Who cares about migrant carers and farm workers? Restrictive visa regimes in the UK and their effects on migrant workers’ access to protections, enforcement & redress in cases of labour exploitation

This paper builds on a collaborative research project with the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, Focus on Labour Exploitation, Kanlungan Filipino Council and Southeast and East Asian Centre, as well as academic researchers from four UK universities. Together, we explored the modern slavery risk factors for migrant workers in the agriculture and care sectors through qualitative interviews with workers and complementary stakeholder surveys. The paper centres the voices of migrant workers themselves. Utilising the project’s interviews with care and agriculture workers, it explores the narratives of their experiences of the UK visa regimes and labour market. Importantly, the paper addresses factors beyond immigration status itself. Migrant workers’ vulnerability is best understood by exploring the interplay of restrictive visa conditions with additional factors such as language barriers, isolation (either geographically or through work in private households), unsocial hours, temporariness, and the resulting inability to create links to local communities, as well as lack of knowledge of - or access to - legal processes. All of these barriers are characteristic of workers in both agriculture and care work, rendering them more likely to be exploitable by their employers without adequate policy interventions. Thus, the paper’s second focus is the interplay of restrictive immigration laws and policies with existing weaknesses in employment regulation in sectors that are perceived as ‘unskilled’ or ‘low-skilled’ work and how to best address these concerns.