absolutely.

No big deal but that’s why I said “undocumented immigrants.”

-Immigration lawyer

Here in Australia, prostitution is legal, at least in some jurisdictions.

We have a mix of legalisation, decriminilisation and some areas where prostitution is illegal entirely. Sex worker’s rights groups (which in this country are largely made up of current or former sex workers) promote decrim, not legalisation.

Yet problems remain- especially in brothels staffed by illegal immigrants, who have all the problems of illegal prostitutes, and more.

Of course problems remain. Decrim might be a better option than prohibition for sex workers, but it’s still a legislative framework being imposed on a population made up of humans. I’ve never encountered one of them that was problem free.

As for “illegal immigrants” and sex work, this is an issue that the Aussie sex worker’s rights movement is pushing to have addressed on an immigration and human rights front. Re-introducing prohibition isn’t going to do anything to help the people in negative situations caused by the failure of immigration legislation to address migratory sex work, and pointing to them as failure of decrim is missing the point.

I think the appeal of decrim for a lot of people is that the kinds of regulations that you are talking about wouldn’t happen. Which makes sense. A lot of people are prejudiced or self-interested and are probably going to be more concerned with regulating the worker instead of the industry if its been legalized, and so that’s the kind of regulation that would be passed. Since so many people would be more concerned with sex workers spreading diseases around than with workplace protections. Also workplace protections are less applicable to independents…it’s really only applicable if there’s an employer to hold accountable, I would think. At least, that’s my sort-of-fuzzy understanding of the politics and so on.

The scrutiny doesn’t go away, it just winds up severely reduced. Once the assumption (in theory) goes from “this is illegal, look for other crimes being committed on top of simple prostitution” to “this is perfectly legal, there’s no need to investigate further unless there’s suspicion of x, y, or z,” you do see less policing. Simple regulation may be up to the job of enforcing minimum safe working conditions for citizen sex workers, but is it up to the task of finding and assisting undocumented immigrants who’ve been coerced into sex work or who are practicing voluntarily but without the protections they should have by law?

If you take the porn example, it can be a lot easier for porn made with minors to wind up being distributed along with legally-made porn once porn in general has, by dint of laws and regulation, been given a veneer of respectability. It’s no longer automatically suspect; people don’t turn the same critical eye on it. Policy-makers see less cause to allocate the same amount of resources to regulating an industry that they were using to try to stamp it out.

It would need to be treated like a two-pronged problem from the get-go, I think. Not just that oh, right, we might need to regulate this industry if we’re going to legalized it, but that we’d have to have, ready to go from day one, retooled and ramped up anti-trafficking efforts to prevent a commensurate rise in trafficking organizations using legitimate sex work to camouflage their operation. I don’t really see anyone doing that any time soon. Of course, I don’t really see anyone in this country accepting legal prostitution on a wide scale any time soon, either, so I guess it’s kind of a moot point. The current system isn’t doing anyone any good, but changing it into something better is going to be slow going.

I like the idea of legalization, except to be honest the “regulation” part concerns me if it would mean that sex workers are REQUIRED to get health inspections, or REQUIRED to register with the government. To me these things go against bodily autonomy. The idea of mandatory gyno exams based on one’s occupation frankly pisses me off, grosses me out, and terrifies me to no end. Also, various registration procedures with the state could potentially be a roadblock to other types of future employment, and/or an incentive for all kinds of discrimination & privacy violation if the info wasn’t totally confidential.

I’m not sure if these same things would take place with decriminalization. I’d be interested in hearing other sex worker’s thoughts.

But that’s precisely the problem — the idea behind decriminalization is that it would protect workers because it would establish regulations, like with porn, which is pretty far from exploitation-free but a hell of a lot better than prostitution and porn before regulations about STD testing and such were in place. Of course, if you take away the scrutiny, people are going to have a field day. The restaurant industry would do the same thing if random health inspections ceased to exist.

But unregulated, illegal porn continues to exist and to be made in the U.S. It’s subject to the same laws as the “legit” porn industry, in theory, but it hasn’t gone away. Similarly, trafficking and coercion isn’t going to go away when we institute decriminalization and worker protections. And coercion of illegal immigrants will continue to be easier than coercion of citizens because illegal immigrants will continue to fear going to the authorities because they fear deportation. IMO, this is not an argument against decriminalization; it is an argument in favor of immigration reform.