Introduction
We were not viewed as humans. We were more chattel on the farms. We were just numbers … I do not think people saw behind the hedges where we worked. They just saw the fruit or vegetables that landed on their tables or in their stores (Sybil Msezane, Former Seasonal Worker, House of Lords Enquiry 2023, Q203)
The exploitation of seasonal migrant agricultural workers has become a defining feature of many contemporary agri-food systems. In the last thirty years, agri-food restructuring processes, including farming modernisation, increasing regulation within long and verticalised supply chains, and rising input costs coupled with consumer demands for cheap produce, have produced a perfect storm leading to a price-cost squeeze on agriculture.Footnote 1 As a result, the sustainability of the agri-food system has become, in many contexts, structurally contingent on the exploitation of seasonal workers.Footnote 2 For many years, human rights abuses have been identified in agricultural supply chains; the risks are high and evident, with an estimated 61.2 per cent of the EU agricultural labour force engaged in informal employment.Footnote 3 In Britain, an estimated 10,000–13,000 workers are being exploited in agriculture, but the figure is likely to be higher.Footnote 4
This systemic pattern of exploitation in the agri-food industry has increasingly been understood through the theory of racial capitalism, particularly as anti-racist revolts in the last decade have led to a revival in examining the relationship between race and capitalism.Footnote 5 Yet whilst in Geography there has been a resurgence of scholarship on racial capitalism, International Relations (IR) has ‘made fewer inroads’.Footnote 6 Until recently, questions of race and racism had been ‘sidelined to the margins’ in contemporary IR.Footnote 7 Symptomatic of the discipline’s ‘failure to address the central role of colonialism and decolonisation in the creation of the international order’,Footnote 8 this evasion has meant that the discipline has been slow to connect the reproduction of neocolonial practices to the development of racism,Footnote 9 and to the productions and functions of race in political economy.Footnote 10 This is surprising given the importance of racialised regimes of labour in the globally interconnected world,Footnote 11 and the central role race plays in the international system.Footnote 12
Whilst racial capitalism explains why migrant workers are exploited, less attention has been paid to the mechanisms through which this exploitation is naturalised as state practice, or to how ostensibly race-neutral state policies enable this exploitation. Drawing on a case study of the UK agricultural border regime, this paper demonstrates how this exploitation is contingent on the state practices of colonial statecraft. The paper disentangles the contingency between exploitation and border technologies through a critical policy analysis of the UK seasonal visa scheme. Synthesising the scholarship on racial capitalism,Footnote 13 postcolonial border regimes,Footnote 14 and agricultural labour,Footnote 15 the paper unveils the productive state powers of racialised extraction cultivated from colonial statecraft that underpin the agricultural border regime. Recentring state power as paramount in the production of migrant worker exploitation, the paper demonstrates that these design features are products of colonial governance engineered to control and discipline subjects and used today to enable the exploitation of migrant workers. I argue that the racial capitalist system of migrant exploitation is contingent on state practices of racialised extraction cultivated from colonial governance, and it is the state imperative to maintain the social racial order that motivates their reproduction. Whilst the requirement for capital to extract surplus value provides the stimulus for the reproduction of exploitation of migrant workers, it is state-constructed border regimes, and the colonial rationalities that underpin them, that provide the arsenal to do so. In other words, racial capitalism may explain why migrant workers are the ‘stand-in’ for exploitation, but the state practices of racialised extraction are necessary to explain how.
Methodologically, the paper is based on a case study of the UK agriculture visa regime operationalised through a critical policy analysis totalling 43 documents including government archives, policy papers, independent stakeholder reports, non-governmental organization (NGO) and charity reports, and parliamentary debates and enquiries. Whilst the UK is the site of analysis, the paper seeks to illuminate broader transnational trends in agricultural border regimes by showing how the core features of many seasonal agricultural schemes – including controlled labour mobility, state-employer labour management, and differential inclusionFootnote 16 – are historically rooted in, and shaped by practices of, colonial governance. Applying a postcolonial lens to agricultural border regimes, the paper makes empirical and theoretical contributions to scholarship on racial capitalism. Firstly, the paper offers an original empirical contribution through an analysis of state technologies that organise and sustain exploitation in agricultural border regimes, identifying four technologies that work to extract racialised labour: containment, malleable membership, liberal subjectivity, and a security paradox. The technology of containment works to spatially enable surveillance and isolation of workers to restrict protections. The technology of malleable membership reclassifies populations to construct racialised precarity. The affective technology of liberal subjectivity uses justificatory ideologies of self-improvement to legitimise exploitative practices. The mobilisation of a security paradox legitimises minimal rights under a state of exception. Whilst the technologies of containment and malleable membership construct the migrant as an exploitable figure by creating a framework of liminal membership, the technologies of liberal subjectivity and the mobilisation of a security paradox serve to legitimise this exploitation. Secondly, building on this analysis, the paper advances debates on racial capitalism, coloniality, and borders by shifting attention to the how of exploitation by recentring the state as the central agent enabling racialised extraction. The paper’s core theoretical contribution is to reframe racial capitalism through state power and governmentality by showing how racialised exploitation is actively manufactured by the state as an autonomous and active agent through colonial statecraft. In short, racial capital demands exploitation, but the state operationalises it.
To develop my argument, I first outline the debates of racial capitalism and the field of postcolonial border studies to build my framework. The paper then moves to outlining the UK agricultural visa regime, before demonstrating how the visa designs are rooted in a logic of colonial governance and specifically the four technologies of containment, malleable membership, liberal subjectivity, and a security paradox. The paper concludes with reflections on ‘bringing the state back in’ into racial capitalism through the lens of colonial governance.
Racial capitalism and postcolonial borders
Capitalism, according to eminent political Marxist Ellen Wood,Footnote 17 was born in the English countryside; it was the site where ‘enhancing productivity itself became a reason for excluding other rights’ recasting the mode of exploitation. The agri-food supply chain in the twenty-first century has only intensified the demands for enhancing labour productivity, and in turn the reproduction of global agriculture is contingent on intense labour exploitation.Footnote 18 Across the globe, it is migrant workers that have come to fill the role of the hyper-exploited workforce in agriculture.
