By Maka Julios-Costa and Camila Montiel-McCann

Six months on from riots where asylum accommodation, mosques and minority-owned businesses were systematically attacked by groups of far right supporters, a new Runnymede Trust report highlights the role that media and politicians play in fuelling this violence.

Our latest report, A hostile environment: language, race, politics and the media, the first of two reports analysing parliamentary and media debates from 2010-2024, shows how large sections of these debates encouraged widespread hostility to migrants. 

We show how the ‘hostile environment’ is not a new approach to immigration, but a continuation of a long history of racist, xenophobic immigration policies - designed to exclude people of colour.

It is a form of modern racism, designed to keep as many people of colour and ethnically minoritised people as possible out of the UK, without appearing to be racist. 

This first report covers the period 2010-2014, and shows that:

• The British media and politicians have played a key role in creating a culture in which racial discrimination is permissible. In parliamentary debates and media reporting, negative terms like “illegal”, “flood” and “influx” are persistently used in association with migrants, posing them as a threat, dangerous and outsiders. The word “illegal” is in the top five most strongly associated words with ‘migrant’. 

• Following Theresa May’s announcement in 2012 to “create a hostile environment for illegal immigrants”, media coverage containing hostile rhetoric around migration and migrants more than doubled (a 137% increase), compared to the two years prior. 

• Politicians and the media have pushed this racist narrative to cement the myth that migrants and migration is criminal, in order to justify harsh and discriminatory migration policies. Framing migrants as inherently ‘illegal’ is a key feature of the ‘hostile environment’ and subsequent immigration law.

• When migrants are defined as both illegal, and as ‘too many’/’an onslaught’, measures to expand the scope of immigration restrictions can be more easily accepted.

• A distinctive characteristic of the ‘hostile environment’ compared to former immigration law is that it ‘deputises’ ordinary citizens to act as immigration enforcers - from landlords and healthcare providers to teachers and colleagues. JCWI found that 42% of landlords are less likely to consider tenants without a British passport due to the Right to Rent requirements, and 27% are hesitant to engage with individuals who have ‘foreign accents or names’. Meanwhile, between 60-70% of employment raids target Bangladeshi-owned businesses.

• Politicians and the media cannot continue to deny their role in pushing harmful narratives. We urge them to take meaningful action to eliminate racist hate speech - among public figures and in the media - and we call on the government to end ‘hostile environment’ immigration policies once and for all.

‍London: Runnymede Trust, 2025.   79p.

By Jason A. Cade

This essay examines the immigration implications of President Joe Biden's Proclamation on October 6, 2022, which pardons most federal and D.C. offenders—including lawful permanent residents—who have committed the offense of simple marijuana possession. When used this way, the Art. II clemency power serves a communitarian, forward-looking function—in this case by giving legal effect to a societal recalibration of what constitutes appropriate punishment for marijuana possession and a growing awareness of the racially disproportionate impact that arrests and prosecutions for this crime tend to produce.

With respect to the impact of pardons on efforts to avoid deportation or to gain lawful admission to the United States, however, ambiguities lurking in the Immigration & Nationality Act (INA) raise unsettled complications. Through most of the nation’s history, both gubernatorial and presidential pardons effectively negated the effect of the pardoned crime for immigration purposes. Toward the end of the twentieth century, however, Congress muddied the waters by amending key provisions of the INA. These amendments, in turn, led the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) to infer legislative intent to make pardons ineffective in the immigration context, except with respect to four specifically-enumerated removal categories—which do not included controlled substance offenses. While the Supreme Court has not yet assessed these rulings, lower federal courts have deferred to the agency's interpretation.

• More.....

  All of the immigrant pardon cases to reach the courts thus far, however, have concerned state prosecutions and gubernatorial pardons, such that governing federal law has been given preemptive effect. Presidential pardons, on the other hand, raise a specialized separation-of-powers problem in light of long-undisturbed precedent interpreting the Article II pardon power as immune from congressional constraint. According to the analysis I offer, a lawful permanent resident with a pardoned federal marijuana possession conviction facing deportation should ultimately prevail in light of the broad scope of the presidential pardon power. But the constitutional question need not be fully resolved. At the end of the day, I argue, there are reasons to doubt Congress in fact intended what the BIA has inferred, and a reasonable alternative construction would give effect to President Biden's drug-possession pardons while prudently avoiding the constitutional danger zone animated by the BIA’s statutory interpretation.

  The essay concludes with a set of considerations to which policymakers should attend as they contemplate the adoption of reformatory programs that impact immigration rules. Although the Biden Proclamation too-tightly cabins which noncitizens fall within its reach, it is a step in the right direction and may well foreshadow additional reforms, including future moves by legislative and executive branches at both federal and state levels.

University of Georgia School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series, 2022. 38p.