Labour as a component of carceral circuitry: The case of asylum seekers

Abstract

Building upon insights from carceral geography, this article conceptualises the ‘carceral’ as permeating beyond the prison walls to other areas of life through law and policymaking that confines and incarcerates without necessarily ‘imprisoning’. ¹ Utilising the case study of asylum applicants in the UK, this article traces the role of ‘work’ as a component of carceral circuitry which enmeshes asylum seekers’ lives. Outside of immigration detention, this includes work exclusions which hinder mobility, life choices and economic independence, as well as fuelling engagement in both ‘voluntary’ unpaid work arrangements, and/or unregulated ‘criminal’ labour practices which arise as a result of exclusionary laws intent on creating a hostile environment. Inside of immigration detention analysis extends to the practice of ‘paid activities’ in which immigration detainees undertake millions of hours of work at a rate of £1.00 per hour, ostensibly ‘for their own benefit’. Labour law and its explicit exclusions, as well as the social welfare framework, thereby intersect with immigration control and the criminal law to construct, shape and reproduce this carceral sphere which seeks to control and govern asylum seekers’ lives as well as entrenching their vulnerability as an easily exploitable workforce from which value can be extracted.

1. Introduction

This article conceptualises the carceral as existing beyond the confines of the prison walls, arguing that work can be weaponised to create conditions of carcerality both within and outside of detention. In particular, this article focuses on the case study of asylum seekers in Britain positing work as a means of confining and controlling the asylum-seeking community. This approach aligns with Foucault's position in Discipline and Punish whereby the carceral is conceived as a system that proliferates beyond the prison to discipline and control via ‘coercive technologies of behaviour’. ² Within the sphere of asylum, these technologies are framed within the context of colonial histories and racial capitalism, through which Global South migrants continue to be exploited, and their bodies disposed of, for the benefit of capitalist accumulation. ³

Whilst there is a great deal of literature on issues of unfree labour and exploitative work across academic disciplines, ⁴ there is very little engagement with the carceral aspects of work in labour or carceral geography (and even fewer in law), notwithstanding the contribution of Cassidy et al who call for more attention to be paid to the punitive role of work and the political economy of carceral labour. ⁵ This article responds to their call by contributing to the scant literature on the co-opting of work as a carceral instrument, drawing from both post structuralist constructions of the carceral as a site of disciplinary control, as well as Marxist interpretations of the prison as a site for the generation of value.

The article begins by discussing the ‘carceral’ and its construction in economic geography before mapping out the varying ways in which work is utilised as a carceral tool to punish and govern the lives of asylum seekers in the UK. Asylum seekers’ work outside of immigration detention is first explored, addressing the issue of work exclusion and its intersection with sub-standard welfare provision to create immobility and suffering amongst the asylum-seeking population, giving rise to additional circuits of capital. Interlinked to this issue is the practice of asylum seekers’ volunteering which often arises as a consequence of their inability to perform legally paid work, as well as forms of irregular work where asylum seekers risk criminalisation in an attempt to meet their essential living needs. The analysis then turns to asylum seekers’ treatment within immigration detention and the practice of ‘paid activities’ which is perhaps the most obvious example of the carceral circuitry in which they are entrapped as the centre represents a spatial practice of confinement. In exploring these different contexts, I draw together evidence from case law, statutes, parliamentay documents and Hansard, NGO material, empirical studies, academic articles, and asylum seekers’ published narratives to theorise work as an instrument of carceral enclosure.

The concept of carceral circuitry is utilised throughout the article to better understand the ways in which work as a carceral technology impacts mobility, social relations and economic conditions which link to the capitalist interests of private corporations involved in migration control. ⁶ As noted by Gill et al, this lens provides ‘a new way of critically apprehending the causes and consequences of the increasingly interconnected, more-than-institutional landscape of carceral spaces and practices’. ⁷ Central to this approach is the understanding that circuits return to their own starting point, ⁸ which is important in understanding the ways in which the social and capital relations produced by law and policy then inform and reinforce the carceral structures from which they emanate. For example, asylum seekers’ exclusion from work buttresses public attitudes that work is a ‘pull factor’ for those seeking entry to the country which reinforces asylum seekers’ exclusion from the labour market. ⁹ Exclusion then fuels a number of social and ‘humanitarian’ industries designed to support and accommodate asylum seekers, forming networks of people working to reproduce carcerality. ¹⁰ The circular nature of circuits also captures the ways in which asylum seekers remain caught within a cyclical process – the only way in which the circuit can be broken is via legal recognition of their asylum claim which triggers a change in status from ‘asylum seeker’ to ‘refugee’ wherein access to employment and welfare shifts to the same terms enjoyed by UK citizens.

Within the carceral circuits in which asylum seekers are forced to operate, certain features become apparent, including: the fashioning of a precarious workforce vulnerable to exploitation, the creation of surplus value and the circulation of capital, the extraction of other modes of value such as data and knowledge production, and finally, the construction of labour as an indicator of (un)deservingness and/or criminality which serves to both inform and reinforce carceral practices and their circuitry.

