Description
The United Kingdom’s informally called ‘hostile’ immigration environment proceeds against the background of a global racial capitalist political economy, in which the access to our conditions of social reproduction is unevenly distributed along axes of race, class, gender and more. These conditions of daily, collective, and generational social reproduction take concrete material shapes in the (affluent) modern state. Perhaps most foundationally, they take the shapes of our right to settlement, the right to work, the right to rent, the access to public funds, and the access to healthcare. These are insufficient, yet basic requirements for a chance to a safe and healthy life. This insight rests on radical and feminist assessments of what makes us actually secure.
Why is access to conditions of security unevenly distributed in racial capitalism? How does this rationale materialise in the situated context of the UK’s ‘hostile’ immigration environment? And, exactly whose security does the ‘hostile’ environment ‘secure’? The first part of the paper maps racial capitalism theory from a radical and feminist security lens to say why security is unevenly distributed therein. The second part looks at how this rationale reflects in the UK’s hostile environment, highlighting the results of ‘hostile’ policymaking in the areas of work, public funds, and healthcare. The paper’s third part, then, discerns whose security the resulting insecurities on the ground ‘secure’. Concretely, I am discerning how the ‘hostile’ environment feeds crisis governance, cheapened labour, and cheapened lives back into a racial capitalist political economy.
Overall, this paper treats the UK’s ‘hostile’ environment as a question of security. Highlighting the ways in which radical and feminist visions of security can provide compelling insights into the why, how, and who, I intend to detangle the security logics of a situated policy web whose ‘hostility’ otherwise appears as complex, overwhelming, and mystifying.
