The criminalisation and exploitation of irregular Chinese migrant workers in the United Kingdom
| Published date | 01 May 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14773708221132889 |
| Author | Siyu Luo,David Gadd,Rose Broad |
| Date | 01 May 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
The criminalisation and
exploitation of irregular
Chinese migrant workers
in the United Kingdom
Siyu Luo
Institute for Advanced Study in Social Sciences, Fudan University, China
David Gadd
School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester, UK
Rose Broad
School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester, UK
Abstract
This article draws on narrative interviews with irregular Chinese migrant workers (ICMWs) in the
United Kingdom (UK) to show how the UK’s immigration policies foster forms of illegal working
and labour exploitation that they are supposed to combat. It argues that the binary conceptualisa-
tion of ‘forced labour’as the polar opposite of ‘free labour’leaves those migrants working without
a right to do so at the risk of both criminalisation and exploitation. The article shows how the fear
of criminalisation, together with the pressure to become economically successful in the West,
among ICMWs diminishes their capacity to leave exploitative work, reinforcing the unequal
power relations between them and their employers, landlords, advisers, and translators. Many
ICMWs who are officially cast as ‘illegal immigrants’need protection, not from ‘snakeheads’
and ‘traffickers’, but the exploitative and precarious work UK government policies render them
economically reliant upon.
Keywords
irregular/illegal migration, illegal working, labour exploitation, Chinese migration, immigration
control
Corresponding author:
Siyu Luo, Institute for Advanced Study in Social Sciences, Fudan University, East Main Building, Fudan
University, 220 Handan Road, Yangpu District, Shanghai, China P.R., 200433.
Email: siyu_luo@fudan.edu.cn
Article
European Journal of Criminology
2023, Vol. 20(3) 1016–1036
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14773708221132889
journals.sagepub.com/home/euc
Introduction
Over the last decade, the United Kingdom (UK) has adopted an increasingly punitive
stance towards ‘illegal’immigration, threatening migrants working without a legal
right to do so with deportation, while at the same time, proclaiming itself ‘world-leading’
in combatting modern slavery. Though less overt, similar tensions can be detected across
the European Union (EU) where efforts to tackle trafficking for the purposes of labour
exploitation are interwoven with immigration control measures (Clark, 2013).
Politically, the tension is obscured by drawing a false dichotomy between deserving
victims of trafficking, forced labour and modern slavery (who are presumed to have
been coerced or tricked into undertaking exploitative work) and undeserving irregular
migrants (who are presumed to be cheating the system, working freely in a labour
market they are banned from) (van der Leun and van Schijndel, 2016). In this article,
we illustrate how this false dichotomy impacts the lives of irregular Chinese migrant
workers (ICMWs) in the UK.
Many of those who are both victims of exploitation and working illegally in the UK
are Chinese nationals. Following the 1978 market-oriented reform in China, migration to
the UK and other western countries increased among Chinese nationals, largely in
response to the structural economic shifts that deprived them of their traditional liveli-
hoods (Chin, 1999; Hiah and Staring, 2016; Pieke et al., 2004; Zhang, 2008). Many of
those who come to the UK were classified as ‘irregular migrants’because they entered
the country in ways that defied immigration law and/or without appropriate official
authorisation. In 2019, 1358 of the 24,000 foreign nationals held in the UK immigration
detention were recorded as Chinese nationals, the sixth largest nationality group
(Silverman et al., 2020). In the same year, Chinese nationals were also the most referred
foreign national group for whom the Home Office received Duty to Notify forms flagging
potential incidences of modern slavery (Home Office, 2021).
This article illuminates the working experiences of ICMWs, based on narrative inter-
views with 15 Chinese nationals, of whom all but one entered, lived and/or worked in the
UK illegally. 14 participants had actively sought to be smuggled into the UK rather than
having been forcibly trafficked out of China. They then became complicit with illegal
employment arrangements rather than having been forced into work. As their narratives
reveal, all were compelled into exploitative work by the lack of viable alternatives to
cash-in-hand work on which hostile immigration policies and acute personal crises and
economic precarity rendered them reliant. The exploitation they experienced did not
take the brutal forms often sensationalised in modern slavery discourse, but it was no
less grinding in its banal manifestations, routinely entrapping ICMWs in a continuum
of oppressive working conditions.
This article addresses two questions. First, how does ‘illegal’status restrict ICMWs’
employment choices? Second, in what ways do the UK’s immigration policies, now
aimed at criminalising illegal working, increase ICMWs’vulnerabilities to labour
exploitation? In addressing these questions, this article provides new insights into the
working experiences of irregular Chinese migrants in the UK –a relatively inaccessible
and understudied group –while also illuminating the continuum of exploitation migrant
workers experience (Andrees, 2008; Lewis et al., 2015; Skrivankova, 2010).
Luo et al. 1017
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