Radical hope beyond hospitality and tolerance: embracing pro-migrant futures out of the UK's hostile environment

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This research examines the growth of privatised immigration detention inthe UK by drawing conceptual links between this local carceral geographyand the wider global prison industrial complex. I contribute to an urgentacademic and activist call to counter violent global border regimes. I bringattention to the pressing need for a move beyond a politics of hospitalityand tolerance through advocating for the recognition and adoption ofradical hope in forming pro-migrant futures. This research explores how apolitics centred around conditional hospitality and tolerance inadvertentlyfosters an intolerant, hostile environment for marginalised communities.Through a methodology of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with peoplewho have been detained under alleged immigration offences in the UK, thisresearch explores their experiences of this hostility. I uniquely contrastthese experiences with accounts of people who have worked withinimmigration detention in the UK, seeking to understand the inflection pointbetween hospitality and hostility, tolerance and intolerance, through anunderstanding of the conditions under which hostility is expressed in a forprofitcarceral context. I ask the question: are these acts of hostility drivenby a homogenous societal anti-migrant sentiment (as a reading of Foucault(2020: 85) would suggest), or are they instead driven by the structuralunavailability of adequate resources and funding within privatisedimmigration detention? Finally, conducting focus groups with pro-migrant,anti-detention community activists, I explore the usefulness of radical hope(Kallio et al., (2021) in generating compassionate and embracing promigrantfutures beyond hospitality and tolerance.