By Pedro Mendonça

Copyright scotsman

The UK Government’s recent announcement of hundreds of arrests under Operation Equalize makes for strong political headlines, with e-bikes seized and “illegal workers” rounded up. Ministers call it a crackdown on “flagrant abuse of the immigration system”. But behind the soundbites lies a policy direction that risks deepening the very problems it claims to solve. At the heart of this strategy is a clear intent to criminalise undocumented migrant workers and remove them from the country. At the same time, it compels companies, including gig economy giants like Deliveroo, Uber Eats, and Just Eat, to check immigration status and report suspected violations. Asylum hotel locations will even be shared with these firms. On paper, this may sound like hard-headed rule enforcement. In practice, it’s a deeply unbalanced approach that criminalises the most vulnerable while allowing the structural drivers of informal and “illegal” work to remain intact. Consider the human cost. Migrants are overwhelmingly people in limbo, awaiting asylum decisions, appealing refusals or trapped with no viable legal employment options. Work, for them, is not a perk; it is a necessity to survive. The threat of arrest and deportation forces individuals deeper into the shadows, making them less likely to report exploitation or wage theft. Then there’s the economic reality. The government’s own labour market faces persistent shortages in precisely the low-paid, labour-intensive jobs many undocumented migrants take on. Delivery riding is physically demanding, often poorly paid, with antisocial working hours. The focus should be on making this type of work fairer and more equal. Most troubling is the structural imbalance between workers and companies. Under the new measures, companies face civil penalties if they fail to check immigration status. Workers face arrest, detention, and forced removal. This asymmetry is telling: the state sees companies as compliance partners, migrants as offenders. While fines can be significant, the reputational and operational damage to a gig platform is manageable; for an undocumented worker, the consequences are life changing. The approach also does nothing to dismantle the conditions that make undocumented migrant labour so common. The platforms’ business models thrive on flexibility and minimal oversight, qualities that make them attractive to those who cannot work in more regulated sectors. Without reforms to gig work itself, enforcement will simply displace undocumented workers into even riskier, more hidden forms of labour. There is a glaring omission: integration. Countries that combine enforcement with pathways to regularisation, language learning and labour market access see better long-term outcomes both for migrants and for host economies. By contrast, the UK’s current path sends a clear message – there is no route from the margins to legitimacy. Instead of funnelling £5 million into ramped-up enforcement raids, we could invest in speeding up asylum claim processing, expanding temporary work permits and enforcing labour standards equally for all workers, documented or not. Companies should be required not only to check immigration status but also to ensure fair pay, safety and working conditions. Operation Equalize may “bear down hard” on undocumented riders in the short term, but it is unlikely to make the gig economy fairer and safer in the long term. The real question is not how many people can be arrested in a week, but how to build a labour market where exploitation is neither a business model nor a survival strategy. If we fail to shift the focus from criminalisation to integration, the cycle will repeat: another raid, another headline, another round of arrests. And still, the deliveries will keep arriving, carried by someone who is unseen, unprotected, and one police stop away from losing everything. Dr Pedro Mendonça is an Associate Professor in Work and Employment at Heriot-Watt University