1.1 Asylum and access to the labour market: The legal framework

For those unfamiliar with UK asylum policy, I sketch a brief overview of this landscape here to aid understanding of the later discussion. Asylum seekers are excluded from labour market access in the UK within the first 12 months of their claim for refugee status, ¹¹ and their dependants are excluded from working throughout the entirety of the determination process. After 12 months, asylum seekers can seek permission to work from the Secretary of State, ¹² however they remain excluded from work in a self-employed capacity or from setting up a company and are restricted to jobs listed on the ‘Immigration Salary List’. ¹³ Historically, this list related to workers with high levels of skill and/or education, creating significant barriers for accessing employment for the majority, however, post-Brexit, roles in care work and construction have been added allowing ostensibly ‘low skilled’ workers to apply for work, though salary thresholds apply to the latter. Despite a reduction in legal barriers, the proliferation of the Government's hostile environment whereby employers are criminally liable for ensuring their workforce have the ‘right to work’ creates anxiety and a reluctancy to take on those with work permits. Accessing these jobs is also risky for the asylum-seeking population as it jeopardises access to asylum housing and welfare in unspecified and discretionary ways signifying a defusal rather than removal of barriers.

If an asylum application is refused, and the individual has exhausted all rights of appeal, they are then prohibited from engaging in employment whilst present in the UK, ¹⁴ which is assumed to apply to those whose claims are deemed ‘inadmissable’ under the Nationalities and Borders Act 2022 and the Illegal Migration Act 2023. Despite a wealth of evidence refuting the pull factor thesis, ¹⁵ the justification for excluding asylum applicants from unimpeded access to the labour market is ‘deterrence’ on grounds that they could be economic migrants seeking access to the country. ¹⁶ The right to punish via employment exclusion is thereby grounded in the ‘defence of society’, ¹⁷ and the need to limit access to the national welfare state ¹⁸ as well as ‘British jobs for British workers’. ¹⁹

Since introduction of the Immigration Act 2016, those working without the right to work commit a criminal offence where they know, or have reasonable cause to believe, that they are disqualified from working on grounds of immigration status which can result in a fine and/or prison time of up to six months, ²⁰ propelling them further into the depths of the carceral. Where irregular work arises, the doctrine of illegality presents a significant obstacle to enforcing employment rights such as a claim for unpaid wages or unfair dismissal, meaning it is unlikely that contractual rights could be enforced against an employer in a court or tribunal. ²¹ Protection from discrimination has also recently been curtailed for irregular workers where discrimination arises as a result of immigration status. ²² The law thus refuses to recognise the racialised nature of immigration status which arises as a process of institutionalising colonial hierarchies leading to the stratification of rights. ²³ This is evident in the UK's timeline regarding rights for asylum seekers which began to retract from the late 1980s whereby the profile of the refugee changed from that of the white European to racialised applicants from the Global South. ²⁴ It is also evident in the differential treatment afforded to European refugees from Ukraine who had specific protective visa schemes created for them to enable legal entry and access to a panoply of rights, including labour market access and national welfare benefits.

Despite being largely excluded from access to the formal labour market outside of detention, once detained asylum seekers are offered participation in ‘paid activities’ via rule 17 of the Detention Centre Rules 2001, which were introduced to reduce ‘boredom and frustration for detainees’. ²⁵ Those undertaking paid activities receive £1.00 an hour for ‘routine work’ and £1.25 an hour for specific projects. ²⁶ This is allowed due to asylum seekers’ exclusion from protection under the National Minimum Wage Act 1998. ²⁷

In the majority of contexts explored within this article, the work performed by asylum seekers is not considered to give rise to employment status, meaning access to labour rights remains blocked, another exclusion which is central to their incapacitation. As noted by Bhattacharyya, the perceived boundaries between work and non-work goes straight to the heart of practices of differentiation for exploitation that make up ‘racial capitalism’, which centres racism as a key site for enabling capitalist development. ²⁸ Racial capitalism is thus regarded as one of the central drivers behind the creation of carcerality for asylum seekers. Though the UK is the case study featured within this article, the forms of carceral governance highlighted apply throughout the world in both the Global North and Global South, meaning the conclusions drawn from this analysis could be applied internationally.

2. The carceral sphere

Drawing from the work of Moran, Turner and Schliehe, ²⁹ the word ‘carceral’ originates from the Latin term ‘carceralis’, whose origin, ‘carcer’ was the name of the central state prison in Ancient Rome. Moran et al also observe connection to the Latin word ‘cuvus’ linked to the idea of circles or round objects, and one of the geomantic signs in occult divination denoting enclosure, a link in a chain or prison cell. Wherever the sign appears, it conveys great detriment, delays, setbacks or bindings. Within the modern context, the Oxford Dictionary defines carceral as ‘of or belonging to a prison’, ³⁰ reflecting its general understanding within wider society.

