The UK Immigration Detention System: Are we exploiting our immigrant detainees?

By Zaina Odubeko, Third Year, Philosophy and Politics

Discussions around immigration in Britain are fraught. Attitudes toward migrants reflect fears about loss of culture, security, and overpopulation. Worse yet, the privatisation of detention centres confines prospective immigrants to ‘waiting zones’ where basic legal protections are suspended in favour of profits. Detainees are regarded as nonpersons, participating in severely underpaid work, and stripped of what philosopher Hannah Arendt notes as the fundamental ‘right to have rights. 

Under Tony Blair’s premiership, the UK integrated ‘paid activities’ into immigration detention centres. In addition to this, the management of these centres is contracted out to private companies. Privatised estates now make up the majority of ‘immigration removal centres’. Detained migrants without the right to enter the UK are offered the ‘choice’ to undertake paid work. However private contractors are motivated by their profits rather than the interest of detainees, as jobs available offset the cost of hiring staff, and workers are paid less than £1.25 an hour. 

Immigrants have become objects of economic transactions. This has been upheld by rulings such as the 2020 Court of Appeal decision in R. Badmus v. Secretary of State for the Home Office. The Court ruled in favour of a £1/hour wage for detainees, upholding the lawfulness of wages 85% below the National Minimum Wage. The implication of this is clear: human rights protection is predicated on the arbitrariness of citizenship. By refusing to afford immigration detainees the human rights we have proclaimed as unimpeachable, we designate them to a category of ‘unhuman’. At least, not as human as a free UK-born civilian.

Wages received by workers are often given in the form of electronic credits. These can only be used within the shop at the detention centre which is owned by the same company that employs them. In this venal structure, detainees are employed at a fraction of a fair wage in order to cut the costs of hiring staff,  and paid in credits instead of real money, which must be spent on purchasing their employers products. A 2017 Guardian investigation found one private contractor, G4S, made more than £4.5 million in profits from 2 detention centres operating with this structure. 

To ward off ethical objections, the UK Home Office emphasises the voluntary nature of this work as detainees receive a £5 per week allowance. Therefore, they do not have to partake in paid work. The option to work is presented as ‘boredom relief’ (though standard educational and enriching boredom relieving activities available in UK prisons are notably absent). In a 2018 paper, Katie Bayles and Lucy Mayblin discuss the difference between forced labour and unfree labour. They find that, in states of uncertainty and hyper-precarity, labour within detention centres is coercive, and not freely chosen:

‘An Immigration Officer will approach you and say: “There are jobs to do here, do you need to work?” It’s where you see that all your humanity has been stripped off and, you know, it’s like, you need to get out of there. You don’t have a calling card to call your solicitor. You don’t have … a way out. You just bury your pride, somewhere, somehow and go back to the officer and say, “you know what, I think I’ll do it”.’ (Anonymous interviewee, Standoff Films cited by Bayles and Mayblin, 2018)

£5 will not cover a lawyer to defend one’s case, buy phone credits to speak to family, or purchase appropriate food for Ramadan. Many detainees’ also desperately need to send remittances to family, and working in any capacity is the only option. 

Another issue is that detainees are held in a persistent state of insecurity for an unknown time: 

‘The uncertainty is hard to bear. Your life is in limbo. No one tells you anything about how long you will stay or if you are going to get deported.’  (Anonymous, written evidence, APPG Refugees & APPG Migration, cited in Bayles and Mayblin, 2018). 

The condition of ‘deportability’ is inescapable in the minds and physical realities of detainees. The prospect of returning home unsuccessful or returning to persecution erases any perception of agency and voluntarism. Deportability lingers as a threat. Detainees do not have freedom of movement or control over their social and economic lives. They do not have any meaningful sense of privacy. Labour undertaken in oppressive conditions where agencies are constrained to such an extent, is only ever unfree. 

The abuse of detainees in immigration centres reflects how bodies, especially those which are the most vulnerable, have become commodities. Desperation is monetized. Isolation is exploited.  Our legal system has reached a point at which people are no longer afforded its protection. We have a responsibility to those fleeing persecution, oppression, and economic strife. Instead, the UK legislature codifies the maltreatment of those already in states of precarity.