Infrastructures From Below in a Migrant-led Autonomous Housing Project in Hostile Britain

In this conversation preceded by a political contextualization, Helen Brewer and Loraine Masiya Mponela describe the very tangible effects of Britain’s Hostile Environmental policy on asylum seekers and undocumented people on the island, as well as the means undertaken to resist this structural violence.

Britain’s internal border controls are configured by a pervasive and expansive set of technologies, processes, and policy practices which restrict migrant access to the means of life. Evidenced in dangerous mandates coming out of the recent Nationality and Borders Bill 2022 and the Illegal Migration Act 2023, “warehousing” people as they await a decision on their asylum claim in hotels, repurposed military barracks, and floating detention prisons.

Bolstering these evolving carceral configurations is a philosophy of deterrence, exemplified in the Hostile Environment policy. In 2012, then-Home Secretary Theresa May declared her aim to, “create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants,” closing people off from fundamental services like the National Health Service (NHS), schools, the right to rent, and accessing emergency services, and asking doctors, police officers, teachers, and landlords with the border work of checking immigration status. By turning civilians into quasi-border guards, the policy undermines the duty of public services, and instead instills the fear of accessing help when needed. Pushing migrants further into precarity and at worst, destitution.

Migrant destitution can be attributed to delays and inadequacies in receiving essential support, and repeated forced movement between accommodation, preventing people from maintaining and establishing social connections and support networks. The dispersal policy means that people who are seeking asylum are moved on a “no choice” basis around the country to be accommodated. They can be moved every week, every few months or trapped inside one hotel for years. Unable to procure a steady GP, or the sense of community, or friendships in the local area for very long before they are moved again.

Once awarded status, state support stops after twenty-eight days, leaving little time for people to find housing, open a bank account, or find a job. Separated outside of the mainstream welfare system by the No Recourse to Public Funds policy, migrants with conditional entry are prevented from accessing local authority housing and constituent services and benefits. If a person is seeking asylum, social support is provided by the Home Office and its outsourced service providers. However, both have shown little regard for people’s welfare, instead, embedding border controls in the community fabric as organized abandonment and violence. As a result, people are often reliant on community-based networks for support whether they attain status or not.  

To counter what Dean Spade calls “forced dependency on hostile systems,” migrant justice organizations and mutual aid networks such as the Coventry Asylum Refugee Action Group have become central to building infrastructures from below. 

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HELEN: This discussion is ​​an urgent reminder on how to institute autonomous networks of care, at the same time as we struggle to dismantle the oppressive systems of racial capitalism. How is the everyday organizing you are involved in Coventry sustaining community-based responses to state-sanctioned violence?

LORAINE: We put a lot of emphasis on lived experience in our work with people who have been refused asylum and left homeless and destitute. As much as we would want people to be on the frontlines of campaigning about what we are going through, you’re not going to do that consistently when your basic needs are completely out of reach. A lot of people are struggling. Some of us might have jobs or the “right to work,” but it’s peanuts. You still can’t survive on it. Looking after ourselves, looking after each other, and making sure that when we’re doing this work, there is support, is crucial, because you never know what people are going through. 

We try as much as we can to support each other but there’s still a lot of lives that are unnecessarily being lost. Why? Because this is how the system is built. So yes, we have to find our way to survive, our way to still live, because the Hostile Environment affects us in different ways. We aren’t all destitute, but maybe it’s because of someone’s network that someone is a little better off. If they don’t know anybody, someone else may have a relative or a friend. It affects us all differently, based on many factors, such as being part of a community. This is why organizations like Coventry Asylum Refugee Action Group (CARAG) are important because even when people do not have connections in this country, you feel like now you have found friends, you have found people you can rely on, you have found family. 

CARAG does what we call “peer to peer” support. We meet every week and the first thing we do is share food together.

We talk about immigration issues, the political weather, past and upcoming events, and share updates. We have built this container. We also have a committee which I was chair of from 2018 to 2022. The committee looks into issues that have come up from the meeting. Within the wider group, people might have language needs, for example, if they speak French, they will be paired with someone who is also French speaking and they will translate for them. If they want to go to a GP, someone will support them to go, or someone will say, “I have this problem, I’m meeting so and so, can someone meet me?”. People feel like they have someone they can talk to, or relate to. When they experience the death of a loved one, people will be there with you. We’ve built a community.

HELEN: It goes to show how critical relationships built in solidarity are to each other.

At the same time, marginalized social groups are devalued by logics of racialized criminalisation. It anchors our understanding that struggles for reproduction are struggles against abandonment.

When we met up earlier in the year in Coventry we spoke about the effects of dispersal and destitution, how has CARAG experienced these issues?

