Before We Politicize, Let’s Empathize with Immigrant Massage Workers

What happened in Atlanta

In March 2021, the Atlanta area was rocked by a mass shooting that targeted three spas/massage businesses. Eight people were killed, including six Asian women, and communities across the country were left grieving and reeling. In the immediate aftermath, there was an understandable urgency to name the cause accurately—because how we diagnose violence shapes what we build next. But even as families mourned and the shooter’s motives were still being argued over publicly, the media floodgates opened, often defaulting to simplified, polarizing storylines that generate clicks more reliably than they generate solutions.

When narratives become weapons

We’ve seen this pattern before. Inflamed coverage during the Rodney King era helped harden racial fault lines and reduce complex realities into easy villains. Media narratives still routinely sort survivors of sexual violence into “real victims” versus “asking for it.” And broader cultural myths about who is “dangerous,” who is “innocent,” or who is “asking for it” don’t just distort the public conversation—they can manufacture real harm for the people trapped inside those frames.

As a rule of thumb, when one group is being demonized, it’s often a sign we’re watching spin (and sometimes propaganda), not problem-solving. And for Asian immigrant massage workers, harmful myths are not new. That’s true nationally—and it’s true locally. Before we politicize, we should do something rarer and more useful: empathize with immigrant massage workers as human beings living inside a high-stigma, high-risk environment.

What I saw up close in West Hollywood

For nearly a decade, I lived on the same corner as one of these establishments, and over the years I befriended many of the Asian male staff (sharing cigarettes easily overcame language barriers). Once, I witnessed an “inspection” that felt more like a raid: multiple armed deputies and Code Compliance rushed in, ordered workers to line up, and pushed into treatment rooms. From what I could tell, the workers looked confused—some visibly frightened.

Afterward, I confirmed that nobody present spoke the workers’ language, and I was refused any further information. Showing up without translation for predominantly mono-lingual workers isn’t a small oversight; it’s a basic failure of cultural competency. The air of intimidation I witnessed was disturbing.

Why raids can become state violence

Routine, punitive raids on Asian massage businesses can be harassing—and in the worst cases, deadly. They function as a form of state violence, especially when policy frameworks indiscriminately conflate human trafficking with adult consensual sex work and ignore the more common reality in this sector: labor exploitation—debt, wage theft, coercive bosses, isolation, immigration vulnerability, stigma, and lack of viable options.

If we genuinely care about reducing trafficking and violence, we should stop building systems that push workers further into the shadows.

Worker-led solutions already exist

In March 2021, massage workers’ rights groups gathered to mourn and organize—groups like Red Canary Song (New York City), Butterfly (Toronto), and worker collectives across the Pacific Northwest. These are worker-led and community-embedded organizations doing what institutions often fail to do: culturally sensitive outreach, safety planning, trust-building, and real-world connections to services.

Where Los Angeles County and West Hollywood went next

For years, Los Angeles County had the raw ingredients to do this well, but progress was uneven.

To the County’s credit, the LA County Board of Supervisors had already moved toward a worker-centered approach. In January 2020, the Board approved a motion directing County agencies and community stakeholders to develop a comprehensive outreach, education, and engagement strategy to provide wraparound services to massage workers in culturally and linguistically sensitive ways. A multidisciplinary group built what amounted to a blueprint for a safer model—one designed to link workers to health care, legal services, and support, while avoiding law enforcement involvement unless truly necessary. The pandemic disrupted implementation—and for a time, plans stalled—but the direction was clear: outreach and services, not just enforcement.

Locally, West Hollywood also took formal steps. The City Council voted to initiate a massage workers outreach effort as part of a broader safety and rights initiative—an important signal that the City understood the limits of policing and the need for culturally competent support.

The lesson: you can’t RFP your way into trust

West Hollywood ran into a reality that almost every city faces when it tries to “do the right thing” on a stigmatized issue: capacity and cultural embeddedness are not easy to procure on a timeline. Finding a contractor with real trust in the massage worker community—language access, lived credibility, and the operational bandwidth to deliver consistent outreach—proved challenging.

That’s the learning lesson: systems change isn’t just a resolution; it’s infrastructure. You cannot RFP your way into trust overnight. If we want real safety and real prevention, cities and counties have to invest in the ecosystem that makes outreach possible—worker-led and community-embedded partners, multi-year funding, language access, trauma-informed practice, and procurement pathways that don’t exclude the very organizations most capable of doing the work.

West Hollywood—and Los Angeles County—have an opportunity to keep pushing past symbolism and into operational reality: outreach that workers actually engage with, service pathways that don’t punish people for survival, and regulatory approaches that don’t treat immigrant-run businesses like a dirty secret.

It’s time to shift how we fundamentally think about this part of our community. Immigrant-run businesses contribute true value and color to our local culture and economy. If we want to prevent trafficking and reduce violence, we should stop responding with stigma and raids—and start responding with competence, coordination, and care.

In loving memory

Delaina Ashley Yaun
Hyun Jung Grant
Paul Andre Michels
Xiaojie Tan
Yong Ae Yue
Suncha Kim
Soon Chung Park
Daoyou Feng

Support

butterflysw.org

redcanarysong.net