Coercion and compliance: the politics of the ‘hostile environment’

Liz Fekete:

We have all seen how the ‘hostile environment’ operates in the public sector – in deportation policies and detention centres, in immigration rules and immigration policing ¹ – but we want here to go further and look at what it feels like to be a victim of the hostile environment, as much as where it takes place and why it takes place. This discussion tonight is to look at the ways in which the hostile environment operates as a form of coercion and bullying aimed at manipulating behaviour through the use of threats – to remove welfare, to remove housing, to make you destitute, to manipulate people to leave the country.

History teaches us that racism is always linked to exploitation, and the exploitative aspects of the hostile environment are often overlooked. So we also want to continue the recent work of the Permanent People’s Tribunal on the violations with impunity on the rights of migrants and refugees ² by looking at who profits from those coerced and bullied into working in immigration removal centres, or from charging regimes that treat people as cash tills so that the only way certain groups can access rights is by paying for them. And what of those professionals ‘in the system’ who do not want to act as controllers or punishers but want to return educational, welfare and health services to their original egalitarian roles?

The first speaker is Dr China Mills, senior lecturer in public health at City University, recently described as ‘heroic’ in The Guardian for her research into avoidable deaths amongst vulnerable people claiming benefits. She has also researched the treatment of asylum seekers in immigration removal centres and is guest-editing a special issue of Economy & Society (along with Elise Klein, Asha Achuthan and Eva Hilberg) on ‘Affective technologies: governance, subject making and the globalization of the psy-complex’, in which she writes on affective technologies of welfare deterrence in Australia and the UK.

First, China, can you explain terms like ‘affective technologies’ and the ‘psy-complex’; and how you see them relating to the hostile environment?

China Mills:

These ideas come from joint work, with Dr Elise Klein (based at the Australian National University) about how deterrence shapes welfare policies in the UK and Australia, and the colonial history of those sorts of policies and practices. One of the things we found useful to start thinking about was the relationship between the ‘psy-complex’ and the hostile environment. By psy-complex I mean the diverse operations, practices, policies which use or mobilise psychology or psychiatry to focus on motivation, behaviour, cognitions, psyche. Anything that uses those sorts of models, I guess, to some extent, might be described as being part of this bigger ‘psy-complex’.

And sometimes people talk about ‘psy-disciplines’ like psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, but also how those perspectives come out in areas such as counselling. The critique of that ‘psy-focus’ is that it turns attention away from the bigger structural, socio-political, economic conditions which might shape people in the first place. We become focused on individuals and, on the neuro side of this, there is a big shift in terms of focusing on the brain.

I had been most interested in looking at suicide: really understanding how psychology and psychiatry explain and understand suicide. Most of my research is within global mental health, looking particularly at India, where I have done a lot of work. One of the areas I worked on in India was farmer suicides, which broadly are the results of aggressive agri-business practices, promotion of pesticides, GMO crops, etc. And how the government in India, but also how a lot of organisations like the World Health Organization, respond to those farmer suicides in often very psychological sorts of ways. So, they quite often say things like, ‘we need to increase access to antidepressants for farmers’, or ‘we need to send out teams of psychologists to talk to farmers’. And those things might be helpful, but there is a marked reticence then to look at those bigger practices that have made those farmers lives unliveable and made suicide perhaps a response to policies. And that got me really interested in how different kinds of reforms, policies, practices, can essentially kill people through creating conditions that make life really, truly unbearable for them or make them so indebted that life can be unbelievably hard.

The ‘psy-complex’ is this set of practices, but it also has a really long colonial history. And so, while people might talk about it as being quite new (and it is new in certain ways) there is a longer history of colonial psychiatry and psychology. And so I have been thinking about the ways that individualised explanations have been used to explain away resistance to colonialism and to enslavement as being essentially symptoms of mental health problems or as being psychological problems − from the diagnosis in the US in the 1800s of drapetomania amongst escaped slaves – where the desire to escape among enslaved people was seen as mental illness. You get the kind of echoes of that into the 1960s when young black males who were part of the Black Power movement, were diagnosed with ‘protest psychosis’. The echo continues in certain ways, around counter-terrorism policies like Prevent in the UK. You see that with the very racialised dynamics of Prevent – how mental health kind of creeps in there as almost like a symptom of radicalisation. And so that's the kind of psy bit of it.

