In the United Kingdom, the COVID-19 pandemic coincided with the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union (Brexit), and the accompanying change in the country’s immigration regime. This brought an end to freedom of movement for EU workers, alongside the opening of new visa routes for both non-EU and EU citizens to come to the United Kingdom as workers in specific occupations. As such, Brexit fundamentally restructured the (im)possibilities of cross-border mobility into the United Kingdom. Together, the pandemic and Brexit revealed the contradictory logics and tensions in the intersection between restrictive immigration control and the United Kingdom’s need for migrant workers.

One of the key messages of the Brexit campaign, and of the Conservative governments that oversaw the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union, was that Brexit would allow the United Kingdom to gain control over its borders and reduce immigration, which would lead to better opportunities for the “British people.” However, the United Kingdom has historically relied on migrants as a resource to address domestic labor shortages. This need for migrants to provide a cheap and flexible workforce also shaped the United Kingdom’s relationship to the A8 and A2 countries—countries that joined the European Union during its eastward expansion. This expansion gave the United Kingdom access to a large pool of workers who were willing to move to the United Kingdom temporarily or permanently, often to work in low paying and labour-intensive jobs, whilst the migrant-sending countries bore the cost of social reproduction (Lewicki 2022).

This outsourcing of social reproduction to European Union countries, itself both a cause and an effect of the United Kingdom’s reliance on migrant workers, furthered the neglect of structures needed for social reproduction within the United Kingdom, where welfare support has been reduced and become increasingly conditional following more than a decade of austerity. Together with the lack of opportunities in former industrial regions, an increasingly negative rhetoric around immigration, and the state creation of a “hostile environment,” this led to emergence of what Mulligan and Brunson (2020) describe as “resentment structures”; social structures built on social and welfare policies created on the basis of distrust, division, and suspicion. Policies of welfare conditionality alongside exclusion from support structures and from economic prosperity, to which people feel entitled, lead to frustration and resentment. In the United Kingdom, much of this distrust, suspicion, and resentment has been directed towards migrants, and led to Brexit. Yet, this resentment did not disappear after Brexit, and the structures created through such rhetorics of resentment, (un)deservingness, and policies of conditionality have remained in place, and continue to shape social and employment policies.

Since 2021, I have researched the effects of the intersection of Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic, speaking to workers and managers in key low-paying and labor-intensive sectors including social care, food processing, and warehousing. These sectors were described as “essential” during the pandemic, and have been affected by shortages of labor created by the “double whammy” of Brexit and COVID-19, when many EU migrants working in low paid (and often insecure) jobs in these sectors left the United Kingdom during the pandemic. Often, they left because the policies of welfare conditionality meant they were unable to access welfare support during the pandemic—as “undeserving” work migrants—and have been unable (or unwilling) to return following the immigration changes brought by Brexit. The “resentment structures,” propped up by policies of conditionality and the political rhetoric of “us versus them” (Anderson 2010), enabled resentment to seep into and shape wider social relationships in the United Kingdom, not just towards migrants. Talking to care workers and warehouse workers revealed existing resentment among those who had to work throughout the pandemic as “essential” or “key” workers, who were often British: those “left behind” and unable to move into better paying jobs.

Care workers expressed negative feelings and resentment towards those working in hospitals, because hospital workers were praised as “heroes” in the media, even though “many hospital wards were empty” and hospital staff were “making dancing videos,” as my interlocutors said. The care sector, however, was portrayed more negatively in the media due to COVID-19 outbreaks in several care homes. Yet, as care workers pointed out to me, the outbreaks were caused by hospitals discharging COVID-positive patients into care homes without providing information about their positive test results.

Similarly, warehouse workers spoke about their work being invisible and how they, alongside supermarket and food factory workers, were not praised like those working in healthcare were. They argued that they had to “work more” because of the increase in online shopping and deliveries to the furloughed or those working from home, who were able to “enjoy the sunshine” and redecorate their homes, as some of my interlocutors put it. They questioned why some jobs, and people doing these jobs, were seen as deserving of recognition for working through lockdowns, while others were not. The resentment was not about having to work while others did not, but more about the demanding and difficult conditions of work, worsened by the pandemic and the feeling of invisibility. Despite such feelings of unfairness and resentment, most of my interlocutors continued working in these “low-skilled” jobs (even if some kept moving between jobs) because these were the jobs that were available.

The pandemic temporarily revealed the essential role that so-called “low-skilled” jobs play in the reproduction of British society. Brexit-related immigration changes and subsequent labor shortages revealed the reliance on migrant workers and led harder conditions of work for those who stayed in the United Kingdom, opening up the possibility of disrupting the notion of migrant undeservingness and shifting the debate around the value of “essential” work. To address the question of where have all the workers gone, while (some) Eastern European workers have left the United Kingdom in search of other economic opportunities, new migrants from the Global South came into the United Kingdom to work in low paid jobs, with immigration still being used to fuel resentment by those on the right and to place further limits on migrants’ ability to settle in the United Kingdom. Despite the temporary recognition of work in these sectors as “essential,” the structures of resentment remain in place, have perhaps become further enhanced, and continue to shape both immigration policy and the conditions of work in these sectors.

Funding

The research used in this article was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, grant no: ES/VO16490/1