In a house in Kensington, a woman wakes up hours before the family she works for does. Her body aches as she works, owing to her not having her own bedroom1 or not having had a day off in months. Whilst she prepares her employer’s home, she worries about her family back home – they are financially dependent on her, and she hasn’t received her paycheck in weeks. She thinks of leaving, but her passport is locked away somewhere in the house. 

Her story is not an exception. She is the 20,000 women who enter the UK through the Overseas Domestic Worker visa2 every year, whose lives are then entirely dictated by their employers.  53% of domestic workers did not have their own bedroom or private space, 66% had no day off, 31% were not paid regularly, and  73% of workers did not have access to their passport in the UK. For them, the British border does not lie at the arrival gate of the airport, but instead it follows them home, embedded into their everyday lives.

The visa as a tool of exploitation

Borders are not only physical checkpoints; they are legal mechanisms that dictate who can enter and stay in a country through tools like passport, visas, and employment contracts. Like many domestic worker visas worldwide,3 the UK’s is created in a way which allows for abuse and exploitation to occur. The visa itself is a 6-month, short-term work arrangement, and cannot be extended,4 making it harder for workers to leave their employers when such abuse happens. When the visa was originally introduced in 1998, domestic workers had the right to change employer. However, after the amendment in 2012, this right was taken away from workers.5 Since then, domestic workers have no longer been able to change employers, and risk deportation if they do.  Founding member of The Voice of Domestic Workers, Marissa Begonia, highlights how the visa was created with the omission of worker protections, stating6 that if “you tie the domestic worker to one employer, that’s slavery”. The 2012 reform did exactly this. 

Because workers cannot change employers, if they report wage theft, leave an abusive employer, or call the police during an assault, they risk losing their visa status entirely.7 This system creates a daily life filled with uncertainty, with the threat of deportation at the centre of their experiences in the UK. The employer doesn’t just control their job; they control their right to remain in the country. 

The failing state

For the majority of visa types, the state controls who belongs and who doesn’t, under what circumstances. In the case of the Overseas Domestic Worker visa, the state has abdicated this power to individual employers. By delegating the power to people who directly benefit from its abuse, the state is failing to provide adequate protection for domestic workers. 

What does it mean when private citizens are delegated border enforcement powers? The employer becomes immigration officer, judge, and detention centre operator. But unlike these officials, employers are not bound by institutional constraints that regulate their power. Because of this, they can extract labour while using the threat of deportation as a tool for control. The state outsources border governance to those with the greatest material incentive to abuse it, creating a system where exploitation is structural.

The politicisation of the visa

Non-profit organisations have documented the abuse domestic workers face in the UK for years, journalists have investigated them, and parliamentary committees have heard testimony. Yet, because political discussions on borders are dominated by small boat crossings,8 the structural violence of employer-tied visas barely registers in public debate. Successive governments have framed border policy as a matter of control and deterrence.9 However, as the abuse of domestic workers remains marginal to political debate, it exposes how the prioritisation of border control over migrant security leaves these workers unprotected. Although limited reforms have been introduced, the core structure of employer dependency and temporary status remains intact – protection is conditional and permanence is unavailable. Today, organisations like Kalayaan, Voice of Domestic Workers, and the Filipino Domestic Workers Association, work on supporting those who have escaped abusive situations. But escape isn’t genuine freedom when it means deportation. Many workers who are officially recognised as trafficking victims are still told to leave the UK10 and sent back to the conditions that made them vulnerable in the first place.

The conceptualisation of the border

The question isn’t whether the UK should have borders. The question is what those borders are designed to do. Every confiscated passport, threat of deportation, and long underpaid working hours, are features of a system that enables exploitation. 

What the Overseas Domestic Worker visa exposes is that borders are not simply territorial lines, but political technologies that organise power relations within the state. Immigration status does not only determine who may enter; it structures whose labour can be extracted, whose mobility can be constrained, and whose contact with the state is fraught with risk. In this sense, the border functions less as a barrier and more as a sorting mechanism, distributing protection unevenly and embedding vulnerability into everyday life. 

The border is where the current migration regime arbitrarily selects whose security is worthy of protection. The domestic workers’ precarious immigration status is not an anomaly within the system, but instead shows how borders work not as simple boundaries, but as mechanisms that distribute security. Then, we must confront what “border security” politics actually secure. When the government speaks of protecting borders, it isn’t talking about the Kensington kitchen11 where a passport sits in a locked drawer. Yet that is where the border does its work. The restrictions placed on domestic workers do not serve to protect the British public, but enable the exploitation of immigrants without consequences.