Foucault's seminal text, Discipline and Punish, has been influential in broadening academic interpretation of the term beyond that of the traditional prison, yet for him the prison and its associated concepts of discipline, surveillance, control and coercion remained central to the construction of carcerality. Academic understanding of the prison is not static, drifting with the ‘tides of prison policy, media discourse, and imaginative and fictional representations’. ³¹ Geographical literature on carcerality thus reflects a variety of interpretations, making it difficult to pin down a uniform definition given its porous and evolving boundaries. ³² Accordingly, much of the literature in carceral geography moves away from an authoritative definition of carcerality that draws boundaries between what is and what is not carceral. ³³ Instead, Moran et al advocate for three carceral conditions to be seen as existing on a continuum, enabling a means of appraising carcerality itself. These conditions are detriment, intention and spatiality. Detriment focuses upon the experience of harm by those experiencing it, which could be intended via punishment, or as an unintended consequence. This condition is less concerned with the intention behind the harm, but rather the experience of those receiving the treatment, recognising the innate subjectivity of the carceral sphere. Intention relates to the agent behind the treatment, ‘a formal structure or organization that intends and administers punishment’; ³⁴ this could be the state, or the prison itself etc. Though harm can be experienced in many circumstances, the absence of an agent inflicting it means these situations may not be considered carceral. Spatiality recognises that the carceral will always apply to some kind of space of confinement, whether this is bound up in the traditional construction of a detention centre or the job centre, the school, the street or the body - ‘in other words, any space, at any scale. If there is detriment and intention, there will be a space or spaces to which these relate’. ³⁵

Nick Gill adds to this construction of carcerality by positing mobility as an aspect of freedom which imprisonment seeks to withdraw as a deprivation of personal liberty. As such, ‘we might understand incarceration as the withholding of an individual's mobility in order to punish that individual’, ³⁶ or the use of forced mobility as a form of carceral punishment. ³⁷ Within this article, mobility is understood to embody movement of both human and non-human actors which involves movement from one place to another, or in the context of social mobility, movement through social hierarchies and forms of stratification. Mobility can thus be used in a punitive sense ‘to rule through the freedom of subjects’ ³⁸ in which the carceral arises. As noted by Carnochan, this need not relate to prisons, colonies or internment camps ‘but can apply beyond to metaphorical patterns that include all restraint on human action whereby the experience of imprisonment and constraint arises, restricting the free movement of body and mind’. ³⁹

To an (albeit limited) extent, such a position is acknowledged in human rights law as the European Court of Human Rights recognise that a deprivation of liberty (relating to the physical liberty of the person) can take numerous forms other than spatial confinement within prison. ⁴⁰ For example, in the 1980 European Court of Human Rights case of Guzzardi v Italy, ⁴¹ the judges had to assess whether a deprivation of liberty had occurred contrary to Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The case concerned a mafiosi who was confined to a small Italian island for 16 months pending trial. Consistently with this approach, the judges analysed a number of aspects of Guzzardi's stay on the island, including: the locality, the possibilities of movement, his accommodation, the availability of medical attention, the presence of his family, the possibilities of attending worship and/or work, the possibilities for cultural and recreational activities, and communications with the outside. As noted by the court, it is not possible to ‘speak of “deprivation of liberty” on the strength of any one of these factors taken individually, but cumulatively and in combination’ they were found to engage Article 5. ⁴² Consequently, there is no definitive bright line to distinguish between confinement that will and will not amount to a deprivation– it will depend in its entirety on the facts of the case, the subjectivity of the claimant and the terms and conditions on which it is exercised. This coalesces with the work of Martin and Mitchelson, who consider incarceration as an ‘assemblage of spatial practices, constituted through social, political, cultural, and economic relationships’. ⁴³

Drawing from the above literature, the four components of detriment, intention, spatiality through confinement and mobility will be utilised to assess the significance of work within the carceral archipelago surrounding asylum seekers. Though Foucault's writing focuses on the use of carcerality as a programme intended to ‘normalise’ ⁴⁴ individuals and create uniform citizens (which some suggest are the developing seeds for his later theory of biopower), ⁴⁵ this article argues that carcerality for asylum seekers intends the opposite: to exclude, isolate and ‘let die’ as encapsulated in the concept of Necropolitics put forwards by Mbembe. ⁴⁶ Built upon in the more recent work of Mayblin, she notes that the populations excluded from the purview of biopower ‘are not simply killed by (or in the name of) the sovereign, however, they are allowed to die in the name of prioritising a clearly defined society of the deserving or legitimate populous’, ⁴⁷ which in this instance is the enfranchised citizen population. Ultimately then, necropower works towards the creation of ‘death worlds’, where stigmatised populations are subjected to appalling conditions conferring upon them the status of ‘living dead’. ⁴⁸

3. Diffuse carcerality: Work exclusion and asylum support

3.1 Labour exclusion: Dependency/destitution/facilitation of economies of ‘humanitarianism’

Labour exclusion and the system of ‘asylum support’ that sit alongside it are what Foucault would term a ‘diffuse’ model of carcerality, whereby ‘carceral methods’ purportedly assist, yet surveil. In these diffuse areas of social policy, we see that ‘the carceral circles widen and the form of the prison slowly diminishes and finally disappears altogether’. ⁴⁹

