‘I hate when the term “economic migrant” is assigned to us. Everyone moves around for economic reasons, not only us,’ Ake says. He’s been in the UK for over ten years, studying full-time at Kingston University when he arrived as well as clocking in thirty-five hours a week or more as a security guard. He used to be a union organiser, founded a group that protects migrants’ right to work and, having completed a master’s in international human rights law, is about to do a PhD. Well-acquainted with the disorder of moving, through his own experiences and his work, Ake points out that ‘economic migrant’ is applied selectively. People from ‘Africa or developing countries’ are ‘economic migrants’ but if someone leaves the UK and goes to Germany, they’re likely to be called an ‘expat’. ‘They are people and we [are] less than human,’ he says.
Making sense of terms like ‘economic migrant’ is not just about understanding how and why people move, but also how they’re treated when they’re here. As she talks to me in the café at the Unite the Union offices in Central London, Marissa doesn’t hide her anger; it seems to drive her campaigning. Over the chatter of people milling in and out of the canteen during the lunchtime rush, she describes how her pitifully low salary, painfully long hours and controlling employers pushed her to join together with other domestic workers and fight back.
When the Coalition government came to power in 2010 domestic workers, who are predominantly women, were in trouble. At the end of the 1970s, visas for domestic workers were scrapped. For many, the proof that they were legally in the country consisted of a stamp in their passport that named their employer as the only person they had the right to work for. If they left their employer, they lost status and were classed as undocumented. After decades of domestic workers agitating, organising and campaigning, in 1997 the rules were changed. Under New Labour, domestic workers had the right to change employers without being deported. As a result, they could access a route to staying in the country and they were recognised as workers, entitled to workplace rights and time off. In 2008, the government threatened to strip away the rights workers had fought for, but were forced to abandon their plans because of the strength of resistance.
However, a new government in 2010 meant new ministers, with new resolve. In 2012, to widespread condemnation, the Conservative-led Coalition changed the rules so that domestic workers could only come to the UK for six months, had no right to renew their visas and were tied to their foreign employer. According to the Guardian, over 2016–17, the Home Office issued 18,950 Domestic Workers in a Private Household visas; if people brought into the country under one of these visas left an employer who was abusive or who was exploiting them, they became undocumented. This sat uncomfortably with that same government’s aim to end modern slavery.59 ‘Theresa May is this great advocate for measures to protect people from modern slavery,’ says former barrister Frances Webber, ‘while at the same time her ministers are removing protection against extreme exploitation.’
Evidence shows that migrants are far more likely to be employed in lower paid, monotonous and dangerous jobs, with little or no trade union influence – yet they tend to be educationally and experientially overqualified for the work they do.60 ‘There are reasons behind why people are moving from their home land to Europe,’ explains Ake, who came to the UK from the Ivory Coast via France. ‘Like anybody else, we have dreams for ourselves and our families, and rights we are entitled to. And when you are denied these basic rights, your instincts switch onto the survival mode.’
While most of us are asleep, a multinational workforce is cleaning the expensive offices of people on six-figure salaries, doing shifts in high-end hotels all hours of the day or looking after older people in care homes.
‘In this world, migrants have rights, but no or little way to make use of them or ask for their respect,’ concluded one non-governmental organisation. ‘They are legally voiceless.’ The International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families attempts to deal with this. It is concerned with protecting the human rights of anyone who crosses a border for work, regardless of their status – that is, whether they’re documented or not. The treaty is designed to ensure human rights are applied to all migrants and to establish a minimum set of legal protections, which among other things requires states that have ratified the treaty give migrants and their families freedom of speech, the freedom to join trade unions and rights equal to citizens in terms of pay and working conditions. At the time of writing, only fifty-four countries have ratified the treaty; the UK is not one of them.61
When New Labour immigration minister Barbara Roche declared in 2000 that ‘we are in competition for the brightest and the best’, she was playing right into the framing that turns people into commodities.62 Dividing migrants into ‘the best and the brightest’ vs. ‘the rest’ or ‘skilled’ and ‘unskilled’, as politicians still do, erases the complex, important work done by people who don’t fit into the former categories. It creates a hierarchy of human value. ‘There’s a wholly artificial distinction between high-skilled people and low-skilled,’ says Diane Abbott. ‘For instance, care workers are described as low-skilled, but they’re vital. If Eastern European migrants stop coming here tomorrow, social care in London and the South-East would collapse because they can’t get the labour.’
Even for people classed as ‘highly skilled’, the very immigration controls that governments claim are necessary for safety and security can produce precarity. If you’re tied to your employer for your right to be here, as you might be on some visas, your status is essentially reliant upon their support. It’s not that all employers who sponsor members of staff are out to actively and grossly exploit them; a licence could cost up to £1,476 (at the time of writing), depending on the size of the company and type of visa, and then they have to pay for each worker they sponsor. But there’s a risk for employees: if you’re struggling with a boss who is forcing you to work unpaid overtime and treating you badly, or you’re just not happy in the job and you can’t find another employer who will sponsor you, it might be more difficult to challenge mistreatment.63 As Swiss writer Max Frisch once observed, ‘We asked for workers and human beings came.’64
A global working class – the majority of whom are of colour – keeps the world economy going. Politicians in a number of countries know they need workers from all around the world and that an unfair, imbalanced global economy paired with climate breakdown means some people need to migrate. But that doesn’t mean that everyone can do so, or that those who do then have freedom, choice or decent rights.
In 2001, twenty-one-year-old Mohammed Ayaz from northern Pakistan broke through security at Bahrain airport and launched himself into an opening on the bottom of a Boeing 777 headed for London. He had been working as a labourer in Dubai and, like so many others who feel like they have no better options but to take this same route, he got into huge amounts of debt to get there. But he wanted to make it to England. The combination of the cold and lack of oxygen had most likely killed him on the long journey and, early on Thursday morning, his body fell from the undercarriage of the plane. He was found dead in a Homebase car park near Heathrow. In the years that followed, two others – thirty-year-old Carlito Vale and twenty-seven-year-old José Matada – died in similar circumstances. ‘He always spoke about going to work in America or England,’ Ayaz’s brother, Gul Bihar, said. ‘But they don’t give visas to poor people like us.’65
We like to tell ourselves a very particular version of the UK’s past. One in which we’ve held the door open to people fleeing conflict and persecution, and welcomed others from all over the world. Whenever the brutal realities of this country’s asylum system make newspaper headlines, the Home Office response almost always includes some variation of the following: ‘The UK has a proud history of granting asylum to those who need it.’66 But while there are tales of warm