Editorial introduction: Racialised migrants navigating the UK's hostile environment policies

This special issue critically examines the far-reaching effect of the UK's ‘hostile environment’, a series of ‘brutal policies’ (Liberty 2018: 4) and legislative measures, implemented by the Conservative Government including the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts, but rooted in earlier political responses to immigration and forced migration, by the Labour government under Blair's leadership and the Coalition government's ‘hostile environment working party’ supported by Theresa May (as then Home Secretary) and translated into policies to control UK immigration (O’Neill et al., 2019, 131). Liberty describe the ‘hostile environment’ as “ a sprawling web of immigration controls embedded in the heart of our public services and communities” (Liberty 2018: 5) and that these policies amount to state sanctioned discrimination and flout human rights laws (Liberty 2018: 50).

Our starting point in putting together this collection was founded upon the increasingly clear evidence that anti-immigration rhetoric has hardened in recent years, impacting some of the most vulnerable communities in society including migrant families and children (Erel et al., 2017a and 2017b). Within this anti-immigration stance, migrants are positioned as the root cause of the UK's economic and social problems and are subject to increasingly harsh and punitive policies of exclusion, made worse by wider intersecting oppressions resulting from race, gender, and class inequalities (Reynolds and Erel, 2014). This Special Issue was inspired by our commitment to addressing systemic oppressions and intersecting inequalities not only through own research on the hostile environment but through the possibilities or potential of critical social policy (Lister, 2010) and the research of our contributors.

In one of our most recent projects ‘Participatory Arts and Social Action Research’ (https://fass.open.ac.uk/research/projects/pasar), funded by the ESRC, we set out explore the experiences of migrant women and young girls subjected to hostile environment policies, including a group of migrant mothers with No Recourse for Public Funding, a condition imposed on grants of limited leave to enter or remain with the effect of prohibiting the person holding that leave from accessing certain defined public funds (O’Neill et al., 2019). We utilised participatory action research – specifically participatory theatre and walking methods – to create a model for bringing together practitioners and migrant mothers living with NRPF to engage with each other through creative and innovative methods for researching migrant families’ citizenship (Kaptani et al., 2020; Reynolds and Erel, 2016; Erel et al., 2017c; Erel et al., 2022). Rooted in in critical feminist frameworks, such as intersectionality, black and transnational feminisms (Reynolds, 2020; Reynolds and Erel, 2014; O’Neill et al., 2019), we focused on advocating for civil rights and human rights across a range of healthcare, welfare, education, and housing policy issues. And we also critically interrogated the relationship between social policy, social welfare and state intervention, in determining marginalised people's collective struggles within and against the state (Erel et al. 2017a, 2022, 2023, O’Neill, 2019, Reynolds, 2017, Reynolds and Erel, 2016).

It is within this broader context that this special issue emerged, providing an important framing to the UK's hostile environment policies and our attempts to address it. We invited other scholars writing and researching in this area to help us elucidate the hostile environment as a set of racialised policies and practices.

We were aware of some of the invited contributors’ research through Social Scientists Against the Hostile Environment (ssahe.info), a group of Social Scientists, who first came together as a Special Interest Group (SIG) on Refugees, Migration and Settlement. This group was established by some Fellows of the Academy of Social Sciences (AcSS), to challenge government policy on the Hostile Environment. Other contributors were invited to contribute to this collection of papers because their research aligned with our aspirations for the special issue - to do research that makes a difference and aligns with our understanding of critical social policy. While there is a lot of important research on the hostile environment, this Special Issue allows readers to better understand the cumulative and cross-cutting issues raised by the array of hostile environment policies, as well as the resistance to them. The Special Issue also privileges storytelling and counter-story-telling as a way of inviting personal accounts and lived experiences of these policies.

A hostile environment for racialised migrants

The hostile environment developed against a backdrop in which fears around spiralling immigration dominated the political and media agenda meaning that policies introduced during this time were designed with the specific intention of making life as difficult as possible, for racialised migrants, particularly those with an undocumented migrant status, to remain in the UK. The term racialised migrants encompasses diverse migrant groups, such as recently arrived, asylum seekers and refugees, that share the common experience of being systemically assigned a racialised status. It also is relevant with reference to racialized citizens: people who hold British citizenship, born in or originating from former UK colonies in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, but are misclassified and treated as migrants. The ‘Windrush Generation Scandal’ (Guardian, 2018) whereby more than 500,000 plus people who arrived in the UK from former Caribbean Commonwealth nation before 1971 ended up being wrongfully classed as illegal immigrants, and as a result denied healthcare and social welfare rights, and also threatened with deportation and/or deported (Goodfellow, 2019). This scandal is a clear example of hostile environment policies intersecting with racializing process (Reynolds et al., 2023). This shows that a particularly pernicious aspect of the hostile environment policies is that it blurs the boundaries between migrants with diverse migration trajectories and situations (recently arrived, long-term, with secure and insecure migration status), and racialised citizens. It places these individuals in a position where they need to prove their migration status to landlords, employers, health staff, public servant officials.