Labour market exclusion and restriction can be utilised as a technique or technology of confinement. As noted earlier, absolute work exclusions apply to asylum seekers during the first 12 months of their asylum claim, ⁵⁰ after which they are restricted to applying for jobs under the Immigration Salary List. For those refused asylum or categorised ‘inadmissable’, labour market exclusions persist. ⁵¹ As a result of these restrictions, the majority of asylum seekers have no access to employment until they are granted refugee status, meaning they have no access to wages or the ability to (legally) support themselves, plunging them into state enforced destitution. This stirs feelings of isolation and hopelessness as reflected by Mustafa, an asylum-seeking participant in Mayblin et al's study, who asserts ‘I want to work so that I can be able to support myself. I want to form relationships with people, I want to dress smartly. I feel so lonely. I am giving up on life because I am unable to live by myself’. ⁵² Employment exclusion thus gives rise to geographic and social immobility causing detriment and harm to those subjected to it, yet such a premise must be contextualised against the restrictive welfare benefits afforded under the asylum support system to truly understand the immobility, surveillance and disciplinary mechanisms that arise.

Due to asylum seekers’ exclusion from work and designation as having ‘no recourse to public funds’, those deemed ‘destitute’ ⁵³ are forced to rely upon the asylum support system, which divides support amongst three distinct groups: those with active asylum claims entitled to cash support and/or accommodation ⁵⁴ (£49.18 per person, per week); refused asylum seekers who fulfil requirements entitling them to non-cash support and accommodation (£49.18 per person, per week); ⁵⁵ and refused asylum seekers who are ineligible for any Government support. Those entitled to support receive approximately £7.02 per day to provide for all their basic living needs, including transportation and telephone costs. ⁵⁶ Where those entitled to financial support are accommodated by the State in ad hoc arrangements such as hotels (wherein meals are provided) applicants receive only £8.86 per week. Support is accessed via the ASPEN payment card, which does not link to a bank account but rather works as a prepaid debit card via Mastercard, managed by PrePaid Financial Services. Those granted accommodation are also liable to dispersal (where the Home Office moves asylum seekers to specified local authority areas across the UK) which functions on a no-choice basis, meaning refusal of the accommodation can lead to the withdrawal of support.

While it is not the intention of this article to fully explore the inner workings and impact of the asylum support system, which has been well scrutinised elsewhere, ⁵⁷ a wealth of data indicates that those in receipt of asylum support, or rendered destitute, live far below the poverty line and struggle to provide adequate living standards for both themselves and their dependents, producing feelings of stress, anxiety and shame which have both physical and mental effects. ⁵⁸ Recipients report having to access food banks in order to survive which has been likened to ‘a feeling of death. . .We refugees like me and you were not poor people in our countries, we just had to escape from death to survive. But you don't believe how terrible I felt, standing in the queue in coldness for a bag of food’. ⁵⁹ Inevitably, restrictions upon social mobility and social exclusion arise as a result of punitive welfare provision where individuals avoid social contact due to feelings of shame surrounding their financial situation. This aligns with Peck's construction of the ‘social/penal frontier’ whereby welfare is used as a punitive tool under neoliberalism. ⁶⁰

Destitution and lack of access to additional income restricts asylum seekers’ ability to socialise or build plans for the future, dispossessing them of time which is a central feature of carceral practices. Indeed, Ruben Andersson construes detention as part of a wider ‘economics of illegality’ which consumes migrants’ mobility, ‘deposes their bodies in a show of deterrence’ and ‘stretches their experience of time’. ⁶¹ Confiscation of these forms of mobility thus form an attack upon the ways in which asylum seekers are able to engage with, and take part in, modern society, ⁶² extending the space of confinement beyond geographical location to one of body and mind. ⁶³

Building upon these insights, it is important to note that the carceral consumption of mobility does not have to be spatially fixed or restricted to a singular place. Though many asylum seekers are geographically isolated, it is not the case that they simply remain static in their accommodation. On the contrary, exclusion from work and enforced poverty necessitates largely pointless and exhausting mobilities, such as visiting numerous charities to access additional support, shopping around for the cheapest available food, attending to social networks which must be maintained and serviced if they are to be relied upon, and signing in at their local Home Office reporting centre or police station as a condition of their immigration bail. This often demands travelling for hours by bus, walking or cycling, ⁶⁴ usurping time from their daily routines and lives. Fisher et al refer to these movements as ‘micro-mobilities’, which constitute regular enforced movements that serve to enact the carceral in the everyday lives of asylum seekers and deplete their energy reserves. ⁶⁵ Indeed, they note that these mobilities are both intended and experienced as a form of punishment, ⁶⁶ mirroring the routines and schedules that produce ‘prison time’, ⁶⁷ where there is no ‘free time, no unallocated slots’. ⁶⁸ Forced mobility and the consumption of time can thus be utilised as an instrument of governance and power, which, in part, arises due to poverty linked to labour market restrictions and exclusions.