LORAINE: Coventry being a dispersal city, people get refusals all the time. Do you remember where we met last time? That used to be a night shelter. The capacity downstairs was twenty men, but most of the night some people would be sent away because the place is full. Now that night shelters have closed, for me the question has always been, where are people going? Is it under the bridge again? When the pandemic came, it stopped, because people were not able to social distance in the night shelter. I know night shelters are not the best places to be. When I first came to CARAG, we had a lot of people living in a night shelter. They operate between 8:30PM to 8:00AM. You come at night, you leave in the morning. I too ended up at a night shelter, but I have my own room. I was lucky. I trained to volunteer in the night shelter but on the very first day of starting to shadow, I left. I could not process what I was seeing. It was hard for me to see so many people on the floor. I just couldn’t do it. Instead I volunteered to do laundry only during the day when people were not there. But where can you go when you leave in the morning? It’s a stressful situation to be in and you feel powerless. I was told to move out of my asylum accommodation within seven days instead of the twenty-eight days. This was because I received the letter very late. You start counting down the days, and ask yourself, where am I going to go? 

Women had their own room. Every morning they too leave and come back at night.  Because you are many, you have to start very early in the morning, for all of you to be out by eight o’clock. It means by four o’clock, people are already starting to use the bathrooms. But then it’s also making noise for other people who still want to sleep a little bit. What time do you even start sleeping in the night you’ve come back? You want to see if there is food to eat? You are cold? Do we switch lights off or with light on? At what point do things settle down? The moment you start sleeping, maybe it’s also the time that someone has to start bathing. It’s a constant lack of sleep. It contributes to all sorts of conditions for people. It’s not ideal at all. When you’re sick, you want to rest, you want to fall asleep. People will sit in the library and staff used to come and wake people up, but what do you do when you’re not well? 

HELEN: It’s a politics of exhaustion that many experience when they are without safe or stable accommodation. But the models for alleviating homelessness are often quick fixes which fail to fully grasp social and economic deprivation, and prolonged exposure to organized violence and abandonment. It’s a reminder that people are made precarious, and how the myth of difference particularly between people seeking asylum is weaponized to deny people access based on who is more deserving? 

LORAINE: Exactly. Otherwise we begin to embrace it, we start believing it, we start normalizing it, and we start thinking to ourselves, “I’m better than them, because now I have status.” What nonsense. It’s the same Home Office that’s been oppressing you all these years. 

HELEN: In fact, we can trace it to Empire, border controls restrict entry and inclusion based on notions of racial difference constructed in the colonies.

We also know that the Home Office has a strategic agenda to deter and deport people they do not want in the country.  

LORAINE: Like I’m saying we’ve been homeless in Coventry for many years. We have been to the council as an organization to say, “Please, we have people who are not supposed to be in a night shelter. Do we have empty buildings in Coventry that you can offer that CARAG can change so that we can house people? Even as a hostel?”. People should have rooms where they can stay during the day, especially people that are unwell. The head of immigration said, “Okay, give me an example. Where are these people from? Who is this man you are saying is sick?” We said, “Okay. This man is from Nigeria.” So he said, “There is no war in Nigeria, you can send him back.” We thought we’d be discussing how we can support all migrants in our city. We’re trying to look for solutions for vulnerable people in our society. But he responds to us by saying, “Send him back.” It’s a barrier for us to continue to pursue that route. When the war broke out in Ukraine, we saw a lot of things opening up, we just wish that could be for everyone. 

Based on that experience, we were thinking of how we can support ourselves? Every time we had a meeting, we asked ourselves, what is the number one problem we are facing? Everyone was talking about homelessness. This is why when funding came up we put forward the idea of having a house for destitute asylum seekers and migrants. They gave us an initial 5,000 pounds, which was used to research how we can run a housing project for asylum seekers in Britain, because at the time when we were looking, we couldn’t find anything that was by and for asylum seekers themselves. Before we even completed the research that we wanted to do, the pandemic came. We decided to fast track the project and acquire more funding. We know that this is a need and we know what people want. That’s how we started the current housing project. That project is still here, but it’s at a small scale. It’s a rented house and has only five rooms. But the demand is huge. We also know that there are other organizations that give support to refused asylum seekers, a room and a bit of money and access to legal advice. But such charities aren’t many so they can’t cater for everyone, but at least it’s there.