There has been as well a sort of intellectual turn, if you like, or increased interest in affect meaning emotions or feelings. A nice way of thinking about this is both the structures of feelings and the feelings of structures. Structures shape our emotions rather than us seeing them entirely as a kind of individual response. By ‘affective technologies’, I suppose what we were trying to get at is that the set of policies, practices, models of understanding, etc. that are designed in a particular way (or possibly can have unintended consequences) sometimes produce certain emotions or affects in people, often negative ones. Particular hostile environment policies or welfare reform policies, specifically, I would say, are designed to create a sense of anxiety in people, a feeling of dread, fear, shame. How those emotions are mobilised both in the public, to garner consent for punitive policy and in denigrated groups, to create fear – this is what we're trying to get at in the term ‘affective technologies’.

LF:

You write in your piece for the special issue that the hostile environment is part of a strategy of stigmatisation by design. Can you tell us what you mean by that?

CM:

Quite a few other people, like Imogen Tyler in her brilliant book Revolting Subjects, talk about how stigmatisation has been used to dehumanise particular groups of people. Graham Scrambler, for example, talks about the ‘weaponisation of stigma’. So there's some brilliant literature on this. It's not necessarily specifically citing the hostile environment, but certainly applies to that in lots of ways.

My link to the subject was that I had been doing work around welfare reform and particularly suicides linked to work capability assessments and, behind that, welfare reform and policy. I was struck by the fact that when the ‘hostile environment’ policies came in more officially, Dr Frances Ryan, a brilliant journalist who writes for The Guardian, wrote about how there's already a hostile environment for Britain's disabled folk. ³ I think it's important to stress that such an environment is not exactly the same as for black and migrant people – there are important differences – but that actually some of the policies we had already seen are used on other stigmatised groups.

So, I thought it would be useful to think about both welfare reform policies and immigration policies alongside each other as hostile environments, particularly in terms of their impact on people. There's very similar media and government scene-setting, political speeches, etc., crafting of ‘strivers versus skivers’ in welfare discourse. And then ‘mobile migrants’ and ‘benefits scrounging’ or ‘benefit tourism’ in the immigration discourse. Certain types of people are being constructed as ‘undeserving’ – as dependent on state welfare and hence as something to be avoided, or deterred, or got rid of. Whether that be people who come to this country, or people already based here, because there is also a massive intersection of racialisation with mental health and disability. And there are other similarities like the ‘go home’ vans that we saw, as well as the kind of ‘dob in a benefit thief’ hotlines. It's a cultivation of suspicion amongst neighbours and the people that live around you. Who can you spot that’s doing something that you don't like and then you can dob them in? It's similar in certain ways I think to the [UK Transport Police’s] ‘see it, say it, sort it’ cultivation of suspicion of certain people on public transport. And then there are always certain bodies which are going to be already read as being suspicious − racialised and gendered throughout history.

There is now a degradation of any kind of dependency on welfare or of being a recipient. Instead of it being seen as an entitlement, the idea is being promoted that it is a lifestyle choice. And that is judged very negatively. The way of valuing people only through paid work, that disabled people are very familiar with, is being extended to other groups. There's no other kind of worthiness than being paid for work, no matter what that job is, or how precarious.

And so, from that work, looking at stigmatisation that is by design, I came to thinking about how suicides linked to welfare reform. It is common in psychological health to think about suicide as an individual act usually talked about as linked to having mental health problems. Focusing on depression, when talked about in the psy- complex, can stop people from thinking about the actual conditions and context in which people live which meant they felt suicidal. And also, in psychology, one of the main explanations for suicide is about the person perceiving themselves to be a burden, so then feeling suicidal. And I thought, but what happens when you're being literally told every day by the government, by policy, by the media that you are a burden?

LF:

Thank you China for explaining the ramifications and ubiquity of the hostile environment. Now I would like to ask Angie Garcia, from the migrant domestic workers’ organisation Waling Waling, to tell us about some of the stresses and hardships women face. How does the hostile environment get under your skin?

