As the 2021 Borders and Nationality Bill is debated within the UK’s House of Lords, NGOs representing victims of modern slavery are campaigning to have part five of the legislation removed. In a brutal extension of the hostile environment policy, this section: introduces the premise of ‘trauma deadlines’ which deny victims of trafficking access to support if they do not share details of their abuse quickly enough; raises the thresholds against which the veracity of the claims of potential victims of trafficking will be tested while reducing the circumstances in which leave to remain will be granted; and seeks to disqualify those victims who have committed crimes or who represent a “threat to public order” from protection.
The position of the British Home Office is that such harsh remedies are required to "break the business model" of organised criminal networks of people smugglers and traffickers, whose profiteering has driven an “alarming rise” in “child rapists, people who pose a threat to national security, serious criminals and failed asylum seekers … abusing our modern slavery system”. How exactly making life harder for people who have been exploited will break the business model of organised crime is difficult to fathom. Global inequality and immigration policy ‘organise’ the illicit markets for irregular migration and labour exploitation far more than criminals ever could, and the “business model” of those who facilitate illegal entry into the UK – if there is one – is simply to turn the government’s distaste for migrants into an opportunity for profit. Continuing to fortify the walls only supports this model. It doesn’t dismantle it.
Further questions must be asked about who the people convicted of trafficking and modern slavery offenses actually are, and whether it is accurate to characterise them as ‘gang members’ or ‘organised criminals’ at all. For if that characterisation doesn’t hold, it’s difficult to understand what the Borders and Nationality Bill could effectively “break”, no matter how draconian it is. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that most of those being depicted as posing an imminent threat to the UK’s security are not what popular culture would have us believe.
