Last week, an update to the UK government’s website showed that responsibility for ‘modern slavery’ had been taken away from the minister for safeguarding and placed under the minister for immigration in the Home Office. It is now listed under “illegal migration and asylum” for which this office is responsible.
This recategorisation is the latest step in recent governments’ efforts to re-frame trafficking and slavery as, above all else, an immigration matter that should be dealt with through stronger immigration enforcement. Both Priti Patel, home secretary under Boris Johnson, and Suella Braverman, until recently home secretary under the former prime minister Liz Truss, justified these efforts with unevidenced claims that the system is being abused. Their goal appears to have been further restricting trafficked people’s access to the already limited modern slavery identification and support system, the National Referral Mechanism (NRM).
Muddying the waters
Despite statements from the Home Office and its inclusion in the UK’s recent Nationality and Borders Act, modern slavery is not primarily an immigration issue. Not only is it wrong to suggest that harsher border policing will stop trafficking – it will increase it. Whilst restricted or undocumented immigration status and the UK’s hostile environment for immigration can and do combine to facilitate exploitation, and thus some people enter the NRM for reasons linked to their immigration status, the majority of people are there for reasons which that have little to do with immigration. The Home Office’s own statistics clearly demonstrate this. The majority of people referred to the NRM between mid-2017 and end-2021 were UK nationals. And in the first quarter of 2022, 79% of UK nationals referred were children.
Consecutive British governments have steadfastly ignored these facts in order to advance their agenda. The UK published its ‘New Plan for Immigration’ in March 2021, and despite being an immigration policy document it included a section on “supporting victims of modern slavery”. This asserts that people are claiming to be victims of modern slavery to prevent or delay removal or deportation:
