THE new Labour government has offered up at least a partial change in narratives generated around immigration. 

Ministers still see the movement of people as a problem which has to be addressed by a series of stern measures to reduce migrant numbers, but it’s now being presented as arising from a need to stamp down on exploitation.

The exploitation of migrant people is an issue of genuine concern. Many migrant jobs are concentrated in sectors associated with low pay, bad working conditions and very little job security. 

Industries like food production, retail, social care, cleaning and building maintenance employ large numbers of migrants and have attracted a lot of criticism over their treatment of employees. 

The Bureau of Investigative Journalists has looked into the treatment of migrant farm workers, reporting six-day working weeks with take-home wages in the £700 to £950 range. 

Its latest investigation into the position of care workers is even more troubling, with widespread abuses being reported which include wage theft, discrimination, intimidation and physical assaults. Other migrant-employing sectors, such as cleaning, domestic work and hospitality, also give rise for alarm.

The risk of exploitation arises from a lack of understanding of legal rights among migrant workers reinforced by vulnerabilities connected to immigration status issues.  

The recent expansion of work visas for employment in the health and care sectors has brought a range of abusive actors into the field, including dubious recruitment agencies which vanish when fees have been paid, along with the jobs that had supposedly been secured for the worker.

Fourteen years of chaos in the management of immigration control by the Conservative government system has also added to the mix. Tens of thousands of people with applications for leave as refugees or other statuses have been left languishing in the system, unable to get responses from an officialdom which thinks it unexceptional to keep people waiting years for a decision on their cases.  

The need to survive pushes these groups into irregular casual employment out of the sheer need to earn enough for food and pay rent.

The immigration control system at the present time works too often by bunching all these categories of people into the single status of “illegal worker” and makes them vulnerable to arrest, detention and deportation as a consequence.

If anything, this situation seems set to get event worse under a Home Office now being led by Labour. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper set her mark on the department by ordering a weeklong “intensive operation” at the end of August which saw raids on 275 workplace premises and the arrest of 85 people deemed to be “illegal workers.”

Reporting on this activity, the Home Office said it had found people living in squalid conditions on-site, earning far below the British national minimum wage, and working longer hours than legally allowed.   

Campaigners for the rights of migrants insist that this is not the right way to tackle the issue of labour exploitation.  

Mariam Yusuf, who is leading the fight for the regularisation of vulnerable migrants with the Status Now 4 All network, set out an approach which hinged on recognition of rights rather than criminalisation.  

She said: “We have come through 14 years during which no person of migrant background has felt safe from being judged ‘illegal.’ That is the real lesson to be learnt from the racist treatment of the Windrush generation when the scandal was exposed to the public.

“There is a need to fight back when migrant workers are deprived of their rights. We look to the trade unions, as the principal guardians of the rights of working people, to join our call for rights, not exploitation for all working people who have been subjected to abusive employment conditions.”

Status Now 4 All supporters will be raising this issue directly with delegates to the TUC Congress in Brighton.