In the case of refugees and asylum seekers, analysing how racialisation and migration intertwine shows that, whilst they experience manifold deprivations and challenges in seeking refuge in the UK, some are represented as more deserving of support and solidarity by government policy. This manifests itself in the way that government facilitated faster access and some form of settlement rights to Ukrainian refugees racialised as white European (Miller et al., 2022). This contrasts sharply with the limited support extended, for example to refugees from Afghanistan and other countries (Ryan et al. and Stavropoulou this issue). Yet, the hostile environment debates have also targeted those racialised as ambiguously white, as recent media discourses on undocumented migrants for example from Albania or previously from Romania have shown (cf. Cungu and Miço, 2023, Fox, 2013). The term racialised migrants highlight the tensions between migration and racialisation enacted by the hostile environment policy.

Brexit (the UK exit from the European Union and European project) impacted significantly on the development of anti-immigration and populist discourses of the ‘hostile environment’. It extended, and weaponised the populist ‘leave’ focus on ‘taking back control’ of ‘British borders, British law-making’ and the economy through restricting immigration. ‘According to one YouGov poll, 84 per cent of Leave voters thought that there would be ‘less immigration into Britain’ if we left the EU, compared to only 27 per cent of Remain voters.’ (Hobolt, 2016:7). An increase in anti-immigration discourse, and a rise in racist attacks meant that since the Brexit referendum all migrants, but particularly ‘racialised migrants’ are constructed as ‘potentially illegal’ (Phillimore and Sigona 2018). Hubbard and Leech (2023) writes “Tellingly, on ‘Brexit Day’ (January 31, 2020), the white cliffs of Dover appeared on the front of the Daily Mail's Brexit ‘souvenir edition’ hailing ‘A New Dawn for Britain.’” The Kent coast in this instance being celebrated as a border, “the bulwark shore that has long held off ‘foreign invaders’ of different types.”

Everyday bordering and the hostile environment

This further instantiation of hostile environment policies led to what Yuval-Davis et al. (2017) call ‘everyday bordering’ as ‘a major technology of control of both social diversity and discourses on diversity’. It shifted the focus of recent UK immigration legislation from the external, territorial border (e.g., passport checks in airports and ferry terminals) to the internal border (e.g., passport checks in hospitals, schools, colleges and universities). This embedded ‘technologies of everyday bordering into many social institutions of British life’ (Yuval-Davies et al., 2017: 228). These discourses recursively impacted the Brexit ‘leave’ campaigns and led to dynamised policies, such as No Recourse to Public Funds, deterring particular categories of racialised migrants from accessing NHS healthcare, social welfare and housing (Flynn, 2015). Professionals and social and welfare providers turned into enforcement officers under these policies, who were responsible for policing migrants’ access to public services (Dickson and Rosen, 2021; Griffiths and Yeo, 2021).

This special issue explores how the British Government are trying to embed immigration control in every aspect of life in the UK for racialised migrants. The articles study the ideological underpinnings of hostile environment policies, to highlight the multiple ways in which racialised migrants are specifically targeted, positioned as ‘unworthy’ citizens’ (see for example, Potter and Meier; Rosen and Dickson in this issue). Hostile environment policies create a climate of fear, and as several articles in the volume will show, a knock-on effect is that policies discourage racialised women from accessing important care, specialist health services including maternal care, and from reporting domestic abuse, because of the justifiable concern that the NHS acts as a ‘border police’ institution by the government to document and report patients’ immigration status (see Lonergan in this issue). Articles in this issue also explore how hostile environment policies from the government increased racialised migrants’ vulnerability to poverty, destitution and homelessness (see for example, Benchekroun et al. in this volume). This was particularly heightened during the COVID-19 pandemic where undocumented migrants were at increased risk of contracting and dying from the virus (Erel et al., 2023).

Throughout this themed issue, we critically analyse the wider policy implications of the human impacts and social costs of the hostile environment policies, by identifying and reviewing key components of policies and corresponding legislation in maternal health, public health and safety, employment, housing, education and social care. We similarly illustrate how the hostile environment, and its legacies create a difficult climate in which to respond to humanitarian and refugee crisis. The most recent Ukrainian and Afghan refugee crisis shows the government response as lacking in clarity, resourcing and accountability, heightening risk to refugees travelling to the UK and leaving those in the UK vulnerable to additional exploitation and abuses (Slaven, 2022, Besano, 2020, Miller et al., 2022; Ryan et al. in this issue).

