Description
In the late 1970s and 1980s groups across Britain were organizing against the imposition of compulsory passport and visa checks in schools, unemployment offices and hospitals, calling out the charging of certain migrants for NHS care and pointing to the disproportionate effects of these policies on Black and South Asian women. Drawing lines of relation between the treatment of Commonwealth and other Third World migrants in Britain and those living under colonial and apartheid rule elsewhere, activist groups such as ‘No Pass Laws Here!’ argued that British state immigration control and surveillance practices should be understood in relation to the concurrent Pass Laws of apartheid South Africa. Through an analysis of archival material and drawing on literature on imperialism, and racial and carceral capitalism (Bhattacharyya 2018, Danewid 2019, Robinson 1983, Shilliam 2018, Wang 2018), I suggest that the current hostile environment policies should be situated within this British history, and in relation to hostile surveillance regimes in other (post)colonies. Calling into question the ‘newness’ of the hostile environment and any associated nostalgic desire to return to a utopian welfare state of our past, this paper argues that rather than solely a national welfare problem, we are confronted with the grammar of racial capitalism that binds both our subjugation and resistance to it.
