This project investigates how and why practices ordinarily classified as indicators of forced labour, namely, withholding of wages and threats of denunciation to immigration authorities, are reconstituted and utilised as tools of immigration control in the UK. It also explores the effect of criminalising migrant labour on the vulnerability of migrants to forced labour. 

The project scrutinises the tensions between these tools of immigration control and domestic and international legal protections of human rights in the workplace. The project adopts a doctrinal method and engages with different elements of UK labour law, criminal law, immigration law, and domestic and international human rights law. This work contributes to the wider project on labour exploitation and human rights undertaken by the Modern Slavery Policy and Evidence Centre in partnership with the Bonavero Institute.

The project has two dimensions based on forced labour indicators in the UK immigration control system. The first explores the phenomenon of state-sponsored wage theft perpetrated against irregular migrants. Drawing upon the concept of wage theft, this aspect of research examines the legal and administrative mechanisms through which the state deprives irregular migrants of their wages and assesses the compatibility of this practice with human and labour rights protections under international and European human rights law instruments. The second dimension investigates the denunciation of irregular migrants to the immigration authorities by employers as a tool of coercion and the regulatory paradox of simultaneously constructing denunciation as an indicator of forced labour and an immigration control function of employers.