The puzzle over why migrant workers have become the staple for exploitation is situated in a broader debate over whether the racialisation of labour is a necessity or a contingency in capitalist development.Footnote 19 Rooted in the critique that Marxism sheds little light on why race plays such an outsized role in capitalism’s historyFootnote 20 or why the worlds’ workers constitute, as DuBois put it, the ‘dark proletariat’ today,Footnote 21 Cedric RobinsonFootnote 22 argued that Marxist theory obfuscates the racial foundations of capitalism. Building on earlier work on the production of racial differentiation and accumulation,Footnote 23 particularly from South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement,Footnote 24 Robinson contended that the racial foundations are the precondition for capitalism itself.Footnote 25 Robinson and his followers advance two key claims that challenge Marxism. Firstly, that capitalism’s functioning is dependent on the construction and production of human difference and that the ideologies of race – which predates capitalism – provide these productions, or as Ruth Wilson Gilmore puts it, ‘capitalism requires inequality, racism enshrines it’.Footnote 26 Secondly, that contrary to Marx’s claims that primitive accumulation is a singular necessary precondition of capitalism, primitive accumulation, and unfree labour must be constantly reproduced to sustain capitalism.Footnote 27
Notwithstanding the critiques of its lack of universal theory and opaque claims on the nature of race, capitalism, and their causal interweaving,Footnote 28 there has been a recent explosion of scholarship (re)examining the relationship between capitalism and racial state violence.Footnote 29 Following the Black radical tradition, geographers in particular have shown how racial capitalism structures all economic and social relations by reducing collective life to the relations that sustain neoliberal capitalism.Footnote 30 The reinvigorations of debates on the interdependency of race and capitalism have generated a revised lens on border regimes. Specifically, how the production of racialised borders works to exploit migrant workers for capital accumulation by branding bodies to produce differentiation, disciplining through deportability and protracted dependency, blurring boundaries between free and unfree labour, as well as the role of the humanitarian sector in reproducing racial capitalist logics.Footnote 31 Scholars in the field diverge as to when, how, and why race plays the pivotal role in capitalism, but all are united in arguing that racial violence is a product of market imperatives. Scholars working in this school therefore see capitalist forces as the source and explanation of racial border violence.
Yet the racial capitalism debate suffers from two shortfalls. Firstly, whilst debates on racial capitalism seek to explain why migrant labour is the ‘stand-in’ for exploitation, it is not patent how this exploitation is made possible. Here governmentality provides the rejoinder as to how economic exploitation and political domination are made possible;Footnote 32 that is, ‘‘how’, not in the sense of ‘how does it manifest itself?’ but ‘by what means is it exercised?’.Footnote 33 Secondly, placing capitalist forces at the centre of explanations sidelines state autonomy and underplays the state monopoly of the legitimate threat of violence in the production of racial violence.Footnote 34 By framing modern states as only enablers of capitalist exploitation, these violent technologies risk becoming depoliticised, even normalised, because state violence is legitimised through the imperatives of capital. Whilst the requirement for capital to extract surplus value provides the stimulus for the reproduction of exploitation of migrant workers, it is state-sanctioned actions that sustain, enable, and explain the ‘how’ of exploitative border technologies, and these derive principally from ‘the basic need of states to maintain control and order’.Footnote 35
State building was, Ida DanewidFootnote 36 persuasively argues, a racial colonial project from the beginning; nation-state borders are relics of European colonial governance which constructed and enforced a racial hierarchy with whiteness at its top.Footnote 37 The state institutions that emerge from these imperial scripts imitate imperial racial regulation of mobility whilst ‘materialising them from self-governing rules’, concealing their imperial origins.Footnote 38 States manufacture racial violence to simultaneously fulfill accumulation and legitimation imperatives; enabling the demands of racial capitalism to be met through constructions of racialised threats that position the state as the sole guarantor of security, thereby naturalising the monopoly of legitimate violence.Footnote 39 Thus, whilst the demands of racial capitalism led to the development of state capacities, the state has become a central agent in its own right that administers these techniques. In sum, legitimation, domination, and social control matter just ‘as much or more than accumulation and extraction as motives’ in the racial violence exercised by the state.Footnote 40
Whilst methods of labour control precede colonialism, the origins of state technologies practised in agricultural border regimes lie in the rationalities of colonial governance engineered to discipline, control, and subjugate subjects. With historic racialised violence as its starting point, the postcolonial lens illuminates the sustainment of Western oppression and its reproduction through everyday colonial practices, making visible how colonial techniques sustain racial inequalities.Footnote 41 Postcolonial theorists have particularly illuminated how colonial systems operate through epistemic violenceFootnote 42 and penetrate the subjective psyche,Footnote 43 forging whatFootnote 44 called the ‘double consciousness’. Far from something that happened in the past in fixed territorial spaces, postcolonial scholarship illuminates that colonialism is an ever-present system of control; an assemblage of truth regimes and practices that constitute the liberal order and are remobilised and redeployed by the modern state.Footnote 45
Colonial sites were central to the making of modern state institutions;Footnote 46 these practices sustain the architecture for modern state governance in what Laura Ann StolerFootnote 47 calls imperial governance, ‘where disciplinary, sovereign, and biopolitical power quintessentially meet in the administering of security’, with ‘racism buttressing its logic [manifesting in] an ever-obsessive concern for the protection of society from itself’. Colonial governance, as a mode of rule and polity, is organised around a set of interlocking pillars that structure its rationalities and practices. Power is directed at the destruction and reconstruction of colonial spaces to produce ‘governing effects on colonial conduct’ to secure racialised extraction.Footnote 48
The critical distinguishing feature in the framework of colonial governance is the institutionalisation of differentiated legal regimes and political subjectivities between coloniser and colonised that serves to legitimise the dual system of bifurcated law, order and rights.Footnote 49 These differentiations were legitimised as temporary exceptions which then became permanent ‘rules of colonial difference’.Footnote 50 Affective regimes were utilised as disciplinary power through justificatory ideologies of progress and civilising missions providing legitimation for these bifurcated racial systems.Footnote 51 The normalisation of coercion, exercised through surveillance to render large and varied colonised populations legible, manageable, and governable, developed in tandem with affective technologies.Footnote 52 Sites of exceptionalism, bifurcated law and order, justificatory ideologies and normalisation of coercion through surveillance worked together as mutually reinforcing techniques to fulfil the end goal of colonial governance: enabling racialised extraction whether through land, labour or resources.Footnote 53 The pillars of colonial statecraft transcend the practices of colonising states. As hallmarks of the Western model in the hegemonic world culture that dictates ‘clear norms for how modern polities should organize themselves’, they are mirrored by colonised states.Footnote 54
