In 2018, the Human Trafficking Research Cluster (HTRC) initiated a community-based research partnership with Red Canary Song (RCS), a collective of migrant Asian massage workers and sex workers in Queens, New York. This research partnership explores the racialized policing of Asian massage work as a site of human trafficking throughout North America. Research teams of student research assistants and massage workers organizers at RCS have created an important oral history archive of migrant Asian bodywork. Some of these oral histories now live on a trilingual public digital mapping project bodyworkers atlas, which juxtaposes NYPD policing data with first-hand accounts of the impacts of such policing.

Working further with RCS sister organizations Butterfly Project in Toronto and Massage Parlor Outreach Project in Seattle, the HTRC co-authored another report: “Unlicensed: Asian massage work and the Racialized Policing of Poverty,” which details the experiences of unlicensed massage businesses facing racialized policing in Providence, NY, Seattle, and Toronto. In concert with Shih’s New York Times op-ed “How to Protect Massage Workers,” this research finds that supporting worker organizing is the most effective antidote to ameliorating the structural vulnerabilities that low-wage migrant workers endure. 

These collaborative research and publications gained the interest of the New York Civil Liberties Union, who partnered with RCS and the Simmons Center to draft a law to decriminalize unlicensed massage. This resulted in the introduction of a historic bill (A 8281), introduced in the NY Senate and House in 2022. They have also earned the partnership of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which partnered with the Simmons Center and RCS to sue the NYC Department of Buildings for access to records.