Flex Work Research Centre

Immigration controls are often presented by government as a means of ensuring ‘British jobs for British workers’ and protecting migrants from exploitation. However, in practice they can undermine labour protections. As well as a tap regulating the flow of labour, immigration controls function as a mould, helping to form types of labour with particular relations to employers and the labour market. In particular, the construction of institutionalised uncertainty, together with less formalised migratory processes, help produce ‘precarious workers’ over whom employers and labour users have particular mechanisms of control.

Immigration controls effectively subject workers to a high degree of regulation, giving employers mechanisms of control that they do not have over citizens. This means that for certain often very specific occupations, immigration controls may not function as a means of protecting jobs for citizens but effectively create a group of workers that are more desirable as employees through enforcing atypical employment relations such as fixed term contracts or selfemployment and direct dependence on employers for legal status. It is in this context that employers praise migrants’ ‘reliability’ and call for an increase in numbers even at times of high unemployment. Thus, while ‘illegality’ is acknowledged as producing vulnerability to exploitation, this article argues that this is not, as commonly imagined, because of absence of status, but is an instance of one of the many ways in which immigration controls and migratory processes produce certain types of labour. In the current conjuncture they serve to produce, among other groups, precarious workers. It is not only the smuggled ‘illegal’ workers who find that ‘the meaning of their existence inheres exclusively in other times and places’, but often ‘legal’ workers too.