Cities of Sanctuary in Environments of Hostility: Competing and Contrasting Migration Infrastructures

Abstract This paper analyses the tensions, contradictions and overlaps between supportive migration infrastructures and the generalised anti‐migrant atmosphere created by the UK government. It utilises infrastructural perspectives to show how the hostile environment has become an everyday reality that forced migrants have to constantly endure and navigate. As an everyday reality, the hostile environment inheres and comes to life in various settings, spaces, infrastructures and affects. Specifically, this paper documents how government buildings, urban landscapes and houses provided to forced migrants are all conduits through which anti‐migrant hostility is encountered and reproduced. It also demonstrates how the hostile environment permeates infrastructures designed to provide support to forced migrants, creating divisions between those providing care and those being cared for, thus recreating affective and interpersonal borders. At the same time, the paper shows how anti‐migrant infrastructures are contested and repurposed by activists, demonstrating the processual and always in‐the‐making nature of infrastructures.