For many asylum seekers, the issue of movement forms one of the central struggles in their everyday lives. For perspective, an adult's return bus fare in the City of Bristol costs £3.80 (via First Bus). ⁶⁹ This constitutes 54% of an asylum seekers’ daily allowance (where they receive full support), leaving £3.22 to cover all of the other essential daily needs, and 302% of the daily allowance given to those in hotel accommodation. ⁷⁰ As a result, many asylum seekers remain geographically isolated from their friends and family after dispersal and have limited access to additional financial means to enable travel, creating a form of containment outside of the prison walls. Indeed, Gill urges us to consider confinement beyond just the notion of ‘holding’ to situations where people are moved against their will or, in some instances, through coerced volition. Darling further posits that dispersal sustains and produces patterns of violence constituting a form of ‘slow violence’ against asylum seekers which seeks to denigrate and dehumanise, creating ‘a carceral experience, one associated with confinement, insecurity and cumulative harm’. ⁷¹ Enforced poverty thereby contains, encloses and prevents asylum seekers from travelling outside of their designated dispersal areas and impedes social integration into the communities in which they are placed, creating de facto spaces of confinement whereby futurity is withheld. ⁷²

Circuits of capital are intertwined into this carceral economy as the dependency created by employment exclusion is then carved out into a range of financialised services. Indeed, Coddington et al note that destitution economies use exclusions (such as exclusion from political membership and work) in order to make migrants valuable to others, value derived ‘through the grinding labo[u]r of living in poverty’. ⁷³ For example, asylum seeker housing is entirely privatised and run by three corporations, Serco, ClearSprings and Mears Group, who are at liberty to subcontract and outsource their responsibilities to other housing providers where such accommodation is available. As noted by Martin and Tazzioli, ⁷⁴ privatisation in this sector has ‘proliferated bureaucracy instead of streamlining it, as different actors are accountable to different objectives and mandates, profit only one among them’. In this instance, it is the reproductive labour of living that creates value as the State pays rent to private providers for occupancy.

Similarly, in 2019 the contract for the ASPEN card, which is used to administer asylum support, transferred from Sodexo (which cost the Home Office £84m) to Prepaid Financial Services (which between January 2020 and December 2021 cost £198m). ⁷⁵ Though seemingly grounded as a form of ‘digital humanitarianism’ enabling forced migrants to access basic services and link with important communities surrounding them, ⁷⁶ such technologies also function as instruments of governmentality ‘engendering a spatial discipline to limit asylum seekers’ mobility and self-discipline’ their financial activities. ⁷⁷ Governmentality is achieved through a number of methods attached to the prepayment cards, including surveillance capabilities as data is shared with the UK Home Office which monitors usage to determine mobility. This gives rise to the withdrawal of support where the card is not used regularly or where it is used outside of the dispersal area on the assumption that asylum seekers must be living elsewhere or have no need for the support itself. ⁷⁸ Secondly, the identifiability of the card ties it to the subjecthood of asylum seeker and thus a status of alterity as ‘Other’; and thirdly, enforced rules and restrictions govern how and where the card can be used, such as the inability to use it for online shopping or goods not considered ‘essential’. ⁷⁹ The card thereby positions asylum seekers as deviant threats to the public purse and in need of management by the State through technologies which further reinforce this negative construction.

Here, then, we see that immobility arises as a result of the intersection between asylum support and employment exclusion. Within this context, the imposition of both physical and social immobility act as a punitive measure used to curtail personal liberty, ⁸⁰ which builds upon Foucault's idea of liberty as a desirable commodity, the manipulation of which serves to both govern and self-discipline state subjects. Asylum seekers’ constructed dependence upon the State and the network of private actors seeking to ‘support’ them in turn also transforms them into sources of value and data extraction through which circuits of capital begin to form. Capital relations further sustain asylum seekers’ exclusion from the labour market as there is a vested private interest in their dependency which gives rise to the commodification of welfare administration and housing provision. These circuits rely upon destitution in order to function. The agent of this carceral regime is the UK Government, whose intention is to create ‘a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants’ ⁸¹ whilst avoiding the imposition of conditions which might breach Article 3 of the ECHR, concerning inhuman and degrading treatment. ⁸² This is clearly evident in the case law surrounding the ‘essential living needs’ of asylum seekers which revealed that the Home Office set asylum support rates to provide ‘sufficient food to keep those on support in health and to avoid illness or malnourishment’ as well as ‘suitable clothing to avoid any danger of illness’ and a number of other basic needs. ⁸³ Legal obligations are thus fulfilled ‘to an absolute minimum, to a point where people seeking asylum are merely prevented from physically dying […] They are, in many cases, being kept alive but in a state of injury, subjected not to immediate violence, but to the slow violence of impoverishment’. ⁸⁴

3.2 Volunteering and irregular work

As an alternative to paid employment, asylum seekers are encouraged by the Home Office and their case workers to volunteer for charitable organisations and NGOs in order to ‘fill their time’, ⁸⁵ moving them from the status of sanctuary seeker in need of support towards a productive worker from whom surplus value can be extracted. Importantly, however, carceral logic removes the option to choose employment freely to build upon skills and education, instead sifting applicants into specific forms of voluntary work that benefit civic society, whereby unpaid voluntary work is constructed as a ‘gift’ to prevent boredom. ⁸⁶ In this context the work performed is not considered to be employment deserving of a wage, which further entrenches asylum seekers’ geographical immobility and highlights the paradox of voluntary work in this context: asylum seekers are pushed to work as citizens without any promise of reciprocal return or rights for their actions. ⁸⁷

In establishing whether someone is a volunteer rather than an employee or worker, the Government notes that there should be no payment other than expenses for travel and meals; no contractual obligations or entitlement to any work or benefits; the volunteer must help a registered voluntary or charitable organisation, an organisation that raises funds for either of these, or a public sector organization; and finally, that volunteering is not a substitute for employment. Whereas paid employment is considered to be a criminal activity, ‘genuine volunteering roles’ are not subject to these restrictions, nor the labour rights and protections that arise from recognised employment status.

