Hospital and housing administrators, 2013. Wikicommons. Some rights reserved.Theresa May’s ‘hostile environment’ policy is under scrutiny. The government is doing all it can to contain the Windrush scandal from spilling over into a broader criticism of the last decade of UK immigration policies (but, in fairness, some elements date back to the Labour government). Various affected groups and advocates, on the contrary, are vociferously arguing that far from an exception, a distortion or a bureaucratic error – all explanations offered by government’s supporters – the treatment of the Windrush generation is instead the tip of the iceberg, and the iceberg is the policy-driven ‘hostile environment’ built under Theresa May’s tenure of the Home Office. Admitting defeat on her flagship policy, the one that arguably made her a darling of the likes of The Sun and Daily Mail, would land a major, perhaps even fatal, blow to her premiership.
One tenet of the ‘hostile environment’ is that it operates diffusely, co-opting public service providers, landlords, employers and even private residents in the job of immigration enforcement. Border checks are no longer one-off encounters between border guards and immigrants confined to the geographical borders of states, but are routinely repeated in a myriad of micro-encounters. They have penetrated the everyday, mundane interactions in people’s daily lives and imposed new meaning on them. Pregnant women avoiding interactions with their GPs or cutting short their stay in hospital after delivery for fear of being reported to the Home Office for their immigration status is but one example.
The proliferation of internal borders came in stages, one little step at the time, and often changes were initially challenged but then they came back, slightly repackaged, and they slipped in unchecked. The British Medical Association, for example, mounted a challenge to initial attempts to impose visa checks on patients in hospitals. Doctors are not border guards it was said. But then visa checking came back more subtly: it was not doctors who would be in charge of it, but less paid and less vocal administration staff. New compliance officers appeared all over public services. ‘Compliance’ is a key word, apparently depoliticised and yet far more bureaucratically effective in filtering access to services to various groups of the population. Visa checking came back more subtly: it was not doctors who would be in charge of it, but less paid and less vocal administration staff.