Angie Garcia:

Campaigning for the rights of migrant domestic workers has gone on for quite some time. Government policies hand abuse into the hands of the employers: working over-long hours, not being paid their wages, suffering from physical, sexual and mental abuse, no day off, no proper accommodation, no proper food. Some women are lucky if they have leftover food to eat. I was in that situation before. But we campaigned and we won our rights as workers in 1997. Thanks to the Labour government, we were recognised as workers with the same rights as other workers and with a right to settle in the UK. Unfortunately, since 2012, domestic workers don't have such rights any more. Theresa May, when Home Secretary, removed the rights that were given to us in 1997.

Workers are still now working in brutalising employment. Their experiences in many ways are even worse, due to the present hostile environment. Unfortunately, others became undocumented, through no fault of their own. For example, they registered at college, paid lots of money to an agency, but when they came here, the college did not exist. Access to healthcare is the most difficult thing for the undocumented members of our organisation. Surgeries ask for details like address, passport, etc. This is very frightening for people who are already vulnerable. We knew of one woman who had a serious heart condition and was treated in hospital and then given a bill of £9,000. She was under lots of stress, which was very bad for her health. Fortunately, the ‘Doctors of the World’ helped her by writing to the hospital and offering to pay £50 a month. Another member was diagnosed with a heart condition when she worked in Dubai, and came here with her employer. But she did not attend the GP or a hospital appointment because she was scared because they were asking so many things. Suddenly, one evening, she was found dead near her bed. She died of a heart attack leaving her 16-year-old daughter alone in the Philippines.

In this hostile environment, our members can’t afford the cost of a visa and national health payments. Many migrant workers are highly skilled in their own countries but are considered unskilled here in the UK. Social care is underpaid, not because of immigration but because it is undervalued as is domestic work in the private household. Not recognising work in the private household as work with rights and protection under employment legislation is a challenge. We have to reclaim those rights lost to us.

LF:

Thanks Angie for giving us the view from the ground on the hostile environment. Now we will hear from Wayne Farah, Coordinator of the NHS Confederation National BME leadership Network, speaking from another vantage point, on the hostile environment. How do you, Wayne, someone in a leadership position in our public services, understand your role?

Wayne Farah:

When you get into a leadership position, you know you're in the compromise business. It's often about squaring the circle. As somebody who's always been committed to the NHS, I never envisaged being in a position where I would be compromising in an NHS that abandoned people to suffer and die needlessly.

The first thing for me was to acknowledge the suffering we caused. In Grenfell, people died because of incompetence and indifference. ⁴ In the hostile environment, people were left to die as an act of policy. The complicity of the NHS in those deaths I think undermined the legal, ethical and historical justification for the NHS.

Yet there has been no public inquiry, no scrutiny of the decisions made by the NHS that led to the deaths that Angie so eloquently described. Nor has there been serious internal reflection. When I began to reflect on the Windrush scandal I began to question everything I thought I knew about myself and the NHS. I concluded that I'd become a collaborator.

The banality of evil grows best in the compost of bureaucracy. I remember many years ago when I first become involved with the Institute of Race Relations and we were doing antifascist work that was part of the struggle then, and Siva [then director] sent me to Germany (when they still had the Berlin Wall) to speak at an antifascist commemoration of Kristallnacht. During that visit I went to visit Wannsee House, home of the infamous Wannsee Conference where the practicalities of the final solution were planned. You can see the minutes of meetings that describe which part of the state bureaucracy and what role they had, all written up. For me, it was even more affecting than my visit to a death camp, because you can actually see how the bureaucrats kept their hands clean. And I think within any bureaucracy, including the NHS, there are a lot of systems that allow us to keep our hands clean.

Often we're doing our best to find answers to difficult questions. But we have to ask, is this the right question? If you get the right answer to the wrong question, how is that useful? And so, you're trying to organise services with quite inadequate budgets. The need is still there, you still have to do something. But you know, we demand staff do more with less, but suffering is hidden. In that context, the hostile environment on a day-to-day basis, it's just a bureaucratic process. It's just about complying with the law, following the rules, limiting demand, so we improve on our performance figures. And we're rewarded in the management structure for having done that.

LF:

What will be the long-term effect of the hostile environment on our public services?