Each of the articles centre the lived experience of the hostile environment for racialised migrants to appraise its impact on public health, mortality rates, the public purse and wider social relations in the UK. This represents a welcome addition to debates because it invites key questions into policy debates: ‘How do people experience the hostile environment policies in their everyday lived encounters and its impact?’ ‘How do people navigate systems and structures of this policy, and its relationship to social welfare policies in the UK? What are hopes for the future and messages for policy makers, practitioners, advocates and researchers in how we can better challenge, resist and elicit change, through collective learning, participatory research and action/interventions?

In responding to these questions, authors identify how racialised migrants in diverse ways and through everyday encounters, contest these policies and fight for fairer and better social welfare policies (Stavropoulou and Benchekroun et al.). The articles are further connected by our methodological approach, with combines and integrate policy analyses qualitative and quantitative methods with participatory action research to gain more interpretivist insights into policy issues. The articles reflect the authors’ collaborative projects and partnerships with public and third sector organisations policy and practice professionals, community leaders and people with lived experience, and their commitment to social justice, equality and inclusion.

The articles

Stavropoulou's article presents personal stories of individuals seeking asylum, in the North East of England, on how they navigate the threefold punitive ‘threat’ of dispersal, detention, and destitution underpinning the UK's hostile environment. Individuals’ stories reveal the embodied impact of such policies for the asylum seekers such as living in (un)safe spaces, experiencing financial precarity, emotional upheaval and imposed social isolation, and highlight the failure of hostile environment policies to respond to intersectional and unique needs of individuals seeking asylum. Combining personal stories with participatory creative methods creates an ‘ethno-mimetic’ (O’Neill et al., 2002, O’Neill and Harindranath, 2006, O’Neill, 2007, O’Neill, 2009, O’Neill and Hubbard, 2010), methodological space for asylum-seekers to re-imagine lived experiences through creative means. In doing so, these creative spaces represent sites of resistance where they can critically reflect and advocate for themselves against unfair and inhumane treatment of the policy, and offer up alternative spaces for belonging, support and caring – which is the direct opposite of the hostile environment policy for asylum seekers.

Rosen and Dickson's article argues that within the context of children, through hegemonic imaginaries of childhood, are held up as a blameless victim caught up in poverty and immigration restrictions. They argue that this child exceptionalism framing allows for the successful and ‘winnable’ campaign of allowing children of undocumented migrants access to free school meals, whilst ensuring that the logic and violence of NRPF and the hostile environment, the pervasive notions of deservingness that underpin remain fundamentally unchanged. How policies interact with racialised, gendered, and classed discourses around citizenship and reproduction, as well as the personal circumstances of individual migrants, to produce further reproductive stratification is explored in Lonergan's article. This study explores the impact of the ‘hostile environment’ on racialised migrant women's experiences of pregnancy and childbirth in England, showing how the ‘hostile environment’ functions as a technology of ‘stratified reproduction’. Pregnant migrants are subject to multiple, overlapping policies that exert influence over myriad aspects of reproduction, including their ability to access medical care, housing, and a basic income. Moreover, these policies intersect with racialised, gendered, and classed discourses around citizenship and reproduction, as well as the personal circumstances of individual migrants, to produce further reproductive stratification. Healthcare professionals, including midwives, may internalise racialised discourses depicting these migrants as ‘undeserving’, and illicitly using the NHS and other welfare state services. Therefore, this reproductive stratification produced by the hostile environment represents part of the wider racialised biopolitics of UK citizenship.

As noted above, diverse migrant groups including documented and undocumented, long term settled, asylum seekers and refugees each encounter the hostile environment in brutal and violent ways. This includes recently invited asylum seekers, welcomed by the UK government, such as Afghan and Ukrainian and, at least partially and conditionally, positioned within the category as ‘deserving’ migrants. Ryan et al.'s article, explores the emerging experiences of Afghan evacuees during the first year in London. Using the narratives of Afghans participants, this article highlights how ‘everyday bordering’, which was birthed within a punitive and hostile migration system has led to lengthy processes of resettlement for these migrants, with many thousands of evacuees remaining in temporary hotel accommodation for protracted periods, despite government policies supporting Afghan resettlement in the UK, at least in theory. Ryan et al. argue that integral to the hostile environment policies, is the way that it is designed to ‘wear down’ migrants in the UK, regardless of their reason for migration.

