Abstract
In May 2012, then Home Secretary Theresa May declared, “[t]he aim is to create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration.” 1 The strategy was to deny undocumented immigrants access to work, housing, and services, even bank accounts. While immigrant life before May’s campaign was far from easy, not least because of the global financial crisis, Bloch and McKay’s book details the worsening situation for undocumented migrants and the impact of policy on all aspects of their lives. It draws on a qualitative study to illustrate the impact of structural factors, including policy and markets, on the lives of individuals trying to get by. What emerges is that the environment in which undocumented migrants suffer and survive is indeed hostile, but it does not reduce undocumented migration. If anything, that environment maintains undocumented migration by making the attempt to regularize one’s status too risky.
This book focuses on the lives of 55 undocumented migrants from London’s Bangladeshi, Chinese, and Turkish communities who, due to their migration status, live on society’s margins. This material is complemented by another 24 interviews with co-ethnic employers, a much under-researched group. By working with researchers drawn from the communities, the authors meticulously examine how the lack of migration status impacts every aspect of a migrant’s life, from employment to housing, from healthcare to education, from travelling on public transport to sustaining social networks. They describe how the pain of bereavement is amplified by the inability to travel and how family relations are strained by the fear of being a burden or putting hosts at risk.
The book is organized into eight chapters, the first two of which provide context and definitions. Chapter one discusses the complexities of defining “undocumented migrants.” Though the sample is relatively small, it reflects the reality that most who are undocumented enter the country with visas (tourist, student, business) and overstay. Only 17 of the 55 undocumented workers entered clandestinely (though some of the 24 employers had also experienced being undocumented), and this number included some who went on to apply for asylum unsuccessfully. Chapter one also introduces the concepts of networks and social capital that underpin all subsequent chapters.
The study’s context is the global economic crisis and its impact on labor markets and the demand for flexible workers. Undocumented migrants are the most flexible, since they can be hired and fired at will and enjoy none of the protections of those with citizenship or a regular status. Chapter two provides a comprehensive overview of the rights of migrant workers and their families, while the rest of the book details how they are denied access to even the most basic rights. Following De Genova (2004) and Samers (2008), the authors note that migration controls produce “illegality” and that the threat of deportation and the deportability of undocumented migrants create a vulnerable, compliant workforce.
Bloch and McKay explain how “illegality,” “irregularity,” or the status of being undocumented, and hence the vulnerability of this workforce, are constructed by states through policies that either deprive people of their regular status or force them to circumvent controls. The authors document recent developments that produce and reproduce undocumented migration and examine the purposes undocumented migration serves for the economy and polity.
In later chapters, we begin to hear and get to know the study’s subjects, why and how they left their homes and families, how they find work, and how their lives are constrained by policy. We see the importance of networks as safety nets and support systems but also as constraints that keep people within ethnic enclaves and make them vulnerable to exploitation by co-ethnic employers. Nonetheless, while not stated explicitly in the book, it is clear that the negative impact of networks is strengthened by current policy, which renders those without papers vulnerable to detention and deportation. Interestingly, in the chapter devoted to co-ethnic employers, some suggest that they are motivated by sympathy for those who, because of their status, find it hard to get work. Thus, even if, as the authors suggest, some of these employers were downplaying the economic reasons for employing undocumented workers, it is clear that both workers and employers will find ways to resist and circumvent hostile social policies.
What emerges from the study is the centrality of employment – whether people enter as tourists, asylum seekers, students, or business people, everyone needs to work and interviewed migrants appear first and foremost as workers, though the authors also allow them to appear as parents, children, and siblings. The picture is one of people living lives, consisting almost solely of long hours doing exhausting and demanding work and sleeping, sometimes in shared beds. The discussion of migrant workers’ rights in an early chapter offers ironic context to the exploitation described later.
Importantly, the research subjects are victims of structural inequality but are never merely victims. They are human beings negotiating the obstacles placed in their way and trying to provide for their families in Britain or in Bangladesh, China, and Turkey. The chapter on this group’s social lives is moving and reminds the reader that undocumented migrants are more than just workers.
One of the book’s strengths is the link that Bloch and McKay make between the welfare of undocumented migrants and the wider society, pointing out that the hostile environment created by Theresa May (when Home Secretary) and maintained by her successors means, for example, that children are not vaccinated and communicable diseases remain untreated, putting the whole of society at risk.
Bloch and McKay sensitively and carefully build a multidimensional picture of the constraints on undocumented migrants’ lives and the strategies used to negotiate and overcome them. The book blends in-depth analysis with the evocative testimony of people themselves. The people who shared their experiences with this research team emerge as human beings struggling to do the best they can in an increasingly hostile environment. In addition to offering a multifaceted portrait of an increasingly vulnerable population, the book offers a careful critique of the direction in which UK policy is moving, a critique that holds for migration policies being introduced in other EU member states and across the globe.