This is when the real work happens – not the work anyone sees, but the work that keeps people alive and, more than that, keeps them dignified. Britain’s nighttime workforce is estimated at around nine million people, and it leans on migrants more heavily every year as fewer UK-born workers take up night jobs. In the health and care sector specifically, more than a third of night workers are migrants, and people not born in the UK are twice as likely to work nights as those born here. I know them partly from the inside – I mostly work days at a Farnham care home, but I’ve picked up enough night shifts over the past seven months to know what that world costs. I’ve watched him move between residents’ rooms so quietly that no one wakes, checking pulse and breathing by torchlight because the overhead light might startle someone mid-dream.