Applying a postcolonial lens to border regimes exposes how contemporary practices of border violence are pivotal for maintaining the colonial racial order through processes of (de) humanisation and othering of racial bodies,Footnote 55 a process described by Harsha WaliaFootnote 56 as ‘border imperialism’. Postcolonial border scholars have illuminated how colonial practices have been readapted in modern border regimes including the organisational infrastructure,Footnote 57 biopolitics,Footnote 58 discursive tropes of monsterisation and dehumanisation,Footnote 59 citizenship regimes,Footnote 60 and technologies of confinement, in particular detention and offshoring.Footnote 61 This literature foregrounds immigration controls as colonial constructions; part of the archipelago of coloniality as a system. This work demonstrates how colonial discourses and practices provide the blueprint for border regimes, laying bare the colonial rationalities that maintain the stratification, determination, and commodification of rights and the differential value of human life.Footnote 62
Postcolonial literature on borders is attentive to how borders reproduce the racial order and the colonial backdrop which conditions the mobility of people from the global south to north. The literature illuminates how Europe’s colonial past creates and maintains the conditions that prompt migrants to seek asylum, and the scholarship has been vigilantly attentive to the biopolitics of belonging and the colonial practices that dehumanise, racialise, and stigmatise those fleeing violence at the territorial border. Yet despite global migration flows being dominated by labour migration, less attention has been paid to how colonial rationalities are the bedrock of labour visa regimes, and even less to how colonial statecraft sustains the exploitation of racialised migrant workers.Footnote 63 Labour migration regimes constitute a key site in which techniques of racialised extraction are obscured behind ostensibly race-neutral policies, concretely demonstrating how capitalism depends upon the active production of racial differentiation. The paper now moves to outline the UK seasonal agricultural visa before explicating how the design and governmentality of the visa regime are rooted in the four colonial technologies of containment, malleable membership, liberal subjectivity, and a security paradox that legitimises minimal rights.
Seasonal agricultural visa regime
Temporary agricultural worker regimes have long been heralded as a success under the so-called triple win, wherein the employer, receiving state and migrant workers are said to benefit.Footnote 64 Yet these programmes have globally fallen foul of hyper-exploitative practices through policy design and the governmentality that follows in the wider infrastructure. Migrant agricultural workers are often subjected to dangerous working conditions, wage theft, barriers to unionisation, denied access to full labour protections and social services, and are often subject to forced labour.Footnote 65 The visa regime institutionalises this exploitation through bonded labour or conditionality, where visas are tied to one employer who therefore exercise ‘almost unlimited disciplinary capacities’, creating a systematic tool of exploitation.Footnote 66 The conditionality of these visas is the overarching mechanism as to why exploitation is made possible,Footnote 67 and a clear legacy of colonial governance. The design of these programmes can be traced back to the indentureship of Empire where the East India Company and British Raj regulated emigration of indentured workers to plantations across the British Empire. As WaliaFootnote 68 argues, part of the imperial strategy in the aftermath of formal abolition of chattel slavery was to maintain indentured labour to preserve a disciplined racialised labour force.
The UK has long had a seasonal agricultural scheme originally set up in the post-war period to facilitate cultural exchange, but over the years the scheme became targeted at meeting seasonal labour shortages. The scheme closed in 2014 following the Migration Advisory Committee recommendationsFootnote 69 that EU expansion (transitional controls for Bulgaria and Romania lapsing) would provide sufficient labour for shortages under free movement provisions. In the aftermath of Brexit, the sector began to struggle to fill seasonal labour demands, and the pandemic exacerbated this. Following intense lobbying from the sector, the scheme was re-established in 2019 for the horticulture and poultry industries renamed as the ‘seasonal visa’ originally as a pilot scheme that permitted 2,500 workers. The scheme was fully rolled out in 2020 and is guaranteed until 2029; it functions on a quota basis that has increased each year from 10,000 in 2020 to 57,000 in 2023, distributed across seven licensed operators who act as the sponsors of the employee.
The threat of seasonal agricultural workers being exploited is rated as ‘severe’ by the Director of Labour Market Enforcement,Footnote 70 which has consistently identified agriculture as a high-risk sector for labour market non-compliance,Footnote 71 with an estimated 10,000–13,000 migrant workers being exploited.Footnote 72 Numerous reports have exposed conditions amounting to modern-day slavery and life under duress (one dimension of forced labour) on the seasonal visa scheme, largely due to the conditionality and the debt bondage to brokers who loan the costs for visa and travel.Footnote 73 In June 2024, the Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery expressed alarm at the ‘systemic exposure of migrant workers in the UK to protection risks related to deception, exorbitant recruitment fees, debt bondage, undignified living conditions, and potential deportation’.Footnote 74 The paper now moves to unearth the colonial rationalities behind the visa design and governmentality.
Technology 1 – containment
The first technology of colonial governance that is foundational to the exploitation of migrant workers in UK agriculture is containment. Containment works as a spatial technology that facilitates exploitation by enabling surveillance and isolating workers from protections by restricting access to reporting mechanisms. Ninety-five per cent of migrant agricultural workers under the UK seasonal worker visa live on employment sites;Footnote 75 this enables the containment of migrant workers, which sustains their exploitation through isolated surveillance. State actions engineer this technology in the agricultural border regime through two instruments. Firstly, through the accommodation offset that impels employees to be tied to employers’ accommodation; thus, workers are always contained on agricultural sites. Secondly, through a designed lack of oversight in governance structures, including opaque roles; governance arrangements, which simultaneously enforce immigration controls and worker rights; and the outsourcing of rights-based enforcement.
Containment as a disciplinary tool was the requisite for building colonial empires, naturalising inequality through segregated spaces of exclusion, and enabling the surveillance of colonised subjects to ensure order and control.Footnote 76 For example, in the British Caribbean colonies of British Guiana and Trinidad, indentured labourers were housed in barrack-style “lines” characterized by linear layouts and shared verandas that facilitated surveillance and managerial oversight.Footnote 77 Contained agricultural colonies specifically were a critical part of this carceral archipelago,Footnote 78 used as a space to segregate bodies, to criminalise and punish those who refuse its terms, and harnessed as a literal and metaphorical site to assess the value of humankind.Footnote 79 Barbara ArneilFootnote 80 argues that agrarian work is one of the defining features of colonialism as ideology, with the etymology originating from agrarian settlements to ‘which ‘excess’ people were resettled from a mother city metropolis. Containment as a technology worked, and continues to work, through its separation of inhabitants physically but more significantly the differentiation of its inhabitants from those that are outside of it. This works to segregate and mark unwanted bodies as a threat to society which it must be defended from, relegating subjects to a different and distinctive legal positioning.Footnote 81 The agricultural colony was the carceral site to make unwanted bodies immobile, surveyed, and disciplined – a site to effectively ‘take outside’ unwanted bodies.Footnote 82
To be consigned to the agricultural field has long been a method of state disciplining that has the effect of isolating bodies from wider collective memberships. Farmworkers were historically seen as a backward section of the working class, ostracised from the wider collective labour union movement.Footnote 83 Agricultural colonies by necessity are in rural sites, and this is key to their success in exercising containment as a productive power, by physically separating workers from society. This facilitates the hidden coercive practices and panoptic surveillance; the separation works to fortify divisions and legitimise exceptional measures. The isolated rural settings are critical to the exercise of coercive and, in turn, exploitative practices because it provides limited oversight – limited public visibility, away from societal gaze, and limited oversight of legal and welfare rights.
Most seasonal migrant workers live on their employer’s site,Footnote 84 which significantly increases the risk of exploitation by creating dependence, as it is the only practically viable option for seasonal workers. As a result, workers are less inclined to report poor housing conditions for fear of being made homeless, jobless, and irregular.Footnote 85 The practice of providing and tying accommodation with agricultural work has a long history in England, generating insecurity where if a worker lost employment, they also lost their accommodation.Footnote 86 This arrangement was for the benefit of the employer, with the coercive threat of eviction to control workers at their disposal, and lower wages legitimised by the offset cost of accommodation. Today, accommodation charges are deducted regardless of the number of people in the shared occupancy, and irrespective of whether the worker has done any paid work that week.Footnote 87 Due to limited formal standards relating to tied-seasonal worker accommodation, the quality of accommodation is well-reported to be below standards, unsanitary and unsafe,Footnote 88 with 20 out of 130 UKVI compliance reports expressing issues with substandard accommodation.Footnote 89 The practice of containment in the UK migrant agricultural regime is sustained through the government’s mechanism of the accommodation offset, which enables employers to charge seasonal workers for accommodation. The accommodation offset rule limits the amount that can be deducted from an employee’s pay for accommodation to ensure earnings do not fall below the minimum wage. Yet it has the potential to further exploit seasonal migrant workers, as highlighted by the Low Pay Commission, because an employer can allay the extra expense of higher rate minimum wage by increasing the accommodation charge.Footnote 90
The secluded segregation enables limited oversight from labour enforcement because workers live on site on private land with no right of passage, which makes it challenging for enforcement bodies to monitor standards.Footnote 91 The remote locations also make it more expensive for the Home Office to operate compliance and enforcement in comparison to other immigration routes, due to greater travel distance required, larger visit teams, and sourcing suitable language translators.Footnote 92 For example, the new law introduced in 2023 to guarantee working hours for those on seasonal visas is rarely enforced because there are such limited visits from labour market enforcement.Footnote 93
The governance on seasonal workers bolsters the limited oversight of agricultural workers because the dual roles of, on the one hand, responding to labour market abuse, and on the other hand overseeing immigration enforcement, are not conducted by separate bodies. Therefore, workers are deterred from reporting problems because they fear their immigration status will be at risk.Footnote 94 Described as ‘muddy’ by the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders,Footnote 95 the enforcement landscape is patchy and opaque, a concern expressed in a House of Lords review of the scheme commenting on the ‘jumbled mix of bodies responsible for carrying out enforcement’.Footnote 96 For example, whilst prescriptive accommodation standards are laid out by the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority (GLAA) in their licensing standards, the GLAA maintain that these refer to licensing requirements as opposed to the distinct Home Office role in enforcement of the seasonal visa scheme, including the Home Office compliance guidance.Footnote 97 Conversely, the Home Office consider substandard accommodation as the responsibility of local government.Footnote 98 There is no responsible enforcement body inspecting worker accommodation, and workers suffer from a lack of legal clarity around their status with respect to their accommodation.Footnote 99 Whilst limited labour market enforcement is caused by other weak governance structures, the rurality of these sites makes them inconvenient for labour inspection, and in turn expedites the freedom of employers to impose hyper-exploitative practices.
Key to containment as a technology that supports exploitation of migrant workers is that it facilitates surveillance. The physical surveillance by living and working in an isolated segregated site coupled with conditionality creates the panoptic of surveillance, exploiting the body’s forces through the regulation of actions, exerting a punitive regulatory power.Footnote 100 The principle of inspection via the architecture of the agricultural site is integral to creating the panoptic effect, intended ‘to induce in the inmate a sense of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power’.Footnote 101 This was evidenced in a recent research report, which found that employers regularly inspected caravans of visa-holders, ensuring a lack of autonomy in the private space, and continuous surveillance.Footnote 102 The colonial statecraft of containment enables the exploitation of workers through segregated sites, which isolate workers from access to protections and facilitate the surveillance of bodies to ensure control. The state-sanctioned containment of agricultural migrant workers today enables the exploitation of migrant workers for capital gain, but this state-sanctioned function stems from a colonial rationality of segregation.
Technology 2 – malleable membership
The second technology of colonial governance, which serves as a precondition for the exploitation of agricultural migrant workers, is malleable membership. This statecraft produces exploitability by forging shifting racial differentiations, creating malleable rules of colonial differences that restrict access to benefits of social protection to produce precarity. The state’s power to prescribe who enters the border to do agrarian work creates a pliable labour force, and the shifts over time of ‘who’ this is are a product of colonial governance. States require legitimacy, and the modus operandi for this is to define and construct a threat against which society must be defended.Footnote 103 Yet to maintain legitimacy, new threats must be continually carved out. States construct threats and subjects – enemies and friends – via constant reshuffling of members and non-members; those that the state protects (subjects/friends) and those it protects from (the threat/enemies).Footnote 104 This redrawing of membership is a product of colonial governance, forged in the imperial logic of expanding and shrinking territories,Footnote 105 and with this expanding and shrinking people it incorporates or more precisely ‘fails to incorporate by design’.Footnote 106 Thus, the binaries between members and non-members, protection and threats, are an enduring technology of colonial governance.
