- Deserving and undeserving migrants
Hostility has the potential to reproduce itself across all groups - but so too does compassion
This article considers a theme that emerged from our recent research project: that local people (including ethnic minority British citizens and recent immigrants) tend to distinguish between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’, or ‘good’ and ‘bad’ migrants.1 Rather than assuming that such distinctions reflect the prevalence and internalisation of anti-immigrant messages, we have sought to understand why people who are themselves devalued through dominant and racist anti-immigrant discourses are nonetheless utilising the same language to talk about excluded social groups such as immigrants, benefits claimants, and the unemployed, destitute or homeless.2 We argue that the tendency of recent migrants as well as people from established ethnic minorities to make this distinction between deserving and undeserving, or good and bad, migrants and citizens is a central feature of their own bid for recognition and legitimacy. But we have also found that people are producing values that counter the predominance of moralistic narratives of economic productivity and aspiration. Our project data provides numerous examples of local people resisting a dominant discourse that seeks to intensify hostility towards migrants. They have been doing this by asserting other kinds of values, such as compassion, empathy, and solidarity.
Devaluing migration
David Cameron’s labelling of asylum seekers entering the UK from Calais as [End Page 49] a ‘swarm’ is just one recent example of popular (and populist) associations of migration with an imminent attack and a sense of impending catastrophe. But Cameron’s response to the crisis at Calais (and now across Europe) should be seen against the background of a rising anxiety about immigration that has been stoked by Home Office publicity campaigns intended to project ‘tough’ positions on so called ‘illegal immigration’. In Home Secretary Theresa May’s own words, the Conservative Party’s intention has been to create a ‘hostile environment’.3 One of the most notorious examples of this approach was the taxpayer-funded ‘Go Home’ advertising van that travelled around five areas in London carrying a billboard with the slogan ‘In the UK illegally? Go Home or Face Arrest’, next to a picture of handcuffs. Soon afterwards the Home Office’s Twitter account published images of people from ethnic minority backgrounds being arrested by immigration enforcement officers. Around the same time, a number of Twitter hashtags drew attention to stop and check operations being conducted jointly by transport police and immigration officers at transport hubs around London. In the end the Go Home van pilot was driven off the streets by public complaints and a legal challenge, but the same message continued to be disseminated through posters inside immigration reporting centres in Glasgow and Hounslow. One such poster depicted a destitute person lying on the street and carried the words ‘Is life here hard? Going home is simple’. The Home Office claims to focus solely on ‘illegal immigration’, but our research found evidence that May’s attempt to produce a ‘hostile environment’ has resulted in racialised practices that have affected a whole range of people beyond the ‘illegal immigrants’ that it claims to target, including ethnic minority British nationals, those holding visas and those with pending applications.4
There has been a great deal of academic analysis of the tightening of immigration controls and the vilification of migrants in the context of the post-financial-crisis austerity agenda and populist discourses of belonging. But our aim here is to better understand the connections and parallels between public (often state-led) discourses that devalue migrants - and distinguish between types of migrants - and the scapegoating of other social groups, such as benefits claimants, homeless people, single mums, sex workers, and people with alcohol and drug dependency.5 Bridget Anderson argues that, as ‘communities of value’, modern states construct themselves as populated by ‘good citizens’ who are envisaged as ‘law-abiding and hard-working members of stable and respectable families’ (Us vs. Them, p3). These communities of value are then positioned as being in need of external protection from Non-Citizens [End Page 50] (foreigners and migrants) and internal protection from Failed Citizens (‘benefit scroungers...