This week the government unveiled its latest draconian plan to curb immigration: banning those who come to the UK to work in the care sector from bringing their family, including children and spouses, with them.

The plan has rightfully provoked outrage, but it’s not entirely new: its roots lie in historical slavery, in which enslaved people were separated from their own biological families, treated as commodities to be used for work and allowed nothing more...

When we recruit migrant workers from poorer countries to perform care labour, we perpetrate what academic Christa Wichterich has called “transnational care extractivism”. This idea recognises care as a vital resource, one extracted by wealthier countries for their own use, at the expense of the needs of poorer countries.

“The local crisis of [care],” Wichterich has explained, “is transferred from the Global North to the countries of origin of the recruited care worker.”

In this way, it is a manifestation of colonial power dynamics, played out in private households and care homes across the UK. The new restriction forces would-be migrants to relegate their own dependents to a care deficit back home while ‘we’ – the wealthier and whiter – use their care labour as our own...