Towards a political economy of charging regimes: fines and fees in UK immigration control

The extraction of revenue is an integral component of UK immigration control. Drawing on new data, Jon Burnett and Fidelis Chebe examine the functions of charging regimes as a distinct form of statecraft that contributes to the political economy of financial power, with significant implications for understandings of criminalisation and immigration enforcement

Towards a Political Economy of Charging Regimes: Fines, Fees and Force in UK Immigration Control

Charging regimes and the extraction of revenue are integral components of immigration control in the United Kingdom. However, while these have been analysed in their individual guises, to date, there has been little substantive analysis bringing these regimes together and locating them at the centre of its enquiry. Drawing on data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this paper consequently examines the functions of charging regimes as a distinct form of statecraft, focusing its attention on UK Visas and Immigration fees and charges, carrier sanctions, charges related to accessing services and civil penalties administered though immigration enforcement. Analysing their historical roots and their contemporary prevalence, it suggests that they contribute to a political economy of financial power which has significant implications for understandings of criminalisation and immigration enforcement

Captive labour: asylum seekers, migrants and employment in UK immigration removal centres

The steady growth in the use of immigration detention under the UK's New Labour government has been mirrored by the concurrent development of a new form of labour market within immigration removal centres (IRCs). This market has grown out of the long history of what some label as exploitative employment practices used amongst the wider prison population. It relies upon a subtle form of coercion which ensures compliance and discipline and, in so doing, provides a cheap and easily exploitable pool of labour for private sector companies. The research for this article draws on findings from prison inspection reports and the annual reports of independent monitoring boards

Wage Theft and the Contours of Accumulation

This article examines the theft of migrant workers’ wages in England by their employers, drawing from original accounts and testimonies of a sample of workers employed between 2018 and 2023. It builds on and establishes new conceptual understandings of wage theft by examining it as a violent form of accumulation, with a range of logics and functions including those which are connected to labour processes and the management of labour forces. In making this argument, this article situates the theft of migrant workers’ wages – in this context at least – at the apex of at least three convergent dynamics: namely, the contours of immigration control and attacks on migrants’ rights, a reworking and undermining of regulatory structures relating to labour protections, and ongoing forms of labour market restructuring’. As such, it suggests that these dynamics are structural; and furthermore, at a point where each of these policy trajectories are being aggressively pursued, they are intensifying. In dominant narratives wage theft is frequently depicted as something carried out by ‘rogue’ employers, at the margins of labour markets. But in contrast, this article suggests it must be understood as a structurally-situated component of contemporary political economy. Indeed, it is a core contention of the analysis that follows that movements to resist and tackle wage theft must acknowledge these broader connections and the broader political economy of which they are a part