Madalena Leao tells of how one small personal experience demonstrates the very real consequences of a hostile environment for those who look and sound like migrants. She also reflects on the miasma of suspicion and distrust it spreads throughout our society.
This week Amber Rudd explained the disgraceful treatment of children of the Windrush with the words ‘the Home Office has become too concerned with policy and strategy and sometimes loses sight of the individual’. This she claimed was a surprise and a shock to her. But it should not have been. The experience of the Windrush generation of Caribbean migrants is a direct consequence of Theresa May’s decision to ‘create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal immigration’.
The hostile environment means that immigrants no longer only face border controls entering the country – they face them in their everyday life. They are required to prove not only their identity but also their right to remain when they apply for a bank account, sign a tenancy agreement, apply for a job, and even access NHS services.
Such a system which requires documentation at every turn is exactly the sort of system that neglects the individual. Constantly proving that you have the right to remain in this country is exhausting, expensive and sometimes impossible. It is also profoundly alienating. I know this first hand.
The botanical gardens in Curitiba
where I was born.
I have been a British citizen my whole life but was born in Brazil and moved here at the age of 18 months. When I applied for university I was assessed by one of the universities as a foreign (non-EU) student despite the fact that all my schooling had been in the UK. This had severe implications for me as the fees a foreign student pays are much higher than those of a UK student. So I duly appealed and was told I had to prove that I had been resident in the UK for the past 3 years.
Evidence of my schooling was not going to be enough. This was difficult. As an 18 year old I didn’t have a bank account. I didn’t pay bills. I barely had any documentation that proved where I lived. I certainly didn’t have documentation about when I’d first come to the UK. In the end my mother found a letter from our GP squirrelled away in a drawer. I had a letter from student finance that I had received earlier that year. That provided me with enough documentation for my address. I managed to prove I was a UK student. The story ended happily for me. But it could so easily have been different.
It was tempting to view the situation as merely ridiculous. But it was also highly stressful. At the back of my mind was the constant question: what if? And just like that a single piece of information on a form – my place of birth – meant that I was ‘othered’, that I was foreign. It meant that, contrary to everything I thought, I didn’t really belong here.
David Lammy told Amber Rudd that ‘If you lay down with dogs you get fleas’. The decision to create a hostile environment for illegal immigrants has led to a hostile environment for so many more people. This is an environment that has very real human costs. We now live in a country where people with the right to remain have faced the threat of deportation because they do not have the ‘right papers’. By turning large parts of the population (landlords, bank clerks, nurses) into amateur immigration officers it is inevitable that these rules are not applied fairly. People who look and sound like migrants are targeted and profiled.
The constant checking of people’s papers, and the suspicion it encourages, are part of a wider trend towards overt hostility to migrants. This manifests itself in changes which mean that taxpaying, Home Office documented migrants must pay an additional NHS surcharge to have access to the health services their taxes fund. It means we are now facing a situation where families are separated because the British citizen’s spouse does not earn enough. This means children growing up with Mums and Dads available only over the phone.
The government has deliberately chosen to ‘other’ migrants. It is hardly surprising then that the consequence of a hostile environment for migrants is distress, expense, profiling, suspicion and precariousness. It becomes not just a hostile environment for those who are migrants, but also for those who look like or sound like migrants. The hostile environment is a racist environment.
God calls us to love one another, to welcome the foreigner. Jesus’ encounter with the woman from Samaria teaches us the importance of bridging national divides. The hostile environment does precisely the opposite. It makes many of us aliens in the country we see as our home.
This is why in the coming weeks JPIT will be launching a campaign on the hostile environment. If you have experience, big or small, of the very real consequences of the hostile environment please get in touch and let us know about it. We want to make sure that as Churches we understand the implications that the hostile environment has for all of us.
Let us know how the hostile environment is affecting you or those in your community: enquiries@jpit.uk.
