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.