WF:

I think it’s an existential threat to the NHS or to any of our public services. The NHS can no longer claim to be a service provided on the basis of need, not the ability to pay. You have to have the ability to pay now. Today it's ‘them’, tomorrow it's me. We know that the restrictions on migrant access undermines public health, undermines clinical ethics. If you have a bureaucratic system that you design around collecting fees, you will encourage people to find more ways to extend that − so you are promoting privatisation of the NHS. As Nye Bevan said, if some are going to be charged and others not, we have to separate the sheep from the goat, so both must be classified. And that only reinforces institutionalised racism within our services.

I think the 2007 regulations about hospital charging, under the Blair government, first hypothesised the links between immigration and asylum, health tourism and the viability of the NHS. I remember being part of the campaigns against the introduction of charging for primary care and it was quite easy to mobilise people as to why it was so wrong. Move forward to 2017−2018, when I was a chair of the Migrants’ Rights Network which authorised the legal action to challenge the NHS and Home Office data-sharing agreement which I saw as a critical part of the hostile environment, I was immediately threatened that I would never get another role within the NHS. So, we'd gone in ten years from sympathy to being identified as a troublemaker.

I also think that legislation is becoming redundant. The idea of these being welfare and benefit tourists is so deeply ingrained within the psyche of the services that they don't actually need to introduce any more regulations. People regulate regardless. That's why, although we were successful in stopping there being any eligibility criteria in primary care, the evidence is that still 20 per cent of people who try to register with a GP are refused on the basis of identity and immigration checks that don't need to be carried out.

The point I am making is that the hostile environment didn't happen overnight. This is not a phenomenon that starts or ends with Theresa May’s statement in 2012. There has been a 15−20-year campaign to undermine the very concept of universal provision. The idea that we're all in it together is to me what the NHS was supposed to stand for and what it needs to be made to stand for again.

LF:

Now Jon Burnett (criminology lecturer at Swansea university) and Fidelis Chebe (director of Migrant Action Leeds), can you tell us from your recent research calculations ⁵ exactly how the hostile environment sits with monetarisation in immigration controls.

Jon Burnett:

Our research set out to look at the charging regimes which exist in almost every single aspect of immigration control: carrier sanctions, NHS charges, employers’ checks, accessing reports in certain contexts. They haven't just emerged recently but intensified over the last few decades.

Fidelis Chebe:

One of the things that makes the research quite rich is that it is grounded in experience. I came to the UK as a student. And I saw each stage of my renewal process involving large sums of money. Within a short space of time I saw immigration fees raised from £1,000 to £8,000 and that had a direct impact on our choices − where we lived, what we did. This is not just academic; this is people living the reality of it. I set up Migrant Action in 2017; again, as a result of my and other migrants’ experiences. It was painful to watch how they had to make choices between saving for their immigration fees and shoes and food and heating. The question was how to articulate these living stories.

JB:

So in order to try and find out about the political economy of charging regimes we contacted the government with information requests for months on end to get some sense of the value of these charging regimes. We looked backwards as well over a ten-year period in these Freedom of Information requests. The income received in 2009−2010 was £283,097,000. In 2012 it was £428 million. In 2014 it was £585 million. It ended up as £769 million. It is important to note that in the financial year 2014−2015 there was a fee recovery target put in place by the Treasury of 148 per cent and the year ended overtaking the target at 149 per cent – a profit of £192 million. We began to get data on the 2017 and 2018 financial year, which was staggering. The Treasury wants to ‘limit the increases on the most economically beneficial roots in order to attract and add significant value to the economy’. What it is saying is it wants to charge really punchy fees to the migrants it doesn't want and to give benefits to those it does want – a form of a socio-economic Darwinism in immigration. Charging regimes are an aggressive extension of a managed migration framework and particularly now, in terms of a promised point-based system, we wanted to look at how that impacts on people in terms of the hostile environment when migrants in some cases cannot afford to pay those fees.

LF:

Can you talk a little more about psychological and other health impacts of the charging regimes, particularly in the NHS where I know you've also explored the links between control and care, of charging regimes and immigration enforcement.

JB:

Charging regimes are part of enforcement but it's not just about profitability, it is also about punishment. For it provides a mechanism for employers to effectively shop their workers, at risk of removal, and tap into funds. In 2016, for the first time, as far as I'm aware, wages could be confiscated to pay for fines, which is a kind of wage theft. From our data, I think there's £1.7 million raised, which is nothing compared to the broader £2 billion. This punishing is about taking meagre amounts of money from people who cannot afford it. The money itself isn't an issue – the money is more a mechanism to punish and control.

