Vietnamese migrants have become coterminous with modern slavery in British media and policy discussions over recent years; they have been positioned in polarised ways as either vulnerable, passive victims of traffickers in need of rescue or as criminals breaching UK immigration and employment law. This view overlooks a much wider spectrum of experiences, including those who are not deemed 'modern slaves' such as undocumented workers and those who are claiming asylum protection but still need to pay off their smuggler's debt. Our article problematises modern slavery debates and public policy agendas which skew our understanding of issues facing 'low- skilled', undocumented Vietnamese migrants in the UK and their opportunities for integration. We deploy the 'precarity-agency' lens (Paret & Gleeson 2016) to better make sense of where vulnerability is produced and how it is managed. We argue for the need to move beyond narrow conceptions of modern slavery by paying greater attention to wider processes of precaritisation which reinforce migrant vulnerability and prevent integration, while also highlighting areas of migrant agency such as 'decisions to migrate', 'work choices' and 'social coping strategies'. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with migrants, we reveal alternative narratives which show how modern slavery policies preclude integration (broadly conceived) and instead enforce a very specific kind of 'subordinate incorporation' into the undocumented, precarious life in the UK.
Barber, Tamsin Nguyen, HaiNguyen, Phuc Van
Department of Social Sciences
Year of publication: 2023Date of RADAR deposit: 2023-01-10