It must have come as a surprise to Theresa May that one of her flagship policies could become so toxic; the “hostile environment” was only ever meant to be a vote winner. Over the past two weeks the Windrush scandal made headlines, Amber Rudd was forced to resign as Home Secretary and the policy itself has come under question. But this has been decades in the making.
On the surface, it seems this all started with an unachievable, wrongheaded target: the Coalition Government’s promise to cut net migration to the “tens of thousands.” Determined to show they would be ‘firm’ on immigrants—and sticking to the well-worn script that immigration was a ‘problem’ to be dealt with—they promised to “get the numbers down.” Or, in real terms, to make it harder for people to come into the country and more difficult for people who couldn’t show the right documents on demand to stay.
When Theresa May was home secretary she therefore set out to create a “really hostile environment for illegal immigrants” through a litany of aggressive measures in the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts. As a result, people are now stopped from accessing “non-urgent” medical care if they didn’t have the right papers. Employers, landlords and bank staff have been turned into border guards. For thousands of people, the rule became “deport first, appeal later.”
It was in the 2014 Act that the government quietly took away the protection that would stop long-term residents, like the Windrush generation, being deported. It is because of these rules that British citizens have been denied healthcare, and lost their jobs, their pensions and their dignity, unless they can provide four pieces of evidence for every year they’ve been in the country.
But while the Windrush scandal is in the headlines, the regulations have affected others too. Violent policies don’t mean people won’t come or stay; it just means they will be exposed to violence. People without the right papers have simply been forced to live without support, many of them forced into destitution.
Normalising cruelty
You don’t just arrive at the ‘hostile environment’ with one government. Theresa May, with a little help from New Labour, is its architect, but she didn’t build the base it’s constructed on. This is not just the product of the past eight years; it is the outcome of decades of a toxic anti-immigration politics that are deeply embedded in Britain.
Just look at the Windrush generation: lauded by the press in 2018 as national treasures, when they came to the UK as citizens from former colonies they were treated as anything but. They were met with politicians that wanted their labour but not their presence—and a public that complained that people of colour moving in next door would ruin whole neighbourhoods.
Fast forward sixty years, and the shape of xenophobia has changed but anti-migrant politics have remained remarkably similar. Politicians, the public and the press have continuously scapegoated migrants for our social ills—wrongly blaming them for low pay, crumbling public services and our social anxieties. “They” are still a problem to be managed. It is not the specifics of who is in the Home Office but the normalisation of these politics that allows the hostile environment.
Cameras will turn elsewhere now that the cleanup is underway. But while the spillage might be mopped up, the source of the mess remains sitting on the shelf. On his first day in office, Amber Rudd’s replacement, Sajid Javid, announced the phrase the “hostile environment” will be exchanged for the more palatable “compliant environment.” The name, he said, isn’t fitting with “our values as a country.” We can assume the policies, still in place, are.
Us versus them
People will be forced to “comply” with an environment that remains just as cruel as it was pre-rebrand. “My first priority,” Javid said in post, “is to make sure the Home Office does all it can to keep British people safe.” Implicit in such a statement is the fact it is “us” British people against “them”: the threatening non-citizens.
The policies of the hostile environment must be kept to find and deport “illegal immigrants” or “illegals,” ministers have repeated. This is part of the problem. Migrants—that is, human beings —become undocumented for all manner of reasons. Changes to this country’s complex, impenetrable immigration rules might strip them of status; they might not be able to afford visa costs to stay in a country they call home; or, yes, they might think the risk of being status-less is necessary to survive.
But the underlying message of “illegality” allows for no complexity; “illegals” becomes an impenetrable justification for callous treatment that snatches away peoples’ humanity. It turns human beings into faceless figures, and their crime, existing in the country and trying to make a life for themselves, is certain—just like our immigration “debate” has done for decades.
What has happened to the Windrush generation is appalling but it is just a glimpse into what is a deep chasm of cruel anti-immigrant politics in the UK. The cases are different but pitting Windrush against the ‘wrong’ kind of migrants does nothing to change the narrative that produced Windrush. Their ‘bad’ counterparts will probably never go through the same sanitising—albeit painful—process to ‘good’ and if they do, who knows how long they will be waiting.
