The puzzling persistence of the hostile environment

On 29 April 2018 Amber Rudd, the Conservative Home Secretary, was forced to resign. The root cause of her departure is unique in twenty-first century British immigration politics: overseeing overzealous immigration enforcement also known as the ‘Windrush scandal’.

The Windrush scandal's victims had largely been targeted by policies which Theresa May had introduced during her earlier tenure as Home Secretary, to create ‘a really hostile environment for illegal migration’, as she had explained in a 2012 interview. The ‘hostile environment’ is the name that has stuck to the sorts of measures contained in the immigration acts of 2014 and 2016 to internalise immigration controls, requiring checks of immigration status when renting housing, opening bank accounts, accessing healthcare, or starting a new job, among other things.

But why have hostile environment policies proven so durable despite their indiscernible effect on meeting immigration control targets and their generation of a significant scandal? Indeed, Brexit further amplifies the risks of hostile environment policies, creating the hazard of similar future scandals involving, for instance, EU immigrants whose status has been thrown into flux. Nonetheless, the short-term political risks of abandoning this long-developing approach in such a controversial area are likely to dominate.

Hostile environments: deeply rooted in the UK, widespread beyond it

The term ‘hostile environment’ has become commonplace as a byword for all Conservative anti-immigrant policy, but it more specifically refers to the sorts of policies May described in her 2012 interview, which ‘deputise immigration control’ by involving immigration enforcement actors in social systems in which they had not traditionally played a role. These include landlords, banks and social service providers.

In reality, this policy trend is not particular to the UK – it has gone by the name ‘attrition through enforcement’ in the United States, for example – and UK governments have been interested in these types of policies for more than thirty years.

The roots of today's hostile environment lie in the responses that many states made to new migration movements—especially increased asylum seeking—from the Global South to Global North following the end of the Cold War. One of the first common policy responses was to deputising airlines to check travellers’ status and documents. By the early 1990s, countries including the UK, France and Germany were increasingly involving the welfare state in immigration control.

However, the conceptual shift toward deputising immigration control was more challenging in the UK than in France and Germany, which had long land borders and existing systems of ID cards and internal checks. On top of this, UK government departments were not necessarily keen to enforce immigration laws which could complicate their core functions.

To overcome these obstacles, in 1993, then-Home Secretary Michael Howard instigated a study of interagency cooperation on immigration enforcement, often called a ‘scrutiny’. While scarcely discussed either in Parliament or the academic literature, this was a significant development.

Concepts of deterrence increasingly featured in immigration control. The Asylum and Immigration Act 1996 placed new restrictions on an array of welfare state resources, as well as introducing employer sanctions for those who employed unauthorised workers. As another policy maker from the late 1990s mused in an interview, ‘if you haven't got anywhere to live, you can't earn any money, you're not getting any benefits, surely that must be a dis-attraction?’ The New Labour government maintained similar deterrent logics. Thus the roots of the UK's hostile environment policies run much deeper than the post-2010 period of Conservative government.

Party politics or state infrastructures?

Why has the UK state, under different governments, been so consistently interested in these kinds of policies for more than thirty years? It is because they provide a way to address three issues the British state encounters in establishing politically legitimate immigration control.

First, in a situation where the Home Office ‘has always struggled with the issue of enforcement’ (as a former policymaker describes) for logistical, political and legal reasons, the hostile environment allows the state to take apparent action against irregular migration which does not rely on visibly following through with punishment or deportation. Such policies have crucial symbolic aspects, since their expression of values or intent is more significant than the murky issue of whether they actually make a difference to migration dynamics.

Second, because hostile environment policies keep the question of efficacy in the shadows, they avoid revealing the scale of previous control lapses and the size of the irregular migration ‘problem’. States are typically content to accommodate obscurity in this area, since mapping irregular populations would heighten political expectations for the state to act. Hostile environment policies are deft at addressing this problem. Implementing them requires only the bordering of resources like healthcare, welfare and jobs and does not necessitate a clear view of irregular immigrants or migration dynamics overall.

Third, hostile environment approaches avoid the complexity of developing capacity for population monitoring, which would likely mean a form of national identification, said to be inconsistent with British civic culture.

Conclusion: post-Brexit entrenchment and post-Brexit risks

Policy developments like the transition to fully digital immigration statuses at the end of 2024 raise the risk of further wrongful enforcement and scandals. But longer-term problems presented by the hostile environment are primed to be ignored by governments that seek short- or medium-term legitimacy. While the Windrush scandal opened up substantial criticism of hostile environment policies, it has been effectively bracketed as the hostile environment affecting the wrong people, with little impact on the legitimacy of the approach itself.

Redressing the problems posed by the basic infrastructure of immigration control is buried beneath the immigration controversies of the day—the can kicked down the road. Thus, the puzzling persistence of the hostile environment is perhaps not so puzzling after all. The fundamental design of the hostile environment is likely to endure, despite changes in government, and despite scandal.

This research interviews quoted in this paper were part of research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, under project reference ES/N011171/1. The archival material quoted in this paper was accessed with funding from the University of Lincoln.