The term ‘modern slavery’ is used to describe the terrible reality of some people’s lives, but it is used selectively. Stories of slavery today tend to focus on an ‘evil’ perpetrator and often offer fetishistic descriptions of bondage while neglecting the processes that allow one group of people to dominate another. Historically, chattel slavery has meant much more than the simple ownership of one person by another. To get to the heart of slavery, we must move beyond images of chains and frightened faces and look at how people become victimised and stripped of their humanity.
Slaves are institutionally powerless and perpetually dependent in a capricious world. They are obliged to abide by laws that don’t protect or benefit them, existing in a liminal state between a lost social place and new communities and identities. Slaves are ‘marked’ as different and, as people without rights, can lawfully be rejected and abused. They are not free to make their own choices or work towards their own goals. In declaring many migrants in the UK ‘illegal’ and ‘deportable’, refusing them permission to work, to rent or even to marry, the State has declared them ‘unwanted’ and without personal rights.
Migrants who have lost or been refused leave to remain in the UK are liable to detention, destitution and deportation. Many have been living in the UK as students, visitors, workers and members of settled families but have lost their rights for a variety of reasons. Their visas may have run out or policy changes may have re-branded them as undocumented or irregular. Some may have been asylum seekers refused refugee status, or perhaps they have had their temporary protections withdrawn. Some might have been convicted of criminal offences carrying more than a year’s sentence which, since 2008, has meant automatic deportation. Some may have lived in the UK for most of their lives, embedded in communities where they feel, and are accepted as, ‘British’. For all of them, a Home Office decision denying further right to remain means that they become effectively banished to the fringes of society.
