Incompatible with life: Embodied borders, migrant fertility, and the UK’s ‘hostile environment’

Abstract

In this piece, I consider the uncomfortable and intimate intersection of bodies and borders through an autoethnographic account of encountering UK migration controls while losing a pregnancy. While this encounter was not representative of the disproportionate targeting of refused asylum seeker and undocumented migrants by these policies, I argue that migrant fertility has become a key lens through which the embodiment of the border is made material, and that the post-2012 deployment of a UK-wide set of policies generating a “Hostile Environment” for migrants demonstrates how the UK is embracing discomfort as a political strategy to deter migrants. Migrant fertility becomes perceived as an anticipatory threat to the body politic that must be continually pre-empted by the state. The restrictive policies of the UK’s hostile environment have exacerbated the perceived threat of fertile migrants, and that the threat posed by these migrants has become both racialized and medicalized, with multi-scalar, material consequences for migrants.

Living digitally like a migrant: Everyday smartphone practices and the (Re)mediation of hostile state-affects

“…Over the past decade, increasingly hostile policies have been developed across European states to manage, prevent and deter illegitimate migrants from European territory (Coddington 2020; De Genova, 2018). The thread that unites many recent European policies is the clear hostile nature of them: the intention to either deter, or if unsuccessful, create conditions of non or bare livability (Darling, 2022).…”

“…Geography has been at the forefront of documenting the shift towards the hostile effects of governance (see: Scheel, 2021; Zampagni, 2016; De Genova, 2013; Papadopoulos and Tsianos, 2013). From externalised and internalised borders (see: Yuval-Davis et al, 2018; Scheel, 2013), to increased and intensified surveillance (see: Aradau and Blanke, 2017; Erel et al, 2016), across the European context, states are continuously developing governance frameworks that reduce their obligations towards helping or providing sanctuary to irregular migrants (Almustafa, 2021; Coddington, 2020). Forms of violence can be simultaneously visible or fast – images of lifeboats and dead bodies on the shores of South East England, France, or the Mediterranean – whilst being slow or habitual – such as the increasingly extended periods of waiting in asylum application systems (Hyndman 2012; Tazzioli, 2021) or in detention centres (Stoler, 2013; Vaughan-Williams, 2008).…”

“…What must be explicitly recognised is that hostility is neither administered nor felt equally. As Coddington (2020) argues, processes of racialization must be central to charting shifts in migration policies over the past decade. Mobility regimes and the attachment of risk to certain kinds of mobilities (irregular, illegal, suspicious) are always already radicalised (see: Coddington, 2020; Davies and Isakjee, 2019; Howell and Richter-Montpetit, 2019).…”

For political geographies of fertilities

“…Through a framework building feminist geography and queer studies, Hiemstra sketches out a typology of 'fertile figures' deployed in media and government discourse over these policies, including the breeder, the anchor baby, and the bad parent, arguing that these figures are embedded within the "white, patriarchal, heteronormative nationalist" policies that respond to non-white migrant women's fertility with fear and anger. Coddington (2020) similarly explores migration policies at the national scale that intersect with the politicization of fertilities. Autoethnographic analysis in the UK context highlights how, through policies known as the "Hostile Environment," discomfort is increasingly becoming a political strategy used to deter migrants.…”

The poetics of labour, birth, and bodies

“…Today, scholarship on fertility treatment, childbirth, surrogacy, miscarriage, and abortion by feminist and health geographers appears with increasing frequency, and work on the biopolitics of birth understood as the management and self-fashioning of populations and subjects is now part of the growing subfield of ‘reproductive geographies’ (Calkin, 2020; England et al, 2018; Lewis, 2018; Perler and Schurr, 2020). There are geographical accounts attuned to questions of citizenship in relation to birth (Kaiser, 2018; Wang, 2017) and to the pregnant body’s mobility, visibility, and displacement (Coddington, 2020; Freeman, 2020; Salvi, 2020). These studies on the embodied experiences of pregnancy and birth powerfully demonstrate how the management and control of spaces and bodies are inextricable from each other.…”