This article explores why Chinese nationals move to the United Kingdom and continue to stay there illegally, even in recent years, when China has witnessed significant economic growth and the United Kingdom has been increasingly hostile towards irregular migrants. Using a biographical approach to study irregular migration, this article elicits migrants' life histories and considers their migration as part of their biographies and as related to other key life events. By reconstructing the biographies of three irregular Chinese migrants in the United Kingdom, this article argues that their migration is a way to escape from personal sufferings (negative childhood experiences and intimate relationship dissolutions) and a means of orienting themselves in a mobile social world. This article provides new insights into the field of irregular migration that remains dominated by economic rationalist perspectives, and it also helps to undermine the artificial dichotomy between voluntary and forced migration.
This article draws on narrative interviews with irregular Chinese migrant workers (ICMWs) in the United Kingdom (UK) to show how the UK's immigration policies foster forms of illegal working and labour exploitation that they are supposed to combat. It argues that the binary conceptualisation of ‘forced labour’ as the polar opposite of ‘free labour’ leaves those migrants working without a right to do so at the risk of both criminalisation and exploitation. The article shows how the fear of criminalisation, together with the pressure to become economically successful in the West, among ICMWs diminishes their capacity to leave exploitative work, reinforcing the unequal power relations between them and their employers, landlords, advisers, and translators. Many ICMWs who are officially cast as ‘illegal immigrants’ need protection, not from ‘snakeheads’ and ‘traffickers’, but the exploitative and precarious work UK government policies render them economically reliant upon.
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