volunteer for San Francisco's St. James Infirmary, a nonprofit providing a range of services to the area's large and diverse sex worker population, Michael said he's heard many first-hand accounts of how digital strategies by law enforcement are pushing vulnerable communities further into danger, and cutting them off from key financial and social tools, rather than protecting them.

For example, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act and Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (known together as FOSTA-SESTA), a legislative package signed earlier this year, has already caused outcry and calamity across the sex industry, according to insiders.

The wide-ranging new rules for law enforcement got approval from Democrats, Republicans, and other public leaders (including recently embattled Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Wired pointed out, "a decision the [New York Times] asserts was motivated in part to make other tech giants like Google look bad"). 

Because of digitally targeted schemes like FOSTA-SESTA and the earlier "Operation Choke Point," sex workers have been "pushed offline and out of society," Michael said, despite lawmakers' stated goal of reducing human trafficking in the former case, and fraud and money laundering in the latter.

RT, IMPORTANT.... this is about S952: End Banking for Traffickers Act which will begin to attack consensual sex workers banking abilities. Many of us have already been hit by Operation Choke Point. Click here and voice your opposition https://t.co/rhM0Cy3zO0

— Kristen DiAngelo (@kristendiangelo) June 1, 2018

The result, among other things, is that workers "have to do things in cash, can't screen people beforehand, and have to find clients in other ways," he said. Websites where sex workers advertised their services and compared notes on the industry have been taken down under FOSTA-SESTA, as have the "bad date" lists where sex workers warned each other about violent clients.

Sex workers as well as those in sex-adjacent fields (including erotic dancing, porn, and BDSM) have also found their bank accounts and digital payment systems being frozen by authorities — jobs that are "ostensibly legal" under state or federal law, but turn up in digital sweeps, Michael noted.

In these already marginalized industries, workers who get locked out of their finances — and are frequently denied loans, mortgages, or even checking and savings accounts, despite pretty average incomes — have little ability for recourse or to move forward with their lives. Given that our workforce includes hundreds of thousands of full- or part-time sex workers, dancers, massage and sex therapists, models, pro-dommes, and so on, the financial and personal repercussions of these digital crackdowns are frankly colossal, Michael said.

"People seem aware that sex work is a way to make a living, but they aren't realizing that people around them are being affected, because they haven't asked. I do think everyone in this country knows a sex worker, current or former, even if they don't know it."

According to industry veterans and advocates, these effects will inevitably be compounded if a finance-specific congressional bill, proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and others with bipartisan support, is passed into law.

Kristen DiAngelo, a former sex worker and co-founder and executive director of the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) Sacramento chapter, said that the bill would let law enforcement take its fairly shadowy financial attacks on the industry (and adjacent ones) even further. In a phone interview, DiAngelo explained that giving authorities more power to track or freeze Americans' finances would likely increase the toll on many immigrant families, too — whether or not their members have ties to sex work.

This year, multiple US banks have already faced criticism for reportedly freezing users' accounts based on little more, apparently, than their last names. In August, the Miami Herald reported that PhD student Saeed Moshfegh had his Bank of America account frozen after the bank rejected Moshfegh's proof of legal residency, despite the fact he'd been living in the US for seven years. 

As the Los Angeles Times reported in September, Moshfegh's case is far from an isolated incident; other legal immigrants have described the same issue, but also citizens like Wichita, Kansas-born Josh Collins, who "ignored a form asking if he was a US citizen or held dual citizenship," because he and his wife assumed the form "was a scam."

See also: Strippers And Sex Workers Show Industry Who's Boss At NYC Women's Strike

Banking consultant Bert Ely told the Times that banks must adhere to national "Know Your Customer" regulations, which require them to confirm customer identity in certain ways, and are meant to help "discourage and ferret out possible financial crimes," the Times explained. However, interpretation of these rules varies, and "a lot of judgment calls [get] made in these areas," Ely said.

In fact, it was anti-immigrant sentiment that drove California to pioneer the country's first laws targeting sex workers, DiAngelo said.

Toward the end of the 19th century, California saw a major uptick in migrant workers, particularly from Asia, while the American West was going through the grueling process of getting itself set up. "Many of the men who came over worked on the railroads, and many of the women worked in brothels, " DiAngelo said.

By the turn of the century, however, California was starting to settle down, and more families started to fill the state's towns, which previously catered mostly to hard-working adults. Soon thereafter, "there was a concerted attempt to send immigrants home, to get them out," she said.

