Santa Barbara residents have joined forces to oppose the detention and deportation of our immigrant neighbors by ICE. In this same spirit, we must act now against anti-immigrant initiatives that harm vulnerable populations — specifically Asian immigrant women workers — under the guise of public safety.
In November 2025, city officials proposed modifications to the Massage Ordinance in the Santa Barbara Municipal Code because massage businesses “may be associated with unlawful activity and pose a threat to the quality of life in the local community” and serve “as a front for human trafficking.” The ordinance contains several insidious components:
Biometric scans of all employees, including reception and administrative staff
Unannounced warrantless inspections by police at any time
Restricting workers’ personal items inside massage businesses
Doubling mandatory training hours from 250 to 500
The proposed ordinance claims to protect the public by framing massage businesses as hubs for dangerous and illegal activity like sex trafficking. Brown University Professor Elena Shih reports that such ordinances disproportionately target and criminalize Asian women massage workers without evidence of a public threat. When questioned on local activity, the Santa Barbara Police Department offered only an anecdotal estimate of “at least a dozen complaints” over several years, failing to substantiate the need for the ordinance.
Many low-income Asian migrant women are employed in bodywork (paid work on bodies for social or healthcare) because it does not require professional working proficiency in English. By design, these policies racially profile Asian women massage therapists, even though Asian-American women are statistically more likely to be targets, not perpetrators, of violence. Such approaches fail to address the actual anti-Asian and misogynistic violence massage workers face, as evidenced by the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings.
Nationwide, organizations such as Red Canary Song report that attempts to regulate massage workers through intrusive regulations that empower law enforcement to harass and arrest massage workers have harmed, not protected, vulnerable immigrant women. In practice, these misguided measures simultaneously criminalize Asian women massage workers and attempt to forcibly “rescue” them from sex trafficking. Prioritizing surveillance and enforcement over safety triggers a cycle of workplace harassment and anti-immigrant hostility that threatens the livelihoods of immigrant women and the stability of small-business communities. It transforms the perception of Asian massage spas from legitimate health and bodycare businesses into inherent sites of criminal activity and exploitation.
Policing the entire massage industry does not combat trafficking. While sex work does sometimes coincide with massage work, conflating massage with sex work exposes workers in legitimate spas to sexual harassment and forces those engaging in sex work into increasingly dangerous, underground conditions. With a majority of voters favoring the decriminalization of sex work, this ordinance represents a significant departure from public sentiment.
These regulations also rely on the flawed conflation of sex work with forced sex work and human trafficking. Anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution policies authorizing law enforcement to unannounced inspections lead to invasive raids resulting in arrests and deportations in the name of rescue. The ordinance continues a pattern of broad sweeps and menial policing strategies of Asian immigrant women workers to be “rescued” and then arrested or deported, known as the “trafficking-deportation pipeline.”
Because law enforcement is trained to identify the presence of personal items in the workplace as indications of restricted mobility and forced residency — in other words, trafficking — these initiatives victimize and then criminalize women residing in massage businesses. In reality, immigrants frequently establish temporary residence at their workplace as a necessary response to prohibitive housing costs and limited affordable options. This is especially true in Santa Barbara, where the soaring cost of living has forced many into alternative housing like motel conversions and ADUs. Consequently, anti-trafficking initiatives that insist on rigid distinctions between housing and the workplace are deeply classed and racialized. Without expanded affordable housing options, banning personal items in the workplace risks displacing immigrant women from their only viable living spaces.
Responding to recent raids on massage businesses in Seattle, organizer Lee Chen says, “You’re patting your own back for solving fabricated issues based on your own sexist, racist ideas, and Asian massage workers are paying the price.” Already, this ordinance has incited fear and prevented massage workers from participating in the conversation. Understandably, Asian massage workers are wary of speaking publicly, limiting their capacity to intervene in narratives that criminalize them or mischaracterize them as trafficked. Therefore, the policy fails to incorporate the Asian massage workers’ knowledge of their industry, specifically their expertise about best practices to promote the safety and well-being of clients and workers alike.
Any ordinance that extends law enforcement into massage work — and risks potentially criminalizing Asian-American immigrant women — directly reinforces the hardline anti-immigrant agenda of our current administration. This is not a matter of public safety; it is misogyny and anti-Asian racism disguised as concern. To truly support massage workers in our community, we must remove the regulation and surveillance of massage work from the domain of law enforcement and move toward the decriminalization sex work. Advocacy for Santa Barbara’s immigrant communities must take many forms and rejecting this ordinance is a vital priority for local justice.
For more information on this massage ordinance proposal and details on a Massage Worker Rights Panel coming in early June, go to Instagram @DecrimSB and @SBResiste.
The authors, all at UC Santa Barbara, are Clara Chin, PhD candidate in the English Department; Jigna Desai, a professor in the both Feminist Studies and Asian American Studies departments and director of the Center for Feminist Futures; Justice Edwards, an undergraduate student in Feminist Studies; Carissa Newsome, a PhD student in Feminist Studies; and Viviana Valle Gomez, Associate Director of Women, Gender, and Sexual Equity and a PhD candidate in Feminist Studies. They write this editorial in their personal capacities as residents; their comments do not represent the views of the university.
