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Migrant care visas: Crackdown is rooted in slavery [1]
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Date: 2023-12
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.
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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.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/migrant-care-workers-visas-dependents-policy-rooted-in-slavery-family/
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