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Detained migrants are paid £1 per hour for working in centres where they are held
Trapped in vast prison-like buildings across Britain, thousands of undocumented migrants cook, clean and even provide haircuts for their fellow detainees.
Faced with an uncertain future and the possibility of being detained for years, the migrants and asylum seekers are offered work at a rate of just £1 ($1.5) an hour by the private security companies who run Britain's immigration detention centres.
Around 30,000 people were detained across 13 Home Office (interior ministry) detention centres last year, according to the makers of a 30-minute documentary "Working Illegally" which will be released online on Saturday.
For many who worked in and have since left the centres, the manner in which they were treated was degrading and traumatic.
"It's where you see that all your humanity has been stripped off ... you don't have a way out. You just bury your pride somewhere, somehow," one man tells the filmmakers, shrouded in silhouette to hide his identity.
A woman who talks about working in order to afford phone credit to call a lawyer says: "They say there is no slavery but it is still going on in Yarl's Wood (detention centre)".
What might be considered exploitation by some is in fact permissible by law in Britain.
Detainees who choose to work are excluded from minimum wage legislation and must only be paid one pound per hour, according to the Home Office's Detention Services Order.
The Home Office said that participation in work is voluntary and must not replace the work of trained staff at the centres.
Supporters of the practice, including prison and security firm staff, say working is essential to the mental and emotional wellbeing of detainees and an important means of reducing the likelihood of self-harm.
Yet Bridget Anderson, professor of migration and citizenship at the University of Oxford, says there is significant hypocrisy in the attitudes towards migrants working in detention centres.
"Their work is somehow imagined out of the labour market ... so that work doesn't count as work," Anderson says in the film.
"Why? Because it's imagined as being for your own good."
For immigration barrister Taimour Lay, the situation is "akin to forced labour, which the government seems so concerned about outside of immigration detention".
Questioning the relationships of power within the detention centre, he asks what might have been done to incentivise or coerce detainees who seemingly volunteer to work.
"Private companies have taken the phrase 'paid activity' and turned it into 'badly paid work'," Lay says in the film.
The filmmakers, Ewen MacArthur and Lou Macnamara, have accused these firms of exploiting detainees to carry out essential jobs at the expense of trained staff in order to save millions of pounds in wages.
The companies refute any suggestions of wrongdoing, adamant that they have followed Home Office regulations to a tee.
"Working Illegally" is being released a month after Britain's Modern Slavery Bill became law, one of a raft of measures to combat a global trade that exploits millions of people and generates $150 billion a year for traffickers.
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