Description
The plethora of studies on the ‘Hostile Environment’ have been characterised by an emphasis on the ‘newness’ of this policy, which was introduced in 2012 by the then Home Secretary of the United Kingdom Theresa May to ‘create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants’ (Hill, 2017), by excluding those classified as ‘unlawfully resident’ from social, political, and economic life. The exclusionary and insecuritising effects of the policy are felt by racially minoritised communities across Britain, including those who have been illegalised, and those wrongfully pursued as ‘illegally resident’ such as the Windrush Generation. But is ‘border internalisation’ in the UK ‘new’? And do claims of ‘newness’ inadvertently invisibilise the historic legal and ontological harm done to racially minoritised people throughout the 20th Century?
The article brings contemporary critical migration scholarship in conversation with key anti-racist and anti-colonial texts from the mid/late 20th Century, to examine the extent to which the ‘newness’ of Britain’s internalised immigration regime is overstated by contemporary scholars. In particular, the article explores the ways in which border internalisation was used by the state to control and harass Black and Asian communities in the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s. I draw upon archival and legal data, collected at the Black Cultural Archives (Brixton) and online databases such as Hansard, between January-July 2024.
Based on this analysis, I encourage scholars to exercise caution when conceptualising border internalisation as a new phenomenon. I argue
that, although the Hostile Environment does represent an unprecedented expansion of Britain’s internalised bordering regime, this expansion should be understood as a continuation of long history of border internalisation, and within the longue durée of colonial state violence (Axster et al, 2021), designed to police and exclude racially minoritised peoples.