To the question of impact. People with serious health conditions are not getting the care they need. Staff who value their relationships with people are being forced into being part of immigration control which stops them doing what they want to do in terms of helping people. People are being charged for end-of-life care and go on to die because of not been able to pay the charges. Parents say they have to choose between which child can get to go on school trips. All this squeezing down of rights and choice, it is not conspiratorial when we say, ‘that's by design’.

FC:

We saw some really unconventional health provision on the fringes: people using a colleague or friend to pull out their teeth because they cannot afford to go to the dentist; pregnant women using very informal ways to access antenatal care. Another point I want to make is that on the back of the charging regimes we are funding institutions and paying the wages of civil servants and the costs of managing these new bureaucratic regimes. This ‘waste’ does not feed into the narrative of migration, we just hear about scroungers.

LF:

Drawing on a piece that you two wrote for our journal Race & Class on ‘captive labour’, ⁶ can you explain the kind of coercion or psychological pressure in Immigration Removal Centres which means people agree to work for around £1 an hour?

FC:

When people are in detention, the first thing that happens is that they are criminalised. That sense of criminalisation and of being dispossessed and without rights already sets off within them a sense of powerlessness. In detention centres – places of poverty and lack of rights – you are already forced into a position of seeing yourself as subhuman, undeserving. Then, within such an environment, almost anything looks better than nothing.

We use the term ‘captive labour’ to try to convey that context. People will go for £1 an hour jobs because they have to survive. It's because they have to meet basic needs. Could be that they have to have a phone card to talk to their loved ones. It could be that they need to have enough money to pay for legal advice. Being able to meet those basic needs and being able to access basic services becomes very difficult and so there is no other option than working for £1. In detention, you are penalised and have to earn your rights. Working for a pound is a privilege and detention officers use that term quite knowingly so if you ‘behave well’, if you are a ‘good boy’ you will be able to have a job to add a pound an hour.

LF:

What about the racialised aspects of working in such detention centres and how does that fit into the bigger picture of social control within the institution?

FC:

I think the racialisation has a range of strands. Within detention centres your access to work and the type of work that you do and your ability to negotiate pay is largely dependent on race. People who are white are more likely to have a job, more likely to have a better sort of job and more likely to negotiate the pay that they would have, more likely to occupy leadership roles within that facility. Those who are white would work in the libraries, in the kitchen and in the ICT suites. I asked someone how he felt about this and he said it's just the reality of the wider system. He said I experienced this before I was in the detention centre. He said you should know this. And then it hit me that this is a continuum; beyond the detention centre in the wider world, any job that you have largely depends on your immigration status and how you live. That is the devil that we are dealing with.

* * *

Audience discussion

Don Flynn (Steering Group, PPT, London Hearing):

As well as unions there are other forms of resistance being generated within public service organisations. I have heard accounts of how nurses do their best to shield patients from international charging officers, including avoiding invoices for people by getting them out of the back door and into a taxi . . . I wonder if we ought not to be exploring how spontaneous resistance that arises can be formed into a practical and sustainable movement with people given advice and support when they find themselves up against authority.

Felicity Laurence, chair Hastings Community of Sanctuary:

I’m really interested in that idea of trying to disobey. We lived in Germany in the 1990s, when memory was bubbling up uncomfortably, for a whole decade . . . and what became clear was that the basis of the Nazi regime was people complying. I was a university lecturer ten years ago when I was suddenly told to tell the foreign students to go off for a census. I didn't. Things are so ingrained now that you hardly even need the laws to comply. Maybe it needs to be people at the top just saying we're not going to do this anymore. In Germany the judiciary and the medical system and education system all went along with it. I'm just wondering whether at this point it has to be, not the people at the bottom but actually some concerted ‘in your face’ action saying we're not doing it, we're not touching it. What would happen?

WF:

The management structure would be removed. All those people would be replaced by those who would be compliant. In the ’80s, critics were writing policy papers about internal controls and central government was thinking, right you sods, we’ll close that loophole and that loophole and that loophole . . . One of the most insidious things is that so much is now done without the need for primary legislation; it's done through regulation. And that's not just in terms of immigration control. We've been seeing it in the NHS where, without any impact on the 2012 primary legislation, organisations are being forced to merge, central government is saying we’re not wasting any time waiting to reorganise the NHS, we are going to do it without any legislation. And you will comply.