Colonial states carved malleable modes of racial differentiation to restrict access to rights and protections on the grounds of exception, reclassifying subjects from insiders to threats according to the states’ situational need. For example, under French colonial rule in Algeria, colonial authorities operated through a malleable regime of membershipFootnote 107 in which Muslim Algerians remained French subjects but the rights they could exercise and the legal regime to which they were subject shifted during periods of unrest through the invocation of emergency powers and other exceptional measures. This allowed emergency rule to suspend legal protections,Footnote 108 demonstrating how colonial states reclassify members from partial insiders to security threats to legitimise exceptional measures of normalised state violence.
Border controls provide the state’s biopower to draw the lines between insiders and outsiders through processes of racialising and (re) racialising bodies by creating malleable truth regimes of common-sense categories that are reshuffled as situations change.Footnote 109 Throughout Britain’s history, elites have racialised and re-racialised distinctions to mark and differentiate bodies as deserving or undeserving of social security and welfare through moralising discourses to consolidate the imperial order.Footnote 110 The redrawing of binaries of insiders/outsiders is encapsulated in the historical and persistent neocolonial production of agricultural labour. Relocating the marginalised to the agricultural fields is a historical disciplining technique used to resolve domestic social problems.Footnote 111 The idle, irrational, disabled, as well as youth and criminals, were forced to undertake agrarian labour, acting as a form of rehabilitation to instil loyal membership, and ensure subjects did not become enemies of the state.Footnote 112 Imperial hierarchies provide the discursive and material legitimation for this stratification,Footnote 113 relegating bodies to agricultural fields at different junctures according to the state’s needs. Materially, the processes of imperial colonialism generated unequal, sustained, and structured relations between nation-states, creating persistent wage differentials that are weaponised to entice and fuel the demand for a constant replenishing supply of super-exploitable migrant workers.Footnote 114 These patterns are historically mapped onto who is doing the hard agrarian work in Britain.
Historically, agriculture has been sustained by relegating marginalised bodies as farmworkers, and the constant replenishing of this labour force has benefited from imperial state disciplining tools to redefine and reshuffle membership. Rural waged farmworkers were stratified by different working conditions tied to temporality in contract in the nineteenth century, with casual workers regarded as farm servants being the most marginalised in society, including women and children and skilled Irish migrants, in contrast to annual workers deemed as skilled specialists.Footnote 115 Ireland was used as a site for the development of techniques of control that were later exported to other colonies, including malleable membership practised through racialization processes that reclassified Catholic Irish populations as racially inferior.Footnote 116 Whilst Irish migrants made annual journeys to England in search of employment as far back as the fourteenth century,Footnote 117 the Irish constituted the first migrant agricultural workers in the nineteenth century. Cast on the imperial margins as racialised colonial Others, the Irish took on an important role of juxtaposition for the (Protestant) British in ‘their reproduction of their collective self-identity as a superior race’, with a ‘range of markers of differences that juxtaposed the dirtiness, drunkenness, laziness and violence of the alien Irish with the purity, industriousness and civilisation of the English’.Footnote 118 Twentieth-century farmers turned to the other marginalised subjects to fill demand, including local women through the Women’s Land Alliance, as well as children, and prisoners of war.
The revolution in agriculture in the post-war period saw a collapse in the number of farmworkers and a flight from rural to urban life. In their place, landowner families increasingly came to occupy the farms and contracted seasonal workers to fill any labour gaps. The Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme (SAWS) was established in response to the post-war labour shortages to fulfil this seasonal demand, with a scheme for German ex-prisoners of war initially, and then the European Volunteer Workers Scheme. Yet these schemes were always anticipated and designed to be temporary measures as outlined by the government at the time:
Our definite policy is to reduce committee labour, to encourage the building up by farmers of their own regular, and even their own seasonal, labour requirements. It is necessary to ensure that first British, then Polish and E.V.W. labour has preference in the filling of the vacancies we have.Footnote 119
As structural changes in the labour market evolved in the late twentieth century, and the reserve labour pool such as women and students dried up, Europeans then became the key reserve labour for the agricultural sector. Over time, workers from peripheral states in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) derided as ‘backward’ and racialised as inferior, became the dominant exploitable labour force,Footnote 120 and the sector became structurally reliant on workers from CEE targeted because of wage disparities. As CEE workers from the A8 states that joined the EU in 2004 were granted more economic freedom in the UK labour market, farmers decried that they were losing their reserve army. The shifts in dominant nationalities undertaking seasonal labour serve to demonstrate precisely how wage disparities and development are utilised to recruit low-paid foreign labour. In the post-war years, CEE nationals dominated horticulture, then the Irish, then Southern Europeans until Spain and Portugal acceded to the EU and workers moved to other sectors. As economies advanced in CEE, standards improved, and workers have moved to other sectors. The UK government placed transitional controls on the A2 states from Bulgaria and Romania in 2007, whilst making SAWS exclusive to these states, thus disciplining Romanians and Bulgarians into these roles. This worked to retain A2 nationals on the imperial margins, in the zone of ambiguity – not a full member, nor a full outsider.Footnote 121
When transitional controls lapsed in 2014, the SAWS was disbanded on the assumption that EU labour would continue to fill the demands for exploitable labour. As labour shortages grew, worsened by Brexit and ending free movement, the sector forcefully lobbied for a renewed seasonal scheme which was eventually established in 2020. Yet in lieu of a tap of flexible workers tied through accession from CEE post Brexit, employers have recruited further East to entice workers with even greater wage disparities. The emerging strategy has been to recruit further into peripheries, signifying a changing composition of migrant workers post Brexit. Firstly, with a focus on Ukraine, and following the war and the establishment of the Ukraine settlement schemes, recruiters moved further east in Central Asia. In 2023, the top nationalities were primarily from Central Asia, with Kyrgyzstan (7,958), Tajikistan (5,665), Kazakhstan (5,014), and Uzbekistan (4,091) followed by Ukraine (2,535).Footnote 122 This shift in recruitment searches towards ‘the Stans’ is determined by colonialism and the geopolitical inequalities in the world order it reproduces through stark wage differentials.Footnote 123
Colonial governance as a tool to reshuffle and (re) racialise members and social status is co-constitutive with amassing a constant replenishing potential pool of super exploitable bodies, racialised and marked as non-deserving, shifting as and when required by the imperatives of the state. Whilst this statecraft augments capital accumulation, it is rooted in the imperial raison d’être – the expansion and shrinkage of territorial and population conquest, and with that the statecraft of malleability of subjects, of members, and those it fails to incorporate by design.
