Migrant Exploitation and Racial Discrimination
Professor Francis Collins – Previously at Te Ngira Institute for Population Research now based at the University of Auckland.
The workplace exploitation of migrants has become a recurrent feature of media reporting and political debate on migration in Aotearoa over the last decade. While the Covid-19 pandemic effectively halted border crossing, reports have continued to surface of people on various kinds of temporary visas, or without formal legal status, being subjected to abuse, underpayment, fraudulent employer activity, overworking and emotional coercion. The migration regime managed by the New Zealand Government has become entangled in exploitative practices in workplaces, as well as education, accommodation, brokerage and other areas, even as government policies claim to address this pernicious issue.
Prana’s story (a pseudonym) provides an indication of the way in which discrimination and exploitation have emerged in the context of temporary migration in Aotearoa New Zealand. Prana migrated from India to study in Aotearoa New Zealand to improve his career prospects. He was told by friends that there were many opportunities in Aotearoa New Zealand, and his father, who had a low-paid but stable civil service job, drew down his pension and borrowed NZ$15,000 to support Prana’s aspiration to migrate. After graduating with an IT diploma from a private institution, Prana took on a fruit picking job while unsuccessfully applying for dozens of jobs, part-time, full-time, through various online employment portals and by dropping CVs to firms and friends.
As his one-year job search visa was nearing expiry and his horticulture employer could not sponsor him for a work visa, Prana started looking for jobs that were not advertised, using referrals through his social networks and online interactions. He was eventually offered a position in a computer shop; the owners claimed they would help with a work visa if Prana paid them NZ$15,000 to assist with the application; Immigration New Zealand declined his visa, and Prana got no money back. After working again in horticulture without a contract, Prana found another person willing to assist with a work visa for cash and again was declined by Immigration New Zealand. By this stage, he had incurred another NZ$25,000 of debt that his parents had paid on the basis that it would assist him in developing his career and prospects for gaining a residence visa. At the time I met him for a research interview, Prana was despondent as he had received a deportation liability letter from Immigration New Zealand and had run out of options, to stay in Aotearoa or get any of his money back.
Prana’s story was not unusual in research Christina Stringer and I carried out on temporary migrant worker exploitation in Aotearoa New Zealand on behalf of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. We were told by numerous participants how they could not get the kinds of jobs they expected and knew they needed in order to succeed. Many were left with no option but to seek employment with less desirable/reputable employers that often ended up being exploitative. This process is indicative of one way in which discrimination in the labour market can lead to exploitation; migrants seeking legitimate employment often end up taking jobs with worse conditions because they face discrimination from some employers and then exploitative practices from others. This link between discrimination and exploitation is not only individualised in employment applications and declines. Rather, neither the circumstances under which migrants find themselves subject to exploitation nor their motivations and actions in response to those experiences can be understood outside of the contemporary education-migration system in Aotearoa and its connections into exploitative labour markets.
Why does the exploitation of migrants like Prana continue in Aotearoa? One key reason is that temporary migration programmes in Aotearoa create a dependency between migrants and their employers, either to maintain a current work visa or programme towards aspirations for long-term residence. Even the New Zealand Productivity Commission, hardly a bastion of radical or militant thought, proposed that the government end this arrangement, suggesting that: “The practice of tying migrants to a single employer can lead to negative labour market outcomes for both migrants (including through exploitation) and local workers.” Such arrangements lay the foundation for exploitation, upon which employers, migration and education agents, educators, accommodation providers and others can entrap temporary migrants in exploitative situations based on government-maintained insecurity, what might otherwise be described as “legislated inequality”.
