In this paper, Tamsin Barber interrogates the role of recent debates around Modern Slavery and trafficking in framing and understanding the experience of new Vietnamese migrants working in the cannabis trade and nail salons in the UK. By reflecting upon wider aspects of the lived experience and biographical processes of migration, the speaker will argue that these frameworks can unintentionally become complicit in rendering these migrants more vulnerable by disregarding their agency (more broadly conceived) and pre-migratory conditions.