News articles and parliamentary debates from 2010 to 2014 frequently associated immigration with crime and illegality
A new report published last month by the Runnymede Trust examines how political and media discourse played a key role in fostering and legitimising the Conservative government's 'hostile environment' policy towards migrants.
The 79-page report, A hostile environment: language, race, politics and the media, can be downloaded here.
The report analysed a large body of texts comprising of House of Commons debates and news reports from the time period 2010 to 2014. The period is two years either side of the 2012 Daily Telegraph article in which the then-Home Secretary Theresa May said the Government's immigration policy aimed "to create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration".
Researchers from the Runnymede Trust tracked the terms 'immigration', 'migration', 'immigrant' and 'migrant' in the texts they studied. They found that in the years leading up to the implementation of the hostile environment policy, immigration was increasingly framed as a problem and linked to notions of illegality and danger, creating a foundation for the policy to be presented as a supposed solution.
Analysis of the findings reveals that the hostile environment policy was not a new approach but part of a long-standing history of racist and xenophobic immigration strategies. The report argues that the policy represents a modern form of racism, aimed at excluding people of colour and ethnically minoritised groups from the UK while maintaining a façade of non-discrimination.
According to the report, migrants were consistently portrayed in terms of crime and illegality during 2010 to 2014, with the word 'illegal' being one of the top five words associated with migrants in news reports and parliamentary debates.
The authors explained: "Although the hostile environment was officially announced in May 2012, our analysis of the rhetoric preceding its announcement reveals discourses that were already markedly hostile to ethnically minoritised groups. Immediately preceding the period covered by our 2010–12 data was the 2009 Conservative manifesto pledge to reduce 'net immigration to the tens of thousands'. Alongside this pledge, we find representations in both news media and parliamentary debates of immigration and immigrant communities as a threat and a problem, of initial calls by political leaders for the deputisation of immigration controls, and discourses which begin the expansion of the definition of illegal immigration in ways that facilitate the exclusion of more and more people of immigrant and/or ethnically minoritised communities, as the hostile-environment policies were designed to do."
News coverage between 2010 - 12 also frequently associated the term '(im)migrant' with words like 'numbers', 'many', and 'thousands', emphasising the idea of disproportionately large groups. A similar pattern was found in parliamentary debates.
The report notes: "This has important implications for how exclusionary immigration policies focused on reducing numbers are given legitimacy. By recurrently presenting migrants in terms of large numbers and as an ever-growing crowd, the sense of magnitude is over-inflated. In this light, any actions to 'reduce' or 'shrink' the number of people in this group of 'others' can be more readily presented as the 'natural' or 'logical' course of action. Furthermore, in focusing the debate on 'migration numbers', it becomes possible to abstract away from the fact that such policies ultimately affect human beings who are being racialised, stigmatised and excluded. This focus also leads to many readers overestimating the number of migrants in the country and to upward, frantic growth becoming a constant, defining characