Government crackdown on migrant care workers is rooted in historical slavery

This week the government unveiled its latest draconian plan to curb immigration: banning those who come to the UK to work in the care sector from bringing their family, including children and spouses, with them.

The plan has rightfully provoked outrage, but it’s not entirely new: its roots lie in historical slavery, in which enslaved people were separated from their own biological families, treated as commodities to be used for work and allowed nothing more.

It’s plausible that the plan, announced by home secretary James Cleverly on Monday, won’t reduce applicants for the health and care visa by much. In a globally unequal world, migrating to the UK for this arduous and underpaid work might still be someone’s best bet for a better future.

But in doing so, they’ll be forced to leave their own dependents behind. Doubtless, this causes no moral qualms for the government, but it should perturb the rest of us.

When we recruit migrant workers from poorer countries to perform care labour, we perpetrate what academic Christa Wichterich has called “transnational care extractivism”. This idea recognises care as a vital resource, one extracted by wealthier countries for their own use, at the expense of the needs of poorer countries.

“The local crisis of [care],” Wichterich has explained, “is transferred from the Global North to the countries of origin of the recruited care worker.”

In this way, it is a manifestation of colonial power dynamics, played out in private households and care homes across the UK. The new restriction forces would-be migrants to relegate their own dependents to a care deficit back home while ‘we’ – the wealthier and whiter – use their care labour as our own.

Carers are constructed as ‘workers’ only, rather than humans with loving ties that ought to be recognised and permitted entry. This points to the deeper problem underlying Cleverly’s announcement: capitalism forces us to separate the ‘worker’ from the ‘human’, and nowhere is this more obvious, or more harmful, than in the realm of care.

In the case of migrant care workers, this separation is made geographically explicit: they are allowed to come to the UK purely to work, and their humanness, with its potential ‘costs to the state’ of children who need schooling or loved ones who need medical treatment, must be left behind.

The local crisis of care is transferred from the Global North to the countries of origin of the recruited care worker

As I said, this is unlikely to trouble ministers. But the policy creates another headache for the government. If the new restriction does reduce the number of people migrating to the UK to work in the already understaffed care sector, who will bear the brunt? Unpaid family carers, who are statistically more likely to be older and therefore are likely to be Conservative voters.

Unpaid carers are already in a dire situation: research finds they are more likely than non-carers to live in poverty, to be isolated and depressed, and to suffer from a range of physical ailments, as well as having higher mortality rates. According to Carers UK, 25% of unpaid carers have had no days off caring in five years.

While many family members would continue caring for loved ones even with more paid help, we should not underestimate the importance of paid care workers in providing support and respite. Any decrease in their availability will cause severe hardship among family carers who are already beyond breaking point.

Today in the UK, if you perform unpaid family care for 35 hours or more per week, and earn under £139 per week from paid work, you can claim Carer’s Allowance to help you get by. But this allowance is just £76.75 per week.

Or, if you’re one of the three million people who work enough to earn more than that while also caring for an unwell, disabled or elderly loved one, you’ll get no additional financial support. And you’ll get no right to paid leave for your caring responsibilities, no explicit discrimination protections, and no right to have your needs for flexibility accommodated, only the right to request their consideration.

Again, the worker is supposed to be separable from the human. It’s this aspect that makes the migrant care workers’ fight also the unpaid family carers’ fight, a site of shared struggle that’s under-recognised but important as a basis for meaningful change.

The home secretary’s announcement is certainly a manifestation of the anti-migrant and racist policies symptomatic of our contemporary UK. It deserves opposition in that respect, but it should also draw our attention to this other, care-specific aspect.

Cleverly and the rest of the cabinet likely neither perform their own care work nor rely on state-provided paid care workers, and are therefore immune to the realities of trying to be both human and worker. But their electorate is not. As the crisis in care deepens, this may just be a policy they come to regret.