Though there is a very limited range of circumstances in which asylum seekers can legally work, these instances are so limited that they serve as a poor attempt to conceal what is effectively labour market exclusion. By dispossessing asylum seekers of this access, they become a form of ‘labour in waiting’, during which their time becomes valuable, but not to themselves ⁸⁸ - rather to the public bodies and charitable industries into which they are filtered as volunteers. The ‘volitional’ nature of this work should, however, be called into question in light of the lack of other options available for asylum seekers to build and maintain their skills or socialise. Indeed, by disrupting and denying autonomous processes of social reproduction through enforced destitution, the State is able to extract unpaid labour from asylum seekers looking to build connections and community. As argued by Martin and Tazzioli, these modes of extraction arise due to the exceptional legal status of asylum seekers which activates ‘carceral practices of discipline, spatial confinement and dispossessed time’ upon which much of the ‘volunteer’ industry has come to rely. ⁸⁹ What is more, there is evidence that authorities sometimes allow the ‘success’ asylum seekers have at volunteering and bettering themselves to permeate the decision-making process on their protective asylum claims, making use of the discretion available to decision makers to favour the productive migrant, ⁹⁰ reflecting yet another form of governmentality and control commonly attributed to the prison industrial complex.

In addition to creating an available arsenal of voluntary labour, employment exclusion and welfare dependence is documented to add pressure upon applicants to engage in irregular work in the informal economy; motivated, in some instances, by the shame of relying on the generosity of others or the inability to provide for oneself and one’s family. ⁹¹ Entry into irregular work is also another example of the mobilitarian imperative imposed upon unwanted populations who are constantly required to engage, move and keep-up, almost constituting a test of strength to see if they are suitable subjects for inclusion. Exclusion from work and employment restrictions thus enter asylum seekers into a variety of circuits, including forms of irregular work which can result in exploitation and prostitution ⁹² where individuals risk obtaining a criminal record or imprisonment to provide an adequate standard of living. ⁹³ Exploitation as a consequence of employment exclusion is recognised by the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which acknowledges that high levels of unemployment cause workers to seek employment in the informal sector of the economy. ⁹⁴ If caught working irregularly, asylum seekers are liable to either criminal or immigration detention, a fine and/or deportation – a system which is arguably designed to remove surplus labour and keep labour compliant as opposed to removing all unauthorised migrants. ⁹⁵

In excluding asylum seekers from lawful access to the labour market, the Government structures their vulnerability through law, ⁹⁶ encouraging exploitative forms of irregular work in which asylum seekers provide cheap labour from which ‘surplus value is extracted precisely from the gap between what migrant labourers and their legalised counterparts might be paid’. ⁹⁷ In this instance, the status of irregular worker has punitive consequences in terms of exclusion from labour rights and protections, exposing workers to manipulation and exploitation by employers. Accordingly, we see that carceral circuits move beyond the geographical space of the prison and into several spheres of asylum seekers’ lives, as well as institutional and corporate settings. It should be noted, however, that alternative models to employment exclusion, such as the obligatory work system for asylum seekers in Sweden, ⁹⁸ can also result in carceral consequences. The point then is not that the denial or granting of work is punitive in all circumstances, but rather that the terms and conditions on which work is granted, contextualised against intersecting structures and laws such as immigration control, can amount to coercive technologies and furtherance of the carceral state.

Against labour market access and employment rights for UK citizens, labour exclusions and the removal of rights operate as a form of discipline and punishment for the asylum-seeking community, producing a slow structural violence. ⁹⁹ This violence operates as an everyday form of necropolitics in which suffering is inevitably drawn out and dispersed. As explored, these reflections apply to the weaponisation of work outside of detention, whereby the carceral circles diffuse, ‘and like ripples in water, extend far from the prison’, as well as processes of work within immigration removal centres. ¹⁰⁰

4. Compact carcerality: Labour within immigration detention

Penal labour has been a definitive feature of carceral practices since the emergence of systematic detention in 16th century England, where bridewells (houses of correction) were created as sites of detention, punishment and reformation in line with mercantilist requirements for dependable labour. ¹⁰¹ Accordingly, systematic detention developed in response to the rising demands of capitalism and to fill local labour shortages, as evidenced by the construction of the first house of correction in England, established in London in 1557 by prominent merchants. ¹⁰² The link between mobility, incarceration, labour and the accumulation of capital is thus integral to understanding the growth and development of both historical detention practices and the modern prison industrial complex.

