‘Institutionalised Uncertainty’: The Extent to Which Indefinite Detention Affects Immigration Detainees’ Acceptance of Precarious ‘Paid Activities’

Abstract

This chapter seeks to contribute to the existing literature on precarious immigration status and how this leads to migrant precarity (or precariousness), but in the new context of detainee work in the UK immigration detention centres. Hence, the central focus is around two key questions. First, it seeks to examine how the availability of indefinite immigration detention in the UK system increases the propensity of detainees to engage in exploitative ‘paid activities’ work, for which they are mostly paid £1 per hour. The concept of ‘precarious work’ will be used, in a new immigration detention context, as the theoretical basis for analysing how a lack of certainty of detention period is a key question in contributing to the acceptance of precarious ‘paid activities’. Second, it seeks to examine how this effective institutionalisation of precarious work contributes to the fashioning of precarious migrant workers in the wider labour market upon detainees’ release.