Hannah Lewis

Hyper-precarious lives: Migrants, work and forced labour in the Global North

This paper unpacks the contested inter-connections between neoliberal work and welfare regimes, asylum and immigration controls, and the exploitation of migrant workers. The concept of precarity is explored as a way of understanding intensifying and insecure post-Fordist work in late capitalism. Migrants are centrally implicated in highly precarious work experiences at the bottom end of labour markets in Global North countries, including becoming trapped in forced labour. Building on existing research on the working experiences of migrants in the Global North, the main part of the article considers three questions. First, what is precarity and how does the concept relate to working lives? Second, how might we understand the causes of extreme forms of migrant labour exploitation in precarious lifeworlds? Third, how can we adequately theorize these particular experiences using the conceptual tools of forced labour, slavery, unfreedom and precarity? We use the concept of ‘hyper-precarity’ alongside notions of a ‘continuum of unfreedom’ as a way of furthering human geographical inquiry into the intersections between various terrains of social action and conceptual debate concerning migrants’ precarious working experiences.

Multiply vulnerable populations: mobilising a politics of compassion from the 'capacity to hurt'

This paper reflects on the concept of insecurity defined as ‘the capacity to hurt’. It begins by considering asylum seekers and refugees as hyper-precarious groups that have experienced bodily, material and psychological ‘hurt’ in the UK. At the same time, the paper considers how these hyper-precarious groups are perceived to have the capacity to hurt (bodily, materially, psychologically and spatially) the majority population. Having drawn out two understandings of the capacity to hurt—both the ability to be or feel hurt and the act of hurting others, we argue that a shared recognition of what it means to feel hurt (co-suffering or suffering together)—albeit to very different extremes and with very different consequences—and an understanding of the processes which drive this might be mobilised politically to challenge the act of hurting others. In doing so, we argue for a group politics of compassion to respond to increasingly insecure times.

Precarious Irregular Migrants and Their Sharing Economies: A Spectrum of Transactional Laboring Experiences

There is growing interest in the sharing economy as a different way of living in neoliberal capitalist societies, but this discussion is frequently heavily classed and the ethos generally rests on excess capacity of goods and services. This article intervenes in this emerging body of writing to argue that it is equally important to explore the types of sharing and exchange that are survival-compelled among those with precarious livelihoods. Precarious migrants are a group facing significant livelihood pressures, and we are concerned here with a particular category of insecure migrants: irregular migrants including refused asylum seekers in the United Kingdom. Such migrants are especially shaped by their sociolegal status, and without rights to work or welfare they are susceptible to exploitation in their survival-oriented laboring. Existing literature from labor geographies and the subdisciplinary area of unfree and forced labor has not generally focused on the experiences of these migrants as house guests in domestic realms, nor has it thoroughly explored their transactional labor. As such, this article argues that the moral economies of gifting and sharing within such labor create and reproduce particular social structures, cultural norms, and relationships that position people along a spectrum of freedom and exploitation.

Socio-legal status and experiences of forced labour among asylum seekers and refugees in the UK

Socio-legal status determines the differential rights to residence, work and social welfare that accrue to migrants depending on their particular immigration status. This paper presents analysis of original empirical data generated in qualitative interviews with migrants who had both made a claim for asylum and experienced conditions of forced labour in the UK. Following an outline of the divergent socio-legal statuses assigned to individual migrants within the asylum system, early discussions in the paper offer a summary of key aspects and indicators of forced labour. Subsequent sections highlight the significance of socio-legal status in constructing such migrants as inherently vulnerable to severe exploitation. It is concluded that immigration policy and, more particularly, the differential socio-legal statuses that it structures at various stages of the asylum process, helps to create the conditions in which severe exploitation and forced labour are likely to flourish among asylum seekers and refugees in the UK.

Music, dancing and clothing as belonging and freedom among people seeking asylum in the UK

This article explores how dancing, music and clothing provide vital modes of identification and freedom in the lives of people seeking asylum in the UK which are otherwise ostensibly marked by lack of choice. People who make a claim for asylum are accommodated in towns and cities around the UK under a compulsory dispersal system. The rapid emergence of new music leisure spaces demonstrates the importance of music and dancing for processes of settlement and negotiation of belonging. Music and ‘community’ events provide a safe space for clothing, music and dancing that visibly announce national, ethnic and cultural identities. Music events provide moments to engage as insiders in a world new refugees mostly experience as outsiders. Dancing may be an especially important way for refugees, who typically migrate without objects of material culture, to negotiate identity and to enjoy moments of freedom and individuality in the context of live that otherwise frequently feature powerlessness. The momentary nature of parties and the spontaneity of dancing allow for an ephemeral community manifestation within precarious, insecure lives.

