The British Chinese community is 500,000 people strong, constituting 0.8% of the total population. There are no reliable figures for the number of people who have been smuggled into Britain. It is estimated that there may be half a million ‘illegal’ immigrants of all nationalities here. Many of those who have been smuggled in may have applied for refugee status and succeeded so they are no longer ‘illegal’. In 2005, there were 307,064 refugees in UK.

On arrival, many people fade into an underground economy where they have no recourse to protection from the state in terms of employment rights, housing or benefit support. Others may lodge a claim for asylum. However, all those who have no independent means of survival will end up in forced labour of one kind or another: agricultural, construction, domestic labour in low-pay sectors where the work can be described by the “three Ds” (difficult, dangerous and dirty) or sexual exploitation. This invisible army of exploited workers, some of whom have fallen into a system of debt bondage, exerts a downward pressure on wages and inflation.

Families back home can be hit by debt bondage as they invest in one of their number going abroad to make their ‘fortune’. The Chinese cockle-pickers who died at Morecambe Bay in 2004 provide a vivid and tragic illustration of this phenomenon. The vast investment in their journeys had not been recouped because they had found one low paid job after another which barely covered the inflated rents and other expenses that the gangmasters dreamt up, which drove them to take on riskier assignments, like cockle-picking. New government legislation in the form of the Gangmasters Licensing Act 2004 has had limited success in reducing the exploitation of workers.