FC:

I will just go back to a difficult question − where is the hope? Where do we access that hope as the hostile environment become sharper? Suddenly things that used to be slightly awkward are increasingly normalised. Now we have this outsourcing of state machinery that was supposed to be delivering the services to the communities, now involving them. The private sector has got involved in detention centres. The community that used to be together no longer feels safe and is separated. So where do we find those oases of hope that we can bring them together and change the system? For me that's where the challenge is, also where the hope is, and where the struggle is. In the last couple of years those spaces have really, really shrunk or have actually disappeared.

LF:

One small space of hope is Waling Waling where domestic workers can come together to claim rights.

Margaret Healy (Steering Group, PPT, London Hearing):

I think the Doctors of the World is a great achievement and also the teachers who fought against collecting data on children’s nationality and country of birth in the school census. There are campaigns that are achieving small successes – well, big successes actually.

CM:

I work in a university where Prevent as well as other ‘ordering’ practices have become embedded, so we need to look at the impact of Prevent, too. And I’m aware that many of the students, over 50 per cent of whom are BAME students, particularly Muslim students, are talking about not accessing the mental health and wellbeing services at university because they think the staff have all been Prevent trained. The students are rightly worried about what they might bring on, as distress is going to get read as symptoms of radicalisation. This is not to blame the staff, some have to do mandatory training, but it is what universities now represent.

But talking more generally there are acts of resistance and non-compliance. I think what counts as resistance is really important and making those historical connections is in itself a really important part of that resistance. What is also key is the intersectional connections between the workers, the staff who have to be compliant and the people at whom these policies are targeted, those at the hard end of hostile environment policies.

WF:

I remember Siva speaking about ‘building communities of resistance’, as a way forward and I don't think the task has really changed very much. One of the things that I know we're trying to engage with within the NHS is we're talking about ‘communities of caring’ because the old traditional models of the NHS are breaking down. The need is for us to begin to look to build healthy communities as a new role for the NHS. The prescription is very simple: liberté, égalité, fraternité. Those are the key elements that research says the NHS has to engage in.

The NHS has its roots in the South Wales valleys where Nye Bevan helped organise health care for miners and steel workers and they understood liberté, égalité, fraternité and the need for health care to be about the whole community. The reason we have lots of choirs, and lots of rugby clubs, is that choirs were one of the ways the health services were organised by the miners to treat black lung disease. We had lots of rugby clubs because that is how you got people out into the fresh air to deal with vitamin D deficiency, for those underground for a lot of the day. We can build such communities of resistance now that we will take into the NHS because actually the NHS can't survive without them.

DF:

Following Fidelis’ point about hope . . . I think we're making a big mistake if we see government departments and public services as super-efficient organisations with total control. Wayne was suggesting that we know that because they've got a regulation for everything. In actual fact, the more regulations there are, the more likely that it is to be a sign of inefficiency. Home Office regulations now make up 1,100 pages of rules which has not produced a smoothly operating immigration control system. It is a system wracked by tension and conflict that periodically throw up a crisis that causes politicians to have their careers wrecked. There is no department more prone to that than the Home Office and we know from the revelations about the ‘hostile environment’, the ‘Windrush generation’ ⁷ and so on. The problem on our side is that when crises have exploded, we have not been in a position to push for political advantage with a generalised critique about the way in which immigration is run and managed. That's a weakness of the anti-racist movement and the Left in general and if we want to address these issues, we ought to be anticipating that, every few years or so, another major immigration crisis is going to arise. We need to have a structure and organisation to take our critique beyond an episodic crisis into something that's more sustained.

FC:

It’s hope, as Don says, that we need to cling onto. I would like to see more activities and places like this [the IRR] in a country where there is an increasing risk of de-housing and deporting people and I think we need communities to come together. States have never handed us freedoms; freedoms have been won – voters’ rights, women's rights, civil rights, decolonisation − by people like yourselves and institutions like this that are the custodians of those freedoms. That's where the hope lies . . . we have to continue to exist as positive forces working together and find the solidarity, and we have to take that power back from the state.