Description
The UK government further intensified their “crackdown on illegal working” through a new
scheme introduced in September 2025, which extends the surveillance of migrants by
making digital ID mandatory for proving their Right to Work (Home Office, 2025; PM’s Office,
2025). Work is thus one of many aspects of life where the reach of the UK’s hostile
environment is exemplified (Barnes, 2017). Drawing on postcolonial feminist theorising and
interview data developed with local actors involved in fast fashion manufacturing in the UK,
this paper will illustrate how such a scheme increases different types of insecurities (I focus
on socio-economic and legal) that are already unevenly distributed on migrants and
racialised people. Not least, the coupling of labour market enforcement with immigration
enforcement means their employment rights are curtailed (LBL, 2024), including fear of legal
action (El-Enany, 2020; Aliverti, 2020).
Garment workers in the UK, predominantly South Asian women, are simultaneously
‘workerised’ yet disciplined by the power of state border and migration regimes.
Workerisation refers to how ‘migrants’ (broadly conceived) in labour markets are compelled
via “the development of formal and informal measures” to participate “in economic sectors
affected by shortages of workers” (Schmid and Bird, 2024: 8). This is positioned alongside
the purposeful fluidity of immigration and employment rules that allow control over and
superexploitation of migrants’ labour (Portes and Ventura-Arrieta, 2022; Tazzioli and Garelli,
2018). Colonial state and capitalist interests (the latter in this case being British brands) are
protected: They can squeeze and superexploit the labour of racialised populations, but then
impose ‘wageless life’ or remove their access to (predominantly citizenship) rights. Thus, I
argue, these garment workers are precarious and sometimes illegalised ‘relative surplus
populations’ (De Genova, 2010; Sullivan, 2022), rooted in long-standing British colonial
exploitation of racialised and feminised populations via its textile and garment industry.
