ABSTRACT

The relationship between immigration status and vulnerability to exploitation is most acute for irregular immigrants, who work under the threat that at any time their employers may denounce them to the authorities. However, regular immigrants are also ‘fashioned’ into exploitable workers through the conditions and exclusions attached to immigration status, which ‘cheapen [their] labour power ... and leave them vulnerable to all forms of market relations’. This chapter focuses on regular immigrants – those with the right to reside and to work in the host country – and the role that state policy plays in exacerbating their vulnerability to exploitation through immigration status conditions, programmes limiting immigrants’ legal admission to ‘dirty and dangerous’ jobs or sectors, provisions ensuring that immigrants are temporary, and restrictions on social rights. These policies play a significant role in making immigrants vulnerable to exploitation; however, in many cases, the issue is less that vulnerabilities are written into the law and more that there is a lack of enforcement of the rights that immigrant workers do hold. Again, this chapter argues that the failure to ensure that regular immigrants are protected from exploitation is the result of the complex, often-conflicted nature of the state. The chapter ends by considering the political and economic trade-offs associated with increasing immigrant workers’ rights.