"People thought there really weren't as many white women working in brothels, so leaders started spreading stories about the 'demon slavery of white women who would [otherwise] be Christians.'" Authorities also started shutting brothels down "to get rid of immigrants," DiAngelo said, by threatening landlords with property seizure if the women were allowed to continue working there.

"They didn't go after individual women; they went after their support systems," DiAngelo added. "And they've been doing it for over 100 years." 

In the early 20th century, the vast majority of states quickly followed California's lead and created similar laws, causing a nationwide crisis for prostitutes (who later gained the title 'sex worker' through 1970s activism, DiAngelo noted). "Women’s families were in these locations, their lives were there, and they had nowhere to go. So they packed up all their stuff and went out and stood on street corners; all these women were standing out on the streets, and people started picking them because they didn’t want to see them out there."

In short, DiAngelo said, "In California, we created street walking."

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What followed was violence, rape, and women's disappearances, she said. "They had to get back indoors, so they rented their own places."

In response, California counties started creating uniquely tailored laws to prevent unmarried women from renting their own homes. "Each county enacted different laws based on what they felt: one would say, but what if the husband died? So they'd create a law allowing single women to live alone on the first floor, say, where they can be watched." Other states once more followed suit.

Overall, DiAngelo said, "The country created a situation where all women had to fight for their rights, and California did worse than that: women figured out they could find a man to rent out a place for them to live and work. Men who were not good men quickly realized they didn't have to honor that business deal, and could take whatever they want from these women, who couldn't tell anyone."

"We created pimping," DiAngelo said.

"So when people ask me about FOSTA-SESTA and financial crackdowns, and what happens to workers who use the internet to stay safe and stay indoors, I say, 'Where do you think workers are going to go?'"

"You can try to work at a massage parlor, but those often face sweeps from law enforcement. You can freelance at a hotel bar, but hotels get upset. You can try to work at a brothel in Nevada, but those are very limited in how many people they can employ, and each will only have one Black woman, one Latina woman. Or you can freelance on the street."

In prior decades, when she was working as a sex worker, DiAngelo said older women told her to always expect attacks before too long — from law enforcement, violent customers, or both. Given the advantages that online screening and booking have offered, and gradual changes in US culture, "We really thought this craziness was over, and that young women today wouldn’t have to deal with what we dealt with," she said.

"But we already have a body count after FOSTA-SESTA. I've spoken to women who have been raped, who have lost their homes; I feel like I'm a suicide hotline right now," DiAngelo went on. "Tens or hundreds of thousands of people across the US have no way to support themselves now, and no hope. These are college girls who can't pay their tuition, middle-class and upper-class Americans working in sex work, and end-of-month mothers not able to feed their children."

"The death count is going to go up, the PTSD will go up, and it'll keep getting worse until they let people come back indoors."

In light of these impacts, Michael said he hopes platforms like his can raise awareness among lawmakers as well as the public about the devastating effects that digital crackdowns can have for sex workers, immigrants, and other vulnerable communities.

After learning about these issues, he said he remembered hearing that letters and faxes to lawmakers are much more impacting than tweets, emails, or other online methods, so he quickly built his prototype platform for the fight ahead.

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According to Michael, the only fax number for the Senate committee now handling the banking bill has been cut off, so he's pivoted to mailing letters on behalf of each commenter. Sending a paper letter costs about 10 times as much as originating a fax, Michael said, but funding and operating the project himself is worth it, at least for now.

In the future, Michael said, he hopes advocates and organizers of all kinds will use Tribunus to promote their causes in a meaningful, tangible way (paying for their own postage, of course) — even if that means he'll sometimes have to tell a would-be user, thoughtfully and with his individual privilege in check, to take their content elsewhere. 

"It's my creation, and for right now, I want to keep it that way," Michael said. "I just want to live a life where my garbage doesn't have a bigger impact than I do."

He continued, "I grew up in a desert town with not many people, not much in the way of jobs, and you would see street walkers a lot. People would talk trash, but I always thought it didn’t seem fair; they weren’t bad people, and obviously there was demand."

"We tell people, 'You can't exist,' but also, 'We want you to exist.'"

"It’s also my firm belief that you can’t be pro-feminist and then turn around and be against sex workers," Michael said. "Either people have agency over their bodies and lives, or they don’t."