There were dozens of strawberry plants to prune, and Shukrat Djuraev was more than 3,000 miles from home, but he wasn’t complaining as he made his way through a giant greenhouse tunnel in Kent, southern England.
“I like it here,” said Djuraev, 44, originally from Bukhara, Uzbekistan, and one of the thousands of seasonal workers British farmers depend on each year to get their produce into stores. “It’s good to work here. It’s very stable and calm.”
Before Britain left the European Union, many farm workers came from Eastern Europe. After Brexit, they lost the right to work in Britain and therefore many voters assumed that fewer foreign workers would come.
Instead, 10 years after the Brexit referendum, British farmers have made up for labor shortages by turning to a more distant region for seasonal workers, who are granted entry on six-month visas: Central Asia.
Immigration was a animating issue in the Brexit vote, with its promoters promising that leaving the European Union would allow Britain to “regain control” of the country’s borders. A decade later, it remains one of the biggest political pressure points, this time for the ruling Labor Party.
One of the strongest voices behind Brexit, Nigel Farage, and his latest anti-immigration populist party, Reform UK, have since become a dominant political force, topping opinion polls and making significant gains in recent local elections. His party’s success has shaken the Labor Party and contributed to the downfall of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who announced his resignation on Monday.
Immigration is a complicated picture in Britain. In the years after Brexit, net migration soared, driven by the admission of people fleeing Ukraine and Hong Kong, as well as students and their families, and professionals eligible under the new rules. It has decreased significantly lately after changes in regulations. Regardless of the numbers, previous Labor and Conservative leaders promised to curb immigration, knowing the political dangers of doing otherwise.
There has also been a mismatch between the perception of migration and the reality of the country’s needs. Farms across the country say they could not operate without seasonal workers from abroad, and the mix changed after Brexit.
In the first years after the vote, many Ukrainians and some workers from Russia and Belarus took seasonal jobs in Britain. Then war broke out in Ukraine and British recruiters, supplying large British farms, began to look further afield, landing in the countries of Central Asia, where wages were relatively low.
By 2023, when Britain issued more than 32,000 six-month seasonal worker visas, the top four recruiting countries were Kyrgyzstan (24 percent), Tajikistan (17 percent), Kazakhstan (15 percent) and Uzbekistan (13 percent), nations that once sent much of their workforce to Russia. They do not gain the right to remain in Britain.
Mr Djuraev appreciates the money he earns at Homefield Farm in Kent, which has helped him buy a flat at home. He’s even optimistic about Britain’s unpredictable weather, although that’s partly because he once worked as an oil and gas driller in Russia.
“Well, it’s not Siberia,” he said in Russian, laughing, recalling his time as a qualified engineer and technologist working in Nizhnevartovsk and Surgut. “There the temperature could be 50 degrees below zero.”
Tim Chambers, chief executive of WB Chambers, the company that runs Homefield and 25 other farms in the region, said that without its seasonal workers, “it would be impossible to run the business; it would be losing so much money it would have to stop.”
“If that source of labor was taken away from me, I would close immediately; it wouldn’t even cross my mind; the only thing I could do to survive would be to double or triple my production costs,” he added.
Chambers can trace his ancestral roots in Kent back to 1640. The family business he runs was founded in 1952 and ships around 3,500 tonnes of raspberries and strawberries to British supermarkets each year.
Even if some of the fruit’s packaging displays the British flag, here in the Kent countryside, most pickers speak the Russian language, widely used in Central Asia.
Chambers said that in the 1990s his company hired many Britons, but now none are tempted by seasonal work. Without permanent, year-round work, they can’t get credit or a mortgage, he said.
Those without another job would lose welfare payments while picking fruit and then have to reapply for state aid when the season ended, so it wasn’t worth it. The system, he said, was so inflexible that it was “ridiculous.”
The minimum wage in Britain is 12.71 pounds, about $16.80 an hour, and seasonal workers are guaranteed 32 hours of work a week; some can earn around £700 a week, around $927 or more. By contrast, the average salary in Kyrgyzstan in 2024 was just over £300, or $397, per month.
Djuraev lives with four people from Tajikistan in a mobile home designed for six and says he hopes to return to Britain for at least three more seasons.
Previously, many workers from Central Asia went to work in Russia, said Christopher Gerry, a British academic who is rector of the University of Central Asia, based in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan.
Given the economic volatility in Russia after the invasion of Ukraine and reports of hostility towards Central Asians, Britain has become attractive.
“We are seeing a very young population that is more globally oriented, connected through Instagram etc., looking at global labor markets and wanting to speak English,” Professor Gerry said, referring to the Kyrgyz workforce.
Charities report that some seasonal workers in Britain have been exploited. Because visas last only six months, unscrupulous employers know that workers will soon have to leave and will not be able to file any claims, said Daniyar Abdrakhmanov, who is from Kazakhstan and worked on a farm in Northern Ireland.
“Can you imagine being a person who comes to another country, where you don’t know the language, for the first time?” said. “Maybe they borrowed money or got credit in their country and come here with debts.” And if a farmer treats workers badly, he added, “they have to keep silent because they don’t want to lose their job.”
Dora-Olivia Vicol, chief executive of the Work Rights Centre, a charity, said: “The exploitation of seasonal workers that our lawyers see is widespread. It is systemic and enabled by a visa system that ties them to a single employer, leaving them with nowhere to turn when things go wrong.”
For workers who have good experience, the program can open horizons.
Orozbek Saipidin, originally from the Batken region of southwestern Kyrgyzstan, said in an interview in Bishkek, where he now lives, that the prospect of working in Britain offered a real opportunity for him and his family. “In six months, it could improve our lives,” he said.
Saipidin, 34, said he had never traveled abroad before and initially found his first visit to Britain, five years ago, difficult.
“My back, arms and legs hurt,” he said. “There were days when I would cry in the shower and curse at myself: ‘Why did I come here?’ But after about three weeks I got used to it. We started making decent money – between £550 and £600 a week.”
Saipidin was about to travel to England again in May to work on a farm in Cornwall, south-west England.
In Kent, David Catt, a partner at Ragstone Ridge, a vineyard, said his grapes were harvested with the help of a team of workers from Central Asia.
“They are all from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan,” Catt said, adding: “Communicating with them is difficult; you have to physically show them what to do, because, to be honest, my Russian is not very good.”
It was, Catt noted, just one of the consequences of Brexit.
“That’s the way things are now,” he said. “When we were in Europe, it was very easy because the workforce could come and go as they wanted.”
