One of LAEL’s postgraduate researchers – Maka Julios-Costa – is the co-author of a report produced for the Runnymede Trust and featured in the Guardian which shows that anti-immigration rhetoric has been on the rise in both British media and UK parliamentary debates since 2012, when Theresa May announced the ‘hostile environment’ policy.

In the first of two reports, A Hostile Environment: Language, Race, Politics and the Media, the researchers analysed media and parliamentary debates around migration in the period 2010-2014. Applying principles of critical discourse analysis and methods of corpus linguistics they found terms like ‘illegal’, ‘flood’ ‘influx’ to be the most frequently associated with (im)migrants and (im)migration and to have more than doubled in use since Theresa’s May’s announcement. These findings, the report argues, are part of a longstanding and fundamentally racist narrative that frames migrants as criminals in order to justify their harsh and discriminatory treatment and which extends well before the ‘hostile environment’ was formally acknowledged. In this way, the report concludes, “The British media and politicians have played a key role in creating a culture in which racial discrimination is permissible”. A follow up report, which covers the period 2019-2024, is due to be published this Spring. The ultimate aim of the project is to articulate the links between immigration policy, political and media discourses and racism in the UK’s recent past providing a solid evidence base for racial justice and migrant rights organisations to explore the way these policies contribute to racial inequality.

An executive summary of the initial report can be found here.