Technology 3 – liberal subjectivity
World systems and the wage disparities etched from colonialism make stark that the distinction between free/unfree labour driven by poverty is blurry.Footnote 124 Such distinctions are legitimised under the guise of voluntariness wherein discourses of illusory promise of self-improvement, demonstrated through hard agrarian work to become entrepreneurial industrious bodies deserving of the standards of membership, are mobilised. This illusion is crafted through affective technology of liberal colonial subjectivity where justificatory ideologies cultivated from colonial rationalities are used to legitimise racial extraction by shifting responsibility for exploitation onto workers. Under British colonial rule, justificatory ideologies of civilising missions were used to legitimise coercive work regimes under the façade of moral and economic uplift. This targeted Irish Catholic tenants and famine relief labourers as deficient subjects to be disciplined through agricultural ‘improvement’ and punitive public works.Footnote 125 These same logics were applied in India, where the ‘free worker’ was constructed through the coercive British indentured labour system. Whilst workers ostensibly consented to unequal contracts, this consent was legitimised by the ideologies of the civilising missionFootnote 126. In turn, the purportedly ‘natural’ state of freedom became central to the civilising mission of colonialism itself.Footnote 127
Liberal subjectivity as an instrument of state power stems from the deep intersection of evolving liberal thought with the rise of European EmpiresFootnote 128, and the resultant binary between rationality and sensibility. The key power of modernity has long been the building of a truth regime that rationality is apolitical, progressive, and superior, with its colonial blueprint disregarded as an irrelevant background, leading to a ‘common colonial concern with irrationality’,Footnote 129 concealing epistemic violence.Footnote 130 The Enlightenment offered a way to legitimise imperial state violence on the grounds of rationality to ‘tame nature and control subject populations’,Footnote 131 so that states could dominate less through expensive violent conquest, and instead through more insidious ideological power structures on the grounds of progress, pragmatism, and practicality. Whilst imperialism was defined by dominating inferior others through conquest, colonialism is characterised by internalised productive power, appealing to an ethical justification over brute force.Footnote 132
The ideology of colonialism as a process of ‘improvement’ comes from John Locke’s liberal commitment to an equal and universal capacity for human beings to reason. Locke’s liberal colonialism was premised on any person having the ability to become industrious and rational if educated properly; undesirable ‘irrational’ or ‘idle’ bodies were ‘backwards’, held back by their own bad habits or customs.Footnote 133 The productive power of liberal colonialism lies in its ability to persuade the subjugated that their oppression is for their benefit, and that this subjugation is a voluntary and necessary step in pursuit of their own fulfilment to become the fully industrious member. Liberal colonialism must get inside the ‘minds and bodies of those subject to it’Footnote 134; thus, it is the psycho-affective dimension of the imposition of the settlers’ gaze that gives this technology such power. Barbara ArneilFootnote 135 argues that it is precisely this kind of insidious internalised form of disciplinary power which distinguishes colonialism from imperialism, the latter of which is conversely rooted in repressive external domination. This internal productive power parallels mimicry,Footnote 136 where the colonised imitate the culture of the colonisers, from a desire for a recognition leaving the colonised in an ambiguous place with a partial presence. The effectiveness of this phyco-affective power is that individuals are blamed for their own poverty; for the colonist, poverty is rooted in customs and habits rather than a product of structural forces, and individuals must therefore ‘break free’. Critically, this rehabilitation of self-improvement has colonial roots as it serves to prevent individuals becoming enemies by way of ‘educating’ individuals to be industrious, loyal, and obedient subjects.
Arduous agrarian labour, it was argued, would make idle or backward bodies industrious and improved through rehabilitation and therefore ‘free themselves from themselves’, ridding them of their backward habits and customs.Footnote 137 The agricultural colonies were, as Laura Ann StolerFootnote 138 put it, ‘seedbeds to raise honest citizens and hardworking labourers with limited aspirations’. There was a widely shared conviction that life in the countryside and manual agricultural labour would provide solutions to moral ‘problems’ to alleviate urban pauperism and avert a new generation of wayward youth who would otherwise turn to crime.Footnote 139 It is the ethical utilitarianist arguments that legitimised colonialism by arguing that agrarian labour was both ‘therapeutically and economically productive’,Footnote 140 a kind of medical intervention ‘to recalibrate the mind’.Footnote 141 Charitable religious organisations and socialists defended agricultural colonies because they sought to help and improve young delinquents rather than punish them to transform them into free citizens.Footnote 142 Progressive thinkers and actors championed domestic agricultural colonies seen as a remedial means of improvement, as conversely the antithesis of imperial, punitive, or carceral power where hard labour was a means of punishment in overseas penal colonies.Footnote 143 Whilst the discursive distinctions between agricultural and penal colonies as serving educating or punishing imperatives provided ethical legitimation, in practice punitive/disciplining and curing/educating became synonymous, which gives colonialism as ideology such potent force, approved by liberal thinkers as an antidote to violent imperialism. As FoucaultFootnote 144 put it, ‘on the pretext that … work is useful for their cure … [members of the colony are] subjected to a very strict regime of agrarian work’ when in reality, ‘the farm … is a model practically bordering on slavery and colonization’.Footnote 145
This affective technology of liberal colonial subjectivity has and continues to work in the agricultural fields by legitimising exploitation through the façade of voluntariness, attempting to persuade exploited workers that their oppressive conditions are a necessary stepping stone to self-improvement. The original SAWS Programme was designed for student exchange, building in from the inception the civilising mission ethos of colonialism, as the original supreme to be copiedFootnote 146 in the exchange for labour for agricultural skills in Britain, a quid pro quo labour for a modern education. The industry signals that industrious workers will succeed in going up the employment ladder if they work hard enough, channelling meritocratic liberal illusions to workers with testimonies of progression: ‘Initially, [seasonal workers] would come to work on the line, so that’s the packing of the tomatoes. The next year it could be that they become a line leader or a quality controller’ (Large edible horticulture farm, scheme user, Midlands).Footnote 147 This is signalled via operators and employers who offer incentives contingent on performance, including return employment the following season, thus weaponising residency to extract maximum labour. These incentives are nonetheless concealed in a narrative of self-improvement:
