How the UK’s hostile environment for migrants is fostering systematic discrimination and social division

Posted on by Francesca Jackson

intergration

Francesca Jackson graduated in July 2022 with a first-class honours degree in Law and is planning on studying an LLM in Law at Lancaster University. Francesca has blogged about the UK’s ‘hostile environment’ for migrants coming to the UK. Her dissertation was supervised by Georgina Firth.

We have all seen the images of desperate migrants in small dinghies making the perilous journey across the English Channel in search of a better life in the UK. However, reaching our shores is not the end of the journey for these migrants; rather, it is just the beginning. Once here, they, alongside countless other migrants, will relentlessly be asked to provide proof of their right to be in the UK. Failure to do so will result in them being denied the basics of life, such as jobs, housing, and healthcare. This is all part of the UK Government’s desire ‘to create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment for migrants.’ This Hostile Environment policy, introduced by then-Home Secretary Theresa May in 2012, has one very clear aim: to make daily life in the UK so difficult for migrants that they choose to leave the country voluntarily.


My dissertation critically discussed the claims that the hostile environment has fostered discrimination and social division in the UK. To analyse these claims, I took three specific hostile environment policies and critically discussed their impact on society. These were: the right to work policy, the right to rent policy, and the immigration checks which NHS trusts are required to carry out.


The first of these, the right to work policy, was introduced by the Immigration Act 2014. The Act criminalises undocumented migrants who are found not to have the ‘right to work’ in the UK and threatens them with a 6-month prison sentence, an unlimited fine and deportation without appeal. The Immigration Act 2016 also criminalises employers who hire undocumented migrant workers and threatens them with a £20,000 fine and the prospect of 5 years’ imprisonment. These harsh punishments have incentivised employers to routinely conduct right to work checks on workers. However, the checks are long and complicated, meaning that many employers take shortcuts by refusing to hire anyone, or dismissing an existing worker, who is perceived to be an undocumented migrant.


As migrants arriving in the UK since the late 1980s have tended to be from the Global South, skin colour and ethnicity have been particularly popular proxies used by employers. For example, my research found that the number of black employees being dismissed by their employers has risen since the introduction of right to work checks almost a decade ago. My dissertation also found that the hostile environment is fostering social division by pushing undocumented migrants into the shadow economy. Right to work checks grant a disproportionate amount of power to unscrupulous employers, who are able to weaponize a migrant worker’s undocumented status by threatening those who challenge poor working conditions with the prospect of being reported to the Police.


The second policy that my dissertation analysed was the right to rent. The Immigration Act 2016 threatens any landlord found to be letting a property to an undocumented migrant either knowingly, or with reasonable cause to believe that the person is disqualified, with fines of up to £3,000. This broadly-drawn offence, combined with severe fines and a complicated ‘right to rent’ checking procedure means that, like employers, many landlords use crude proxies like skin colour, names and accents when deciding who, and who not, to rent to.


For example, research has shown that a higher proportion of white prospective tenants than Black and Minority Ethnicity (BME) prospective tenants received responses to their initial rental inquiries (60%-40%), despite those from the BME community being more likely than their white counterparts to be in the rental market in the first place. 27% of landlords were also reluctant to engage with any prospective tenants who had foreign-sounding names and accents. Indeed, despite the fact that the hostile environment is purportedly only aimed at undocumented migrants, the Court of Appeal has held that the policy discriminates against anyone in the UK who does not look or sound ‘ethnically British.’ The UN Special Rapporteur has similarly found that the policy creates ‘a hostile environment for all racial and ethnic communities and individuals in the UK’ and violates the UK’s international human rights obligations on racial equality.


The final policy which my dissertation examined was the duty placed on NHS healthcare providers to carry out immigration checks. Under the Immigration Act 2014, undocumented migrants are required to pay the estimated full cost of non-urgent secondary healthcare upfront and are denied treatment if they cannot pay. All NHS healthcare providers must also share migrant patients’ data with the Department of Health and Social Care, which is then passed onto the Home Office to help them with their immigration enforcement functions. In 2016, 6,000 people suspected of lacking documentation were contacted by the Home Office following NHS immigration checks.


A combination of charging plus data-sharing is deterring some of the most vulnerable migrants from accessing life-saving healthcare. For example, my dissertation found that pregnant migrant women routinely avoid seeking NHS antenatal care, whilst some BME migrants have even died due to being denied vital cancer treatment as a result of lacking documentation. The situation was exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. BME migrants were less likely to access NHS treatment for fear of immigration enforcement, despite being amongst the most vulnerable in society to the virus. Fears of being reported to the Home Office also deterred 43% of the estimated 1.2 million undocumented migrants living in the UK from coming forward for their Covid-19 vaccines. A reduced vaccination rate in migrant communities poses a risk to the wider society, showing that the hostile environment extends far beyond its intended target of undocumented migrants to ultimately touch us all.


The final chapter of my dissertation analysed my findings and critically discussed the extent to which the hostile environment has fostered discrimination and social division. I argued that discrimination and social division is systematic under the hostile environment. Skin colour, names and accents are systematically used to identify undocumented migrants, causing anyone who lacks ethnically British attributes to be denied the basics of life. The Windrush Scandal - which saw British citizens who came to the UK from the Caribbean in the 1950s and 60s being systematically denied their fundamental rights - was caused by the hostile environment policy. Members of the Windrush generation never received documentary proof of their lawful status, and the Home Office destroyed their landing cards in 2010. This led to wide-scale injustices, such as people being denied employment, being evicted from their homes and having to pay healthcare bills of £5,000 or face being denied treatment.


I also found that the hostile environment has fostered systematic social division. Undocumented migrants are deliberately denied jobs, housing and healthcare in order to alienate them from mainstream society and make life as hard as possible for them in the UK. As anyone who looks or sounds ‘different’ is at risk of exclusion, I concluded that the hostile environment ultimately threatens the very fabric of multi-ethnic British society.


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