Similarly in the US context, after the civil war ended, ‘black codes’ were created in the Southern states to criminalise and incarcerate freed black men and women so that they could be outsourced and contracted out to private companies as labourers, often subjected to brutal regimes of unpaid labour. ¹⁰³ This ‘transferred symbolically significant numbers of black people from the prison of slavery to the slavery of prison’. ¹⁰⁴ Reflecting upon these histories, it is clear that work has always been an integral component of the carceral sphere which continues in the present via organised regimes of prison labour which are ostensibly ‘rehabilitative’. Indeed, recognition of these connections is nothing new within academic literature, as Foucault acknowledged the use of forced labour within the modern penal system as a form of punishment for the idle vagabond ¹⁰⁵ and the links between capital, race, labour and detention are well traversed in critical race theory. ¹⁰⁶

Wilson-Gilmore notes that one of the central ways in which prison purportedly aims to solve social problems is through incapacitation, which is achieved by extensively and repeatedly removing people from disordered, deindustrialised milieu and depositing them somewhere else. ¹⁰⁷ Redolent of the prison industrial complex, perhaps the most obvious dimension of the carceral circuitry in which asylum seekers are ensnared is that of immigration detention, ¹⁰⁸ whereby those subject to immigration control are removed from society and deposited in one of the seven immigration removal centres in Britain. Yet these centres are not just holding facilities for detainees; they are also places of work, ¹⁰⁹ which in similarity to the prison industrial complex use labour as a tool for governance, control and the extraction of capital. Between January 2014 and July 2016, detainees undertook over 1,955,000 hours’ worth of work. ¹¹⁰ In the 12 months between April 2016 and March 2017, 887,073 hours of paid work were undertaken, over 99% of which was paid at a rate of £1.00 an hour. ¹¹¹ Ironically, this means that the UK Government and the associate corporations running the detention centres are the single biggest employer of irregular migrants in the UK – despite their having ‘no right to work’.

Immigration removal centres are considered to be ‘compact’ forms of carcerality in Foucauldian terms, due to their mirroring of the prison regime. Indeed, the Detention Centre Rules 2001 are explicitly modelled on the Prison Rules 1964 and a number of removal centres, such as Harmondsworth, Brook House and Colnbrook, were built to emulate category B prison standards, rendering them ‘claustrophobic […with] the “feel” and look of contemporary gaols’. ¹¹² Immigration detainees and prisoners can be distinguished, however, as those within immigration detention are not held on account of criminal activity, and unlike prison work, detainee work serves no rehabilitative function as the lawfulness of the detention itself arises on the bases of deportation, which must be foreseeable. The intention then is not to reintegrate these individuals into UK society, but rather expel them from the country.

A further significant difference is that unlike criminal detention, there remains no specific time limit on the length of detention for immigration purposes within the UK. Instead, the timeframe is subject to the Hardial Singh principle of ‘reasonableness’, ¹¹³ the judicial interpretation of which has warranted concern, ¹¹⁴ as evident in the case of Giwa, where an 18-year-old man was held captive for four years and five months pending removal. ¹¹⁵ As Lucy Mayblin and I have argued elsewhere, ¹¹⁶ the lack of certainty concerning length of detention creates hyper precarity, making detainees more likely to accept exploitative working conditions. Indeed, Andersson argues that ‘the authorities engage in an active usurpation of time for the purposes of migration control’, part of a management technique which uses detention as a form of collective punishment, as well as disrupting mobility and the flow of capital. ¹¹⁷

Whilst detainees are able to voluntarily put themselves forward for work, the carceral logic of control underpins the system as eligibility is linked to detainees’ compliance and cooperation with the Home Office in helping to resolve their case. Non-compliant or violent behaviour (such as failing to attend an interview or causing disruption) will also automatically exclude individuals from paid work opportunities. ¹¹⁸

Though the labour of immigration detainees is used to produce goods for private corporations in numerous countries throughout the world, ¹¹⁹ at present within the UK this work constitutes prison housework, ¹²⁰ whereby detainees are complicit in maintaining the standards of their own incarceration, including jobs such as cleaning, laundry, gardening, waste disposal, hairdressing, decorating and gym supervision. As highlighted in the case of Morita, such services ‘confer a benefit on the removal centre and its occupants, including detained persons and staff’. ¹²¹ However, in a parliamentary debate concerning implementation of the national minimum wage for immigration detainees, the Labour Party pushed against this prospect on grounds that it ‘would not be viable financially, nor reflect the true economic value of the work likely to be carried out, which is likely to be remedial and assistive.’ ¹²² Like much of the work considered to be ‘women's work’, detainee labour is thus categorised as non-productive work, erasing its value in capitalist terms. Yet this overlooks the fact that the capitalist system is a patriarchal and racialised project built on the erasure of others’ ‘non-productive’ labour - mainly provided by women, slaves and workers from the colonies.

