A 'hostile environment' for irregular migrants? Experiences of exclusion, advocacy and resistance

The UK government promises a 'hostile environment' for irregular migrants. Given the exceptional pressure to deliver this environment, it is vital that the implementation, effectiveness, and impact of immigration policy on migrants and other actors involved, is closely scrutinised. Accordingly, this project will focus on a range of legislation and policy designed to control and manage irregular migration, interrogating the transformation of 'soft' social policy approaches underpinning immigration policy into 'hard' security-driven approaches. Specifically, this project seeks to study empirically the role of a variety of actors in both shaping and resisting the implementation of these forms of control, by exploring the contested relations between policy frameworks, local community agencies that are tasked with enforcing them, and those caught up within these 'hostile environments' in the South East of England. Moving beyond prisons and detention centres, this project will explore the lived impacts of immigration policy in local community settings, in particular the Immigration Act 2016. In developing this project, the contribution of activist and collaborative research methods to the analysis of immigration policy impacts will also be evaluated.