Coercion and compliance: the politics of the ‘hostile environment’

Abstract

A roundtable discussion on the UK’s ‘hostile environment’ policy (on making life so difficult and unpleasant for certain groups, they would ‘choose’ to leave) from new angles: the weaponisation of deterrence; how the psy-complex is helping to obscure the consideration of material conditions shaping human desperation; the exploitation of and life and death conditions for workers without rights; the difficult questions for BAME and other professionals in ‘caring’ jobs, now tasked with controlling and punishing the rightless; the ways in which immigration control has now become monetarised with money-making targets; organising resistance both from inside and outside to the new human brutalising regimens of state racism and hostility.