That is why we would advocate a two-year visa system to allow us to attract people to come for long enough to be able to give their worth for our benefit, the businesses’ benefit, for the companies’ benefit, for the nation’s benefit, and then go away. (British Poultry Council)Footnote 148
Co-constitutive with the imperially etched wage differential, the racialisation of migrant workers operates through governmentality with employers’ ascriptions and stereotyping of ‘work ethic’ to denote bodies as more or less appropriate to agrarian labour. The industry deploys moralising coded exploitable discourses to mobilise ‘hard-working’ work ethic stereotypes, such as the ‘hard-working Pole’. These discursive tropes rooted in the racial colonial world order legitimise recruitment searches in specific regions, but they are nothing more than postcolonial tropes or ‘geopolitical scripts’,Footnote 149 used as a stand-in for exploitation. As one operator put it, ‘if it was our utopia, we would have a mixture of Belarussians, Ukrainians, and Russians. They work exceptionally hard. Our growers would fall over themselves to come to us and say, ‘Yes, supply us with those people’. (HOPS Growers)Footnote 150
With operators advertising the scheme as a ‘life changing opportunity’,Footnote 151 the ideologies of self-improvement, and necessary arduous work for the delayed gains in the labour hierarchy are mobilised through the scheme, pitched as a necessary endurance which promises a capital return in later life: ‘The guys in the field … are earning a fortune if they’re working hard…but the guys that were coming in [before the SWS] they could not see that money because they weren’t prepared to put in the work’ (Large edible horticulture farm, scheme user, Southwest England).Footnote 152 The colonial gaze is internalised as an affective technology, with migrant workers often then performing this work ethic to compete for work to signal productivity. In other words, ‘hard-working’ work ethic becomes synonymous with potential exploitability.Footnote 153 The insidious affective power of colonial liberal subjectivity enables the voluntariness of exploitative conditions of migrant workers, without which the agri-food capitalist production system could not survive.
Technology 4 – security paradox
The fourth technology that enables the exploitation of migrant agricultural workers is the mobilisation of a security paradox that legitimises granting the most minimal rights to migrant workers on the grounds of a state of exception.Footnote 154 Whilst Agamben argued that security is the paradigm of government today, StolerFootnote 155 contends that security has ‘shaped the imperial coordinates of polities long before it took over how national logics of security operate’.Footnote 156 Imperial governance is, Stoler argues, precisely the meeting of disciplinary, sovereign and biopolitical power in the administering of securityFootnote 157 accentuating the call by postcolonial scholars to reroute security discussions through the history of empire.Footnote 158 Colonial governance operates by building spaces of exceptionalism in the name of security to defend society from constructed threats. The colonial rationality of dispossessing and plundering wasted lands to extract resources for the metropolis continues to structure debates in agri-food systems, reframed and remapped as the necessity for food security in the West at the expense of migrant agricultural workers' rights.
With migration controls being biopolitics par excellence, the filtering of bodies in the name of security to protect subjects from the threat of the racialised Other has intensified in the twenty-first century.Footnote 159 For many years, immigration has been increasingly associated with terrorism, drug trafficking and organised crime smuggling. This security knowledge has sustained the idea that migration is a question of insecurity in turn legitimising exclusion and violence.Footnote 160 The moral panic around migration has been reconstructed as ‘an outright menace to law and order, and to, one degree or another, a security threat that purportedly legitimates a state of emergency’.Footnote 161 The securitisation of immigration, including constructions of a war logic and sense of emergency, and the regressive closure of borders in response has been the key consistent theme across liberal states.
Yet, in agricultural production, contradictory demands produce a security paradox; wherein the framing by producers of food scarcity as a security issue runs counter to the securitising logics of immigration. Food security, defined as ‘when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life’,Footnote 162 as a concept arose in the 1970s when experts feared that increased food prices could be a threat to food availability.Footnote 163 The UK agricultural sector has mobilised the inability to employ migrant workers as a threat to the UK’s food security and food sovereignty.Footnote 164 In turn, employers' demand for exploitable migrant workers is claimed as a necessity for food security, which circumscribes the politics of closure generated from securitising migration. This conflicting security agenda creates a state of exception by opening legal routes for agricultural workers but granting only nominal rights in residency and labour protection, resulting in the legitimation of exploitation of migrant workers. This security paradox is not a paradox in this respect, but rather a concession of conflicting security logics that legitimise the exceptionalism of exploitable labour in the form of limited rights that sanction exploitation. The security paradox serves the interests of those seeking to exploit workers by claiming exploited labour is necessary for food security, whilst simultaneously benefiting nativist interests that want to reduce immigration on the ostensible grounds of security; a paradox mediated by the concessions of nominal rights for migrant workers.
The rationale of the minority West’s food security overriding any periphery rights is embedded in the very origins and ideology of colonialism. Colonisation, and the massive land theft it entailed, was both a form of primitive accumulation ‘but also became the basis of those countries’ national territories at the cost of native nations’.Footnote 165 The liberal inspired economic and ethical principle central to the ideology of colonialism of dispossession to cultivate ‘wasted’ land to improve and make it ‘productive’, legitimised violent extraction and dispossession, causing irreversible ecological damage along the way.Footnote 166 The introduction of European agricultural practices in particular ‘played a significant role in the destruction of indigenous lands, with livestock enabling ‘the English to extend their domination over the New World with remarkable speed and thoroughness’.Footnote 167 According to the economic justification of colonialism, large-scale agricultural production was unowned, unproductive, and empty, otherwise known as wastelands. Associations between private property, land improvement and value were cast against indigenous ways of relating to land seen as savage, underdeveloped and wasteful.Footnote 168 In turn, the distinction between cultivated land as private property, and wasteland as wilderness which needed to be tamed, domesticated, and made productive was forged, providing the rationale for the colonial violence of dispossession, extraction, and appropriation. Wastelanding then signifies the state violence of extracting resources and polluting zones through violent dispossession;Footnote 169 it is colonial statecraft par excellence involving colonial states dispossessing indigenous populations of land to violently extract natural resources for their own use.
