Against the Hostile Environment

*

A quick guide for action by Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants 

What is the hostile environment? 

"The aim is to create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants". 

 – Home Secretary Theresa May, 2012

The UK Home Office Hostile Environment policy is a series of measures designed to make the UK a hostile environment for so-called “illegal immigrants”. It was designed by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition government in 2012, and implemented primarily by the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts. The Hostile Environment aims to make the UK unlivable for undocumented migrants (people who can’t prove their right to live in the UK), and ultimately force them to leave. 

The Hostile Environment policy creates a mandate for racial discrimination in the UK. Most famously, this has affected the Windrush Generation: subjects of the British Empire who migrated to mainland Britain between 1948 and 1973 from colonised and formerly colonised countries in the Caribbean. Despite having a legal right to remain in the UK, from 2014 many of these Black elders were deemed 'illegal immigrants' / 'undocumented migrants'. Many people lost their access to housing, healthcare, bank accounts and driving licences. Many were placed in immigration detention, prevented from travelling abroad and threatened with forcible removal, while others were deported to countries they hadn’t set foot in since they were children.  

How is the hostile environment enforced? 

The Hostile Environment policy embeds hostility in public services and within communities. This turns regular citizens and public workers into immigration officers, making them complicit in the enforcement of the hostile environment. The Government requires employers, landlords, private sector workers, NHS staff and other public servants to check a person’s immigration status before they can offer them a job, housing, healthcare and other support. Landlords and employers can face fines and even criminal sanctions if they fail to do so. 

The Hostile Environment therefore results in widespread racial profiling and discrimination, with public servants and private individuals prioritising people who 'look British'. People with insecure migration status, including people seeking asylum in the UK, are often scared to access healthcare and other essential support, for fear of deportation.

In this way, immigration controls are now embedded in everyday interactions between public sector workers and the people they are supposed to serve. New offences mean undocumented migrants find themselves criminalised for doing what they must to survive—in some cases simply for working or even driving.

What’s happening now?

It has been over ten years since the UK Government conceived the Hostile Environment policy, and things are only getting more extreme. 

In 2022, the Conservative government passed the Nationality and Borders Act. It continued in the same vein as the Hostile Environment, creating further unsafe situations for people seeking refuge and safety, as well as for anyone who is not white and British. The Nationality and Borders Act gave the Home Office a set of new powers, including the power to strip people of their British citizenship without telling them. People of colour are eight times more likely to be vulnerable to being deprived of their nationality than those who are racialised as white. The Home Office planned to deport people seeking asylum to Rwanda to process their claims. As the government body with responsibility for immigration, security, and policing, the Home Office was given more power to surveil, detain and criminalise migrants, and anyone who is seen as helping migrants to enter the UK.

In 2023, the Conservative government under Rishi Sunak continued its cruel and repressive approach to migration, perpetuating a system that prioritises deterrence over humanity. One of the most glaring examples was the introduction of the Bibby Stockholm, a docked barge where asylum seekers were confined in degrading and unsafe conditions, all under the guise of easing pressure on land-based housing. This, alongside the continued Rwanda Scheme, which sought to deport those seeking refuge to a distant country with its own human rights concerns, signified the continued deeply hostile approach to migration. Bolstered by an overwhelming anti-migrant cabinet office, Sunak oversaw the most forceful pushback in the human rights of migrants and asylum seekers in modern British history, further marginalising people of colour within the UK's immigration system. For individual examples of senior Tory ministers’ takes on immigration see our Barbie campaign here.

So far in 2024, with the election of the Labour government under Starmer, the Rwanda scheme has been scrapped. However, demands of a reversal to hostile anti-migrant policies have not been met and the Bibby Stockholm barge continues to be in use. At the end of July, the UK erupted into race riots fuelled by racist anti-migrant sentiment. Additionally, as Israel continues its assault on Gaza committing a ‘plausible’ genocide with the support of UK and US weaponry, anti-Arab sentiments in the media continues to bolster broader anti-migrant and anti-asylum seeker narratives.

How can we resist the UK’s racist and inhumane immigration policies?

There is power in community action. Everyday people can and have resisted deportations, arrests and legal actions through joining together in solidarity with migrants. You can join a grassroots group or local mutual aid effort; you can create a local network of spare rooms for refugees; you can write to your local MP and make sure they stand against the Hostile Environment. Or you can join a local anti-immigration raids group through the Anti Raids Network, who will advise you on how you can collectively or individually intervene legally and safely and take direct action if you witness an immigration raid taking place. 

The now Labour government continues to enforce the Hostile Environment with the belief that it has the broad support of the British public, but countless daily actions and gestures of support for migrants tell us otherwise. But the fight is not just about the work of charitable organisations making up for the destruction of the Welfare State. We need to organise and demand that the Government do better, and we need to challenge the ideas that uphold their systems. We can advocate for an end to the border regime, and ask for freedom of movement as a human right; we can refuse the idea that any human is ever ‘illegal’. We can say that everyone deserves to live with dignity and safety, and that they should receive refuge if that is compromised. Together we can fight for a world where everyone is welcomed, no matter what they look like or whey they come from.

This guide was originally commissioned as part of the second edition of the Brent Biennial 2022, ‘In the House of my Love’. Edits have been included to detail the evolution of the 2015 - 2024 Conservative Government and successive 2024 - present Labour government’s attack on migrant rights.