The categorisation of asylum seekers’ labour as ‘non-work’ unworthy of adequate remuneration and labour rights appears to have become the standardised model both inside and outside of the detention centre. Their exclusion from the status of ‘worker’ is then significant for the rights and protections they miss out on. The work of Cedric Robinson is informative here, which argues that racialised histories of exclusion and social privilege shape access to, and the formation of, labour in the present which run alongside the economy. ¹²³ From this perspective, asylum seekers can be conceived as ‘edge populations’ relegated to a space beyond or alongside the wage economy where their labour is not categorised as real or ‘productive’ work requiring minimum wage. ‘If racial capitalism is a process that sifts people into different categories, sometimes with an economic purpose, but always with an economic outcome, then the visibility and value accorded to types and locations of work, therefore, becomes a central question’. ¹²⁴ Indeed, Nancy Fraser writes that distinguishing between ‘free individuals and those defined as workers, while constituting others as lesser beings, for example as chattel slaves…colonized subjects…[and] felons’ is an essential process for political orders in entrenching the racial dynamics of capitalist society. ¹²⁵ The incarceration of asylum seekers’ and their categorisation as non-workers thus erases the value of their labour and is central to their subordination.

If we consider carceral labour as a means of instilling market and social discipline, then this form of work also indoctrinates detainees into accepting precarity in the form of low wages (if at all) and poor working conditions should they be released. Labour within immigration detention, then, has implications for detainees’ post release, as well as for the wider workforce, as the use of cheap, precarious migrant labour suppresses wages and labour conditions downwards.

Carceral circuits of capital, emanating from confinement, also infiltrate the ‘paid activities’ regime as the private corporations running the UK's detention estate (Mitie, G4S, Serco and GEO) ¹²⁶ seek to profit millions through the cutting of costs on staff who would otherwise be paid the national minimum wage. Though the Government rejects the claim that private companies are profiting from this labour, the nature of the work undertaken, detainee accounts of its value, and the hours amassed are not commensurate with this claim. As noted by John, a former immigration detainee who worked as a cleaner under the paid activities regime, ‘if I had not cleaned that detention centre wing every day, it would have been in an absolutely disgusting state. My role was critical in keeping the detention centre hygienic and safe’. ¹²⁷

Processes of market exchange also occur within the detention centre via detainee purchases at the shop which stocks snacks, drinks, tobacco, phone cards, writing materials and postage stamps. ¹²⁸ It is documented that the price of goods within detention is inflated compared to normal goods outside of detention, ¹²⁹ necessitating engagement with the paid activities regime for those who wish to have a choice in selecting their own goods. Doing so provides detainees with a base level of agency, as expressed by John: ‘the option of what to have for dinner or to be able to buy an energy drink is a small luxury which made life in detention more manageable. The Home Office would only give us 71p per day so I could not have afforded this had I not been working in detention’. ¹³⁰ Accordingly, these carceral circuits of capital are enabled by dispossessing detainees of their liberty, agency and property and funnelling them into exploitative labour practices where their work is valued at £1.00 per hour. As noted by Hiemstra and Conlon, detainees are thereby ‘spatially fixed as both captive consumers and coerced labourers in ways that generate important transfers of wealth’. ¹³¹

5. Conclusion

In stark contrast to the ways in which capital and traded goods flow freely across state borders under neoliberalism, States have sought to ‘immobilise, exclude and excise’ ¹³² migrants arriving from the Global South through a broad panoply of Governmental techniques and technologies. Yet the unique position of asylum seekers under international law means that upon declaration of seeking refuge, they must be admitted into the State. Unable to expel the group outright, the State turns to other internal methods of exclusion and control. Accordingly, work forms a central component of the States carceral archipelago which is weaponised to punish, control and contain those seeking sanctuary, justified on the basis of deterring disingenuous applicants. Inside of detention, this includes the practice of ‘paid activities’ which are used as a means of disciplining and controlling detainees to create docility and submission, as well as extracting surplus value from which detention centre operators profit.

Outside of detention, exclusion from lawful employment creates dependency upon an asylum support system that punitively enforces poverty upon the population as a means of deterrence, control and surveillance, enforcing and restricting the mobility of recipients both geographically and socially. As a result, many asylum seekers are funnelled into systems of volunteering or irregular work devoid of access to the national minimum wage. The immobilities that arise from the carceral operation of work facilitate asylum seekers’ commodification, rendering them as raw materials processed for profit by corporations and ‘humanitarian’ industries outsourced by the State; as well as constituting a cheap source of labour power that can be exploited in their capacity as labouring detainees, volunteers and irregular migrant workers.

If we consider detriment, intention, confined spatiality and mobility as indicators of carcerality, then it is clear that work can be used as a technology of incarceration creating spaces of confinement within the detention centre, dispersal areas, as well as the body and mind, inhibiting the mobility, socialisation and life choices of asylum seekers. The agent in this instance is the Government, which creates asylum seekers’ vulnerabilities through law and policymaking intended to control, confine and dehumanise. Drawn from colonial understandings of human hierarchy whereby asylum seekers from the Global South are posited as the non-human ‘other’, policies concerning work and welfare for asylum seekers constitute ‘slow violence’ through which their suffering is inevitable. ¹³³ This harm is intended as a warning to future migrants seeking access to the State, as well as a means of punishing, controlling and governing those that have entered.