The violent dispossession of land in colonial expansion has always been rooted in colonial states' violent extraction and theft of natural resources on the premise that the colonial demands, often framed as needs, are superior to the dispossessed, forging the racial world order.Footnote 170 In settler colonies such as Australia and North America, doctrines of terra nullius and related notions of Indigenous land as “unused” or “unimproved” legitimised dispossession by framing European agriculture as the necessary means of transforming land into productive spaces capable of sustaining colonial settlement and securing food supplies. European agriculture as essential to stabilising food supplies. The logic of waste landing – of dispossessing and plundering ‘wasted lands’ – to cultivate and extract resources for the metropolis benefits persist in structuring debates in agricultural production today, reframed as the necessity for food security (and specifically cheap produce) at the expense of periphery workers’ rights. The narrative advanced by the industry is that consumers will experience higher prices if migrant workers on low wages are not authorised to work in the fields:
If you do not have the labour to harvest those crops, they do not get picked, and those fruit and vegetables are wasted and do not make their way through to the supply chain. Then you have shortages on the shelves and price spikes. It is very, very unpredictable in its nature. (National Farmers Union)Footnote 171
The securitising frame of national food security being contingent on the exploitation of migrant workers is channelled explicitly by the agricultural sector in lobbying efforts to introduce and retain seasonal visa regimes:
if it [food industry] does not have a workforce, or it does not have a workforce it can afford, then it looks for other opportunities. (Association Labour Providers)Footnote 172
Following Brexit and in the wake of the pandemic, the UK agricultural sector mobilised calls for reopening a seasonal migration scheme as a food security issue akin to an emergency, that no migrant labour would be a ‘disaster to the economy’ (Unite).Footnote 173 At the same time, the Conservative government had long been committed to reducing net migration; therefore, policy was to reduce reliance on overseas workers by recruiting British workers into agriculture.
As a result of intense lobbying from the sector, the government re-established a limited seasonal migration scheme in 2020. Yet the simultaneous securitisation of migration and the politics of closed borders that followed produced a contradiction. When faced with this conflicting security dilemma of food security and national security, highly exploitative visa regimes are the concession, legitimised under the grounds of exceptionalism in the name of security. The acknowledgement of migrant worker exploitation in agriculture is framed as a legitimate exception rationalised by the security paradox. In the same way as colonial dispossession and plunder were justified to improve uncultivated land to extract for the metropolis, national food security in the West legitimises exploitation as an exceptional measure to resolve the security paradox to provide food security for Britain.
Conclusion
Many agri-food systems across the globe remain, to varying degrees, structured around the exploitation of migrant workers. This paper has illustrated how this exploitation is contingent on technologies of colonial statecraft. Through a critical analysis of Britain’s seasonal visa regime, the paper identifies four technologies that enable exploitation. Firstly, containment, which segregates unwanted members and enables a panoptic of surveillance. Secondly, malleable membership and threat constructions to fulfil legitimation, which enables a constant replenishing supply of racialised, marginalised workers according to the state’s situational needs. Thirdly, an affective technology of liberal subjectivity that legitimises exploitation under the guise of justificatory ideologies of self-improvement. Fourthly, mobilising a security paradox that legitimises nominal rights on the grounds of exception. These are the foundational technologies that sustain exploitation in the agricultural border regime. Whilst colonial histories are unique and the development of each agricultural visa regime distinct, the colonial rationalities that underpin the design of seasonal visa regimes are remarkably similar across the world’s wealthiest states.
The debates on racial capitalism have illuminated how borders provide capital’s need for differentiation, and the contingency of expropriation and exploitation to fulfil accumulation. But we lack an understanding of how border regimes do this, and the architectural logics of their foundations. Violent racial border regimes work in harmony with capital imperatives of exploitation for accumulation, but understanding the systemic rationalities of the architecture of border regimes is necessary to understand how they are sustained. In short, racial capitalism may explain why migrant workers are exploited, but it is colonial statecraft that explains how racialised extraction is made possible. The paper sharpens debates on the relationship between race and capital by recentring the state and the colonial technologies it mobilises, showing the ‘how’ of racial capitalism, exposing the moorings of colonial rationalities in border regimes, and demonstrating how capital harnesses these in late-stage capitalism’s quest for exploitable labour.
The lens of colonial governance offers a framework for understanding the architectural blueprint of border regimes and how statecraft works in concert with capital to exploit the racially marginalised. This opens avenues for future research for exploration of how colonial rationalities are the bedrock of migration policies beyond biopolitics, citizenship regimes, and spectacle borders towards the more banal, bureaucratic, and opaque governmentality of labour migration regimes where empirical work grounded in postcolonial theory remains on the margins. More work is needed to expose how ostensibly race-neutral labour immigration policies are undergirded by concealed racial differentiations that enable exploitation, and empirical work is needed to explore how state-sanctioned colonial technologies operate both across diverse global contexts and sectors where accumulation is contingent on racialised extraction such as social care or manufacturing. IR scholarship has been slow to connect the reproduction of neocolonial practices to the development of racism, and the central role race plays in the international order. This paper advances these debates by synthesising and exposing the interconnections between racialisation, neocolonial systems, and border regimes and the critical role this plays in the global agri-food system. It illuminates the tenacity of colonial governance beyond the explicit practices to the rationalities that structure them, and the link between (post)colonial governance on the part of the state and racialised dynamics of exploitation at and beyond the border.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Lucia Ardovini, Mike Collyer, Jeff Whyte, as well as the three anonymous reviewers and editor of the Review of International Studies for their thoughtful and constructive comments on the manuscript. This article benefited greatly from conversations with Alexis Moriatis and Liam Stanley, as well as helpful comments from participants at PPR WIP, the 2024 IMISCOE conference in Lisbon and the 2026 BISA conference in Brighton. I am also grateful to Jenna Higham for research assistance.
Funding statement
This work was supported by Lancaster University Faculty of Humanities Arts and Social Sciences Policy Funding.
Competing interests
The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.
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