Radical hope beyond hospitality and tolerance: embracing pro-migrant futures out of the UK's hostile environment

This research examines the growth of privatised immigration detention in
the UK by drawing conceptual links between this local carceral geography
and the wider global prison industrial complex. I contribute to an urgent
academic and activist call to counter violent global border regimes. I bring
attention to the pressing need for a move beyond a politics of hospitality
and tolerance through advocating for the recognition and adoption of
radical hope in forming pro-migrant futures. This research explores how a
politics centred around conditional hospitality and tolerance inadvertently
fosters an intolerant, hostile environment for marginalised communities.
Through a methodology of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with people
who have been detained under alleged immigration offences in the UK, this
research explores their experiences of this hostility. I uniquely contrast
these experiences with accounts of people who have worked within
immigration detention in the UK, seeking to understand the inflection point
between hospitality and hostility, tolerance and intolerance, through an
understanding of the conditions under which hostility is expressed in a forprofit
carceral context. I ask the question: are these acts of hostility driven
by a homogenous societal anti-migrant sentiment (as a reading of Foucault
(2020: 85) would suggest), or are they instead driven by the structural
unavailability of adequate resources and funding within privatised
immigration detention? Finally, conducting focus groups with pro-migrant,
anti-detention community activists, I explore the usefulness of radical hope
(Kallio et al., (2021) in generating compassionate and embracing promigrant
futures beyond hospitality and tolerance.