Immigration Status as a Weapon of Control: A Global Perspective

Perpetrator BehaviorSystems ChangeIntersectionality
Written By Jessica Sisler

By Safe & Together Institute’s Regional Managers — Nic Douglas (Europe), Leah Vejzovic (North America), and Jackie Wruck (Asia Pacific)

When we talk about coercive control in domestic abuse, we are increasingly good at naming the myriad tactics perpetrators use—isolation, economic abuse, and psychological manipulation to name a few. But there remains one pattern that is still too often invisible to the professionals and systems that should be protecting survivors: the deliberate weaponisation of immigration status.

Writing from three different regions (the Asia Pacific, Europe, and North America), we are struck not by how different this problem looks across our contexts but by how consistent it is. The tactics vary. The visa categories differ. The legal frameworks are distinct. But the underlying logic is identical: Perpetrators identify and exploit the precarity that immigration status creates, sometimes using the policy environment to do so. 

A Pattern With Many Faces and One Purpose

Across all three of our regions, the same core tactics appear with striking regularity. Perpetrators withhold or destroy immigration documents, removing a survivor’s ability to understand or assert their own rights. They deliberately mismanage visa applications and renewals, engineering a situation of dependency before any professional ever sees the family. They threaten to withdraw sponsorship, to report survivors to immigration enforcement, or to use removal proceedings as leverage, knowing that fear of deportation—and particularly fear of separation from children—is one of the most powerful mechanisms of control available to them.

In the UK, the Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s Safety Before Status report recognises immigration abuse as a deliberate form of perpetration within a wider pattern of coercive control. In Australia, research drawing on 300 case files of temporary migrants confirms that the systemic and purposeful nature of the abuse, with the structure of the migration system itself creating built-in power imbalances that perpetrators actively exploit. Across the United States and Canada, spousal and partner sponsorship arrangements create structured dependency from the outset—perpetrators threaten to withdraw sponsorship or refuse to file joint petitions as leverage, manufacturing the same sense of precarity that we see documented in Europe and the Asia Pacific.

What makes this particularly effective in every region is that perpetrators do not always need to actively enforce their threats. The policy environment does it for them.

When Systems Become Part of the Pattern

Where data sharing exists between public services and immigration enforcement, a survivor who reaches out to police, health services, or social care risks having their information passed to immigration authorities. This is not a theoretical risk—it is a documented reality that survivors are cognisant of. In the UK, historic data sharing practices have meant migrant women live in fear of deportation should they report abuse. In the United States, in jurisdictions where local law enforcement cooperates with federal immigration authorities, a survivor who calls for help may reasonably fear initiating a process that ends in their removal. This must be taken into account when assessing survivors’ decisions not to disclose abuse and the help-seeking they do or don’t undertake. 

The consequence is visible and measurable. In England, almost four in five migrant women were turned away from refuge spaces in 2019–20 due to No Recourse to Public Funds conditions. This leaves them facing an impossible choice between remaining with a perpetrator or facing destitution and homelessness. In Australia, despite the existence of family violence provisions within migration law, administrative complexity and fear of deportation mean many survivors never access the protections that theoretically exist for them. Across North America, processing backlogs stretching to years and few legal pathways mean that legislative protections too often remain out of reach for the survivors who need them most.

What the Safe & Together Model Helps Us See

From a Safe & Together perspective, this matters profoundly. The Safe & Together Model asks practitioners to map the perpetrator’s full pattern of behaviour and identify its impact on survivors and children across every area of a family’s life. Immigration abuse is precisely this kind of wide-reaching, deliberate, systematic control.

When practitioners fail to name it as part of that pattern, two things happen simultaneously: We miss the full picture of what is being done to the survivor, and we inadvertently become part of the system the perpetrator is relying on. The Safety Before Status report found that over 80% of survivors with insecure immigration status referred by statutory agencies as standard or medium risk were reassessed as high risk once a specialist organisation properly examined the perpetrator’s behaviour. This mirrors what practitioners across North America and the Asia Pacific tell us—that risk assessments built on an incomplete picture of perpetrator behaviour consistently underestimate the danger survivors are in.

That is not a minor miscalibration. It is a systemic failure with real consequences for survivor safety.

The Services That Hold the Knowledge and the Funding They Are Denied

Across all three of our regions, specialist “by and for” services (organisations run by and for the communities they serve) are consistently identified as the most effective and often the only trusted route to safety for survivors experiencing immigration abuse. These organisations understand the intersecting layers of risk and hold expertise in immigration entitlements, legal pathways, and culturally specific forms of harm that mainstream services do not.

These same organisations are chronically underfunded and routinely absent from the multi-agency settings where decisions about the families they serve are being made. In Australia, specialist culturally and linguistically appropriate services remain under-resourced despite being identified as essential. In North America, organisations serving immigrants, refugees, and communities of colour are often excluded from mainstream funding streams. In the UK, research has found that many non-London specialist organisations were not invited to attend any local authority strategic meetings, even when those meetings concerned the communities they serve and despite being the primary local source of expertise on No Recourse to Public Funds issues.

This cannot continue. The expertise that keeps the most marginalised survivors safe cannot be sustained on goodwill and fragmented funding, while the organisations holding that expertise remain locked out of the rooms where decisions are made.

Naming It, Mapping It, Responding to It

Immigration abuse is a deliberate, identifiable pattern of perpetrator behaviour. It is amplified in every region by policy environments that, whether by design or default, treat immigration status as more important than survivor safety. And it is a pattern that practitioners everywhere can learn to name, map, and respond to.

The Safe & Together Model provides a practice framework centred on perpetrator accountability and survivor partnership. What is needed now is the cross-regional will to apply them—to ensure that no matter where a survivor is, the system they turn to see the perpetrator’s behaviour clearly rather than becoming another tool in its arsenal.

Additional Resources

Jessica Sisler
Next

Kinship Care Should Not Become Another Avenue for Blaming Survivors