Hostile Environments: Introduction

‘Hostile environment’ is a politician’s term. It entered the language in 2012 when, in a moment of striking directness, then British Home Secretary Theresa May described her intentions for her government’s upcoming immigration legislation. As she put it, in an interview with the Daily Telegraph, her aim was to ‘create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration’. May’s statement was in one respect fundamentally inaccurate. In referring to what she called ‘illegal migration’, she meant the movement of people from one country to another for the purpose of seeking asylum. Such movement is legal under international law, as enshrined in the 1951 Refugee Convention, to which the United Kingdom (UK) was an original signatory. What May meant, rather, by the idea of the illegal migrant was the person the UK didn’t want to come in. Where her statement proved true, however, was in the intention to construct a hostile environment; an environment in which people who were not deemed welcome or desirable would experience the reality of the State’s refusal. The environment itself, the place in which they had been compelled to seek a life, was to manifest hostility at every turn. The purpose of the upcoming legislation to which the British Home Secretary referred was to make the life of the person migrating to seek asylum practically unliveable.