The intentionality of the design of hostile environment policies to put increasing distance between different agents in immigration law and border enforcement, and diverse racialised migrants who are subjects of bordering to control empathy, solidarity and resistance is addressed in Potter's and Meier's article. Here they specifically examine how politics of distance are mobilised as a technology of control. Within this context, distanciation is understood as the active production of different forms of distance as a method of control, is mobilised within the English National Health Service, under the Migrant and Visitor Cost Recovery Programme, to restrict their access to health and welfare support and to control the public perceptions of people racialised migrants within the UK´s hostile environment, in spite of an increased prominence of arguments that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic that access to healthcare is a public good.

As is shown in the article by Benchekroun et al., and by the other contributors of this volume, migrant families encounter the hostile environment in a multitude of sites in their daily lives. The expansive nature of the hostile environment policies and the speed at which immigration rules and regulations are introduced and implemented, ensures the nature of hostility is not only experienced by migrant families at the border or in the encounter with immigration authorities, but also in sites where children and parents expect to be safe and go for support and protection, such as churches, schools, and homes. Benchekroun et al. study shows the everyday lived realities for migrant parents and their children living with the uncertainty of these bordering policies and the pressures it creates for them to fulfil normative expectations. This study concludes by highlighting how mothers and their children draw on a range of symbolic and material resources, relations, and spaces for contestation, resistance and freedom from the constraints of the hostile environment.

The articles challenge neoliberal ideologies and structures that reproduce racist¹ practices in welfare services and increase state surveillance of racialised migrants. For example, Benchekroun et al. in this volume present new evidence on the way the current Government has exploited the COVID-19 pandemic to further police aspects of racialised migrants’ lives and restrict their human rights. Articles by Rosen and Dickson and by Potter and Meier also demonstrate how activists, researchers, practitioners and organisations, as well as people affected by these policies are developing local and national action campaigns in response. This includes collective, co-designed, creative and art-based approaches enabling migrant women to share their stories and raising awareness of hostile environment polices to the wider public (Stavropoulou article) The strength of these co-designed and creative approaches is that they speak back to and critique policy through highlighting the discrepancies between policy claims and racialized migrants’ lived experience, revealing the epistemic, economic, racialised and gendered violence that is rendered invisible in policy discourses.

The Living Activism Section comprises two articles highlighting the various ways in which individuals are resisting, challenging, and seeking to change hostile environment policies across a range of social welfare arenas (eg. housing, social care, education, maternal care and the NHS) through strategies of collective action, organising and by promoting cross-cultural learning, sharing and exchanging knowledge, better understanding and awareness across diverse social groups.

The two Living Activism articles also draw on the lived experience of racialised migrants to highlight personal experience of systemic racism, with invited papers from racialised migrant women and a grassroots organisation supporting them. This contribution reflects the co-editors’ networks and commitment to participatory and arts based approaches to research and activism (see PASAR project). We believe it is important to include these perspectives, as they shed light on the lived experiences of structural and interpersonal racism that are incited and exacerbated by the hostile environment policies and everyday bordering practices. They also show that resistance to these policies takes many different forms. ‘Activism’ is not a monolithic category, and the everyday acts of bearing witness, recognising, resisting and naming the effects of the hostile environment policy need to be recognised as ‘activism’. Often, racialised migrant women's resistance is not recognised as ‘activism’ but instead seen as banal, part of their family work – as in the context of the arduous struggle to create dignified, liveable conditions for themselves and their families, articulated in the work of Creating Ground (Marziale et al., this volume).

Likewise, when racialised migrant women endure, but also name and make public the persistent and corrosive effects of persistent verbal and physical racist attacks (Kaptani et al., this volume) this is not always recognised as ‘activism’- we contend that this is in part due to the ways in which activism is often conceptualized in a narrow way that privileges and renders more visible particular forms of social action, often associated with a masculine notion of the ‘public’, as well as with Eurocentric ideas of the political sphere. The contributors largely do not conform to such narrow ideas of activism. Yet, their acts of building a collective knowledge and strategies for resistance, whether in organised or informal communities of resistance, the contributors to the Living Activism section challenge not only Hostile Environment policies and everyday bordering, but also limiting ideas of what activists and activism looks like.

In summary, the Special Issue contributes to critical social policy debates because taken together the articles and this introduction address: intersecting issues of social harms, systemic oppressions, and governmentality, involved in the operation of the hostile environment. We draw attention to the attendant and widespread racialised harms through power, policies, and practices; as well as the vital importance of resistance, claims to social justice, citizenship rights with welfare provisions embedded in the personal accounts. We issue a call to challenge the everyday bordering practices of the hostile environment.