Hostile Environments in Times of Austerity: The ‘Generative Consequences’ for UK-Based Social Care Practitioners Working with Members of Migrant Families

Internationally, anti-migrant policy narratives claim that migrants add pressure to a nation’s welfare state provision to legitimise punitive bordering practices that exclude migrants from welfare state services. In this paper, we reject this perspective and argue that, conversely, hostile environments increase pressures on social care agencies providing welfare support to migrant families, pressures exacerbated in inadequately funded welfare states. Studies spanning Sociology, Social Policy and Health and Social Care illustrate that ‘everyday bordering’ practices and wider ‘hostile environment’ ideologies are harmful, and ‘manufacture precarities’ for migrant families and limit their agency in meeting their own basic needs. Drawing on new data generated in the UK, we extend this interdisciplinary analysis of bordering practices to the ‘networks of support’ services that provide social care to families living in mixed welfare economies. In doing so, we reveal that diverse social care professions subsequently expend additional labours addressing migrant families’ state ‘manufactured’ support needs. We thereby assert that what we conceptualise as the ‘generative consequences’ of exclusionary ‘everyday borders’, combined with austerity-induced impacts on services, increase social care practitioners’ workloads, adding complexity to workforces already facing multiple pressures. By developing understandings of the deleterious consequences of hostile environments for migrant families and, in turn, practitioners’ workloads, we make an important and timely challenge to pervasive narratives that position migration as a threat to a country’s welfare provision.