Restaurants in London's Chinatown protest raids by the UK border agency in 2013. Peter Marshall/Demotix. All Rights Reserved.
The UK government’s 2015 Immigration Bill proposes two major changes. First, it introduces new and increased sanctions against employers hiring migrants who are undocumented, including civil or criminal penalties imposed by the courts. Even though these target employers, the outcome is that workers can be more exploited because some employers manage risks by lowering wages and increasing working hours. Currently, employers can be fined up to £20,000 for each worker found working without permission, and there is mounting evidence that ethnic minority employers in the food and restaurant sector are especially frequent targets of immigration raids. In interviews conducted for our research, employers spoke of unannounced raids involving large numbers of police, of terrified customers and staff, and of suffering losses in business as a result.
If this were not bad enough, the proposed legislation also orchestrates an even tougher regime against migrants by introducing a specific criminal offence of working without documents. Until now this has not been classified as a criminal offence, despite the frequent use of the term ‘illegal workers’ in the press, which feeds into the belief that crimes are being committed. Under the existing law migrants caught in raids may have been liable to deportation but not to prison.