Asylum, Immigration Restrictions and Exploitation: Hyper-precarity as a lens for understanding and tackling forced labour

The topic of forced labour is receiving a growing amount of political and policy attention across the globe. This paper makes two clear contributions to emerging debates. First, we focus on a group who are seldom explicitly considered in forced labour debates: forced migrants who interact with the asylum system. We build an argument of the production of susceptibility to forced labour through the United Kingdom’s (UK) asylum system, discussing the roles of compromised socio-legal status resulting from restrictive immigration policy, neoliberal labour market characteristics and migrants’ own trajectories. Second, we argue that forced labour needs to be understood as part of, and an outcome of, widespread normalised precarious work. Precarity is a concept used to describe the rise of insecure, casualised and sub-contracted work and is useful in explaining labour market processes that are conducive to the production of forced labour. Using precarity as a lens to examine forced labour encourages the recognition of extreme forms of exploitation as part of a wider picture of systematic exploitation of migrants in the labour market. To understand the reasons why forced migrants might be drawn into severe labour exploitation in the UK, we introduce the concept of hyper-precarity to explain how multidimensional insecurities contribute to forced labour experiences, particularly among forced migrants in the global north. Viewing forced labour as connected to precarity also suggests that avenues and tools for tackling severe labour exploitation need to form part of the wider struggle for migrant labour rights.

Refused Asylum Seekers as the Hyper-Exploited

This chapter delves into the worlds of refused asylum seekers — worlds too often characterised by conditions of destitution. This destitution does not simply ‘occur’; rather it is produced and enforced through immigration policies and the structural erosion of welfare support. Successive UK governments have systematically tiered entitlement for migrant groups and undermined the basic rights of asylum seekers who from 1999 onwards have had diminishing financial support and accommodation. In 2002, permission to work for asylum seekers who had not received an initial decision on their claim within six months was removed as employment was considered a ‘pull factor’ encouraging unfounded asylum claims (Bloch and Schuster, 2002). In 2003, a cashless voucher system (known as Section 4 support) was introduced for refused asylum seekers temporarily unable to leave the UK. Both were deliberately punitive to deter continuing residence in the UK. While there is a lack of evidence substantiating any effect of assumed ‘pull factors’ for seeking asylum in the UK, the government insists that denying work rights is central to deterrence of people claiming asylum. It is now widely recognised that refused asylum seekers routinely experience enforced destitution due to the intentional restriction of their rights (Crawley et al., 2011; Bloch, 2013, see also Vickers in this volume).

‘Hostile’ UK Immigration Policy and Asylum Seekers’ Susceptibility to Forced Labour

This chapter discusses how recent changes in UK immigration policy to create an intentionally ‘hostile environment’ for irregular migrants relate to susceptibility to forced labour. The key changes in the Immigration Act 2014 and Immigration Act 2016 target spaces of everyday life by restricting access to housing, healthcare services, banking and legal representation, and increasing penalties for unauthorized working. Drawing on our research on experiences of forced labour among refugees and asylum seekers, we highlight how such policies could operate to increase labour exploitation among people seeking asylum and other irregular migrants. This outcome is quite contradictory with government claims that it wishes to tackle ‘modern slavery’ in the UK through the Modern Slavery Act 2015.

Negotiating Anonymity, Informed Consent and ‘Illegality’: Researching Forced Labour Experiences Among Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the UK

This chapter considers the methodological challenges and ethical implications of undertaking a qualitative study of experiences of forced labour among refugees and asylum seekers in the UK. Employment is prohibited while an asylum claim is being processed and for refused asylum seekers, which made identifying participants willing to talk about labour experiences extremely difficult, even if the work experience occurred after an individual gained leave to remain as a refugee with permission to work. This chapter discusses how access was negotiated through participant observation outreach leading to in-depth interviews with 30 individuals. The indicators of forced labour offered by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) were found to be a useful tool for engaging in colloquial discussions of severely exploitative work practices to identify purposively sampled participants without being dependent on definitions of coercion. Challenges to access resulted not only from individuals’ apprehension of speaking to researchers but also from the concerns of gatekeeping agencies nervous to talk about unauthorised employment. In this sense, the ‘doctrine of illegality’ that surrounds ‘illegal employment’ extends far beyond individual workers and workplaces. The chapter considers the question of ‘doing no harm’ in research with individuals who have complex immigration cases and practical needs, and also considers the importance of negotiating informed consent in iterative and informal ways beyond formal signed consent sheets. Discussing how anonymity operates by describing analysis to interviewees in tangible ways was an important corollary to gaining meaningful informed consent. This requires ethical approaches to extend into how data are written up and disseminated.