Over the last two decades, consecutive New Zealand governments have reframed migration policy from a focus on permanent settlement towards the management of high volumes of temporary migration. These approaches involve the development of highly targeted schemes for achieving economic benefits from migration through a range of techniques aimed at identifying, recruiting and retaining individuals identified as quality migrants while permitting other migrants to enter the labour market to address persistent skills shortages. Migrants who are deemed higher-skilled are encouraged to remain and become part of society. In contrast, others are expected to live partitioned lives for limited periods of time before returning to their countries of origin. The patterns of who is deemed higher-skilled and who is deemed lower-skilled are highly racialised, with people subjected to the worst conditions of the migration regime disproportionately from countries in the Pacific, Asia and South America.
The exploitation of people on temporary work and study visas, and those without legal status, is also a product of a wider system of oppression, however, wherein racial discrimination plays a significant role. It is not by accident that the vast majority of those who report exploitation are from nationalities outside Western Europe and North America. Indeed, white migrants from those parts of the world are more likely to be working in higher paid occupations, or paid more in the same occupations, and have typically entered Aotearoa with favourable visa conditions that reduce insecurity and conditionality in employment and migration status.
The majority of migrants reporting workplace exploitation have also had to negotiate complex bureaucratic structures, are often in-debt directly or indirectly as a result of the cost and complexity of migration, and encounter a labour market where their skills and education are not recognised to the same degree, or where they face outright racism in selection. Others have been exploited by international educational providers and agents who see them as targets for extracting revenue on the promise that New Zealand diplomas lead to enhanced migration opportunities, a system that perversely constitutes a neocolonial form of foreign aid extraction, “a negative remittance from the global South to the global North” that supports education providers and export economies.
In a recent chapter entitled ‘Migration, Discrimination and the Pathway to Workplace Exploitation in Aotearoa New Zealand’, Christina Stringer and I address this relationship between racial discrimination and exploitation. As Prana’s story indicates, exploitation is not merely a single occurrence but rather results from a chain of events that reveal migrants incorporation into oppressive migration and labour relations. In particular, there are three themes we pick up in greater detail in the chapter. First, the socio-legal conditionalities embedded within the New Zealand migration regime produce the precarity that leads to exploitation and that migrants from non-Western countries are much more likely to be exposed to the most insecure situations. Second, there is ‘labour queuing’ and ‘job queuing’ in the labour market in Aotearoa, a relational form of racial discrimination for jobs, wherein employers with the most desirable positions and offering the best conditions choose the most preferred employees, while the least preferred workers are left with no job or occupying the worst jobs in secondary labour markets, particularly in the context of a migration regime that ties employment to legal status.
It is racialised non-white workers in occupations deemed undesirable who are left with the worst options and thus exposed to the most exploitation. Third, encounters with immigration and labour enforcement authorities tend to reinforce the marginalisation of migrants because of the risks to migrants in reporting (especially the risk of deportation) and the limited trust in the testimonies of migrants who have suffered exploitations.
Cumulatively, we make the argument in our chapter that workplace exploitation is not an aberration in New Zealand’s migration regime but a characteristic of the loosely coordinated relations between the state, employers, agents, migrants, education providers and other key actors that constitute this system. Exploitation is undoubtedly a result of the precarity that people on temporary visas experience because of the migration regime.
It is also, however, embedded within wider systems of discrimination that link race and class prejudice to migration policies and systems as well as broader structural injustice. This argument suggests that government agencies and other actors seeking to address workplace exploitation of migrants need to go far beyond simply increasing enforcement measures, or adding new forms of monitoring into the migration regime – indeed, these actually risk amplifying exploitation because of the way they continue to disempower migrants. What is needed is a more transformational response, one that challenges the fundamentally extractive character of the migration regime itself, addresses generalised and normalised precarity in the labour market and reveals as well as challenges the persistence of racism in the jobs people get and the way they are treated by employers.
This blog is partly based on the following chapter:
Collins, F.L. and Stringer, C. (2022). Migration, Discrimination and the Pathway to Workplace Exploitation in Aotearoa New Zealand. In McCarthy, A. (Ed.) Narratives of Migrant and Refugee Discrimination in New Zealand. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003275077