Hostile is a look at the hostile environment policies implemented by the UK government, and tracing both its origins and impact. The hostile environment policy follows the same tack that you find in a lot of government services with lists that target reduction – the dole, disability allowance, mental health care – in that the hope is you will kill yourself and help them get the numbers down. The point is to make attempting to get what you have every right to so difficult you will just give up and go away, or despair and go mad. The Kafka grinder.
The phrase ‘hostile environment’ is a great soundbite euphemism used by the government to sell its racist persecution of migrants. To those who support the policies, they hear ‘hostile’ and it sounds like a clear denunciation, strong and violent, a call to open hostility. To those who might not support it, but are not going to be directly effected by these policies, they hear ‘environment’ and it sounds passive, more of a change in tone, a background administrative tightening up. It describes an abstract culture, not a list of actions. So what does it actually mean for people on the ground?
Farrukh came to the UK as a student. He studied, got his degree here. He worked and raised his family here. Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, he worked tirelessly at the NHS, keeping the place functioning, making sure it could be there to support and care for people facing a life-or-death illness. He couldn’t see his kids while he worked flat out, as his little boy’s health was vulnerable. He’s almost 40 years old and lived his entire adult life in the UK. And he may be deported at any time.
He has applied to the Home Office year after year, each time costing him thousands upon thousands of pounds. Each time denied for spurious reasons. He’s never had so much as a parking ticket, but he’s twice been rejected under the provisions for threats to national security. Even when they walk it back on appeal, they reject him again on other equally ridiculous reasons.
He’s not some oligarch, he’s an ordinary working bloke. He doesn’t have the money for a legal team, and Legal Aid has been paired back to nothing. So any minute he gets not spent working to pay off the debt from all these attempts, he’s trying to put together a needlessly labyrinthian application and understand the complexities of ever-changing migration law. He lays out on the dining room table tomes and tomes of paper. Folders, binders, photocopies of photocopies.
If your application is rejected, your right to work can be immediately suspended as well. So on any given day, you can receive word you are no longer allowed to work, and immediately lose your job. And as you are a rejected migrant, you have no recourse to public funds, meaning you can’t claim unemployment benefit, even though you’ve paid in decades’ worth of tax.
When this happened to Farrukh, he had no other option but to take out loans and put household expenses on credit cards. It was only until he could appeal the decision and get a new job, but combined with the cost of the applications themselves, he’s now in more than £50,000’s worth of debt. His wife says he won’t discuss it, because when they do, they can’t sleep at night. They have no idea how they are ever gonna repay it.
He says he would have given up and gone home by now if it weren’t for his children. He has two kids. They were both born here. They are British by birth, and have never known any other country or home. Yet despite being born here, they are both ‘illegal immigrants’. Their legal status depends on their father’s status, which remains unsettled after decades, and if he was deported, they would be sent with him. Just think about that for a minute.
Farrukh came here for a better life. He did exactly what was asked of him, entered legally, worked hard, got his degree, got a job after uni, paid his taxes. Yet the life he has made for his children is even more precarious than the one he had. Everything they have can be snatched away from them at a moment’s notice. Even as the years pass, they have no sense of security, the sword of Damocles is forever over their heads.
Ironically all the things that they say about migrants – that they are illegal, that they are scroungers, that they don’t integrate with the community – these are products of Home Office policy, not the people themselves. It’s an astonishing piece of projection. They call them illegal, even though they entered legally, never broken a law, and have complied with every effort to ensure their legal status. They call them scroungers, even though it’s government policies that put them out of work, drove them into destitution with exorbitant costs, and that deny them recourse to public funds so charitable community support is the only fallback. They say that they don’t integrate with the community, but they are the ones preventing them from putting down roots, withholding from them the security of a real home, of isolating them in a permanent limbo.
As awful as all these tangible things are, there are also the intangible things. Like the mental torture of waiting for someone to decide your fate for almost 20 years. Of the strain it puts on your marriage to be in tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of debt. As you watch Farrukh sit chain-smoking over his bundles and bundles of papers, you wonder what all this must be doing for his blood pressure.
And Farrukh’s story is just one in this film. There are, unfortunately, so many people like him. So many people have stories just like this. People whose lives have been utterly destroyed by cruel, dehumanising, racist policies.
This is an excellent film. I found the score and some of the directing choices too heavy-handed at times, which is a shame because it’s completely unnecessary, the subject of the film speaks for itself. Chalk it up to a first-time filmmaker finding their feet. And whatever quibbles you may have with it on a technical level, Hostile is a powerful portrait of the impact of racist state policy on the lives of ordinary people, a violence which goes unnamed and largely hidden from the public eye. This film puts a face on the ephemeral rhetoric and to show how, when these abstract ideas touch ground, they hit like a hurricane.
P.S. Good to see Glasgow get a look-in at the end, with the Kenmure Street action being one bright ray in an otherwise dark vista. Glad to see us on screen for the right reasons for once.