HELEN: We often hear about people seeking asylum feeling temporary and contingent. Abandonment fosters instability, uncertainty, exhaustion, and anxiety. Part of the Hostile Environment is to keep people feeling on edge as well as living on the edge. Fearful of detention, deportation, or destitution. I don’t think we give enough time or discussion on the responsibilities placed on people who are already in a precarious position to take on care work in states of abandonment. I think this comes back to the solidarity point and is why everyday organizing is at the heart of how we “win.” It’s at the heart of how you’re not just building one house, you’re building many houses, many homes. 

LORAINE: We have inspired other asylum seekers to form their own campaigning groups. So for example, in Scotland, they have the Scottish Asylum and Refugee Action Group (SARAG). Before they started, they came to us, and asked: How did you start? How do you do it? How do you maintain people? Because as asylum seekers we’re moving all the time. People come to learn and then they go and organize in their own communities.

HELEN: I was thinking about the experience of conditionality to social provision. The Housing Foundation was self-determined by people with lived experience, resistant to hostile conditions. You’re doing this together and providing this for people, because it’s like you said, it’s a necessity, not just for survival, but for sustaining those solidarity connections yourselves. There may be a potential to see this project happening by, say NGOs or charities but it seems vulnerable to a similar model of conditionalities placed onto people. In that sense, it instills the notion that a person might not be vulnerable enough to qualify for a room. This is how a lot of social services operate, to ask, does a person meet a certain threshold of precarity or vulnerability? It’s a catch 22, because people with no recourse to public funds may not be destitute yet, but by not providing that “care package,” they’re going to immediately fall into that gap.

LORAINE: You reminded me of something a male friend told me about his experience at a migrant and refugee charity. He said, “I staggered when I was denied accommodation after queuing that day from 5am,” he was refused and told to go back to his country. He always talks about how he’ll never forget how he was treated. There will always be these conditions. Some charities only provide support for six months or so. Within six months, you have to be seen to move your case and return to the Home Office, and then move out. It’s intense but a relevant and crucial service for someone living in streets. 

So yes, definitely there are things that we need to create ourselves. We know even if after six months, you may be homeless, again, that just makes it worse mentally, you know? These are conditions that they are retaining. Sometimes it’s also what throws people out because you have anxiety, that within these months, you have to figure out your case, and then you don’t do it properly.

HELEN: It’s also deeply entrenched in the Home Office playbook of extending migration management to the charity and voluntary sector. When meeting a person’s “needs” is simply a service to alleviate suffering and not about building those alternative infrastructure from below. It makes it all that more difficult to foster a sense of belonging.

LORAINE: I know people talk a lot about integration.

In the same way as I have a problem, how can the local community support me to get justice? That is what makes me know, that actually, I have integrated. My struggles are their struggles. We are in this all together fighting for a better society for all of us. 

HELEN: Outside of Britain, say in France or Spain, there’s an increasing movement around people who are undocumented, they have a lot of political power and agency. Whereas here, there is no movement. If you don’t have documents, you have to stay underground because it’s too dangerous.

LORAINE: We say our existence is resistance. We exist in physical forms, because we know, people want us to hide, they want us to disappear. We need to come out and say, “Here we are.” The campaign called “Status Now 4 All,” which I am a part of, does this work. You could be an asylum seeker, you could be undocumented, or you could be refused. Within that campaign there is a group called Friends of Status Now, which are people who have no status or precarious status. We meet, we talk, we discuss, and we are present. 

But I also understand that it does take time. There’s a lot of people who say, “You’re putting people at risk, because they will be deported.” But at the same time, this issue needs to be brought to the forefront. If we’re talking about a million plus people here, it’s not just one or two people, it’s a huge population. If everyone can come out, will they deport one million people in a day? No. How come everywhere else people who are undocumented are speaking out, but in this country we are threatened? They say, “you can’t,” but we are trying to build the same movement, we have to speak about it, because it’s us who are suffering and we cannot keep hiding. People are losing their lives. It’s either we seek liberty or we die.

We Live to Fight
Loraine Masiya Mponela

as sanctuary seekers
and migrants still finding our feet
we are children
and parents of the struggle

victimised in our places of birth
marginalised in the purported places
of safety
trauma and poverty are our bywords

the never ending suffering
in a strange land
where hate and stigma persists
double trauma on double trouble

impoverishment laced with destitution
sleepless nights
on empty stomachs
grinning and sighing all at once

but we refuse
to give up
we choose life
when sentenced to death

and proclaim these words
we live still
have beating hearts
and active minds.

we know change is coming too
though we be tied in chains
and ropes of oppression
and pain

we know there is no gain
until all of us stand strong
and be some role models
for ourselves and others

showing that life sometimes is hard
but never a bad thing
and that as long as blood flows
in our veins

and breaths courses in and out
of our lungs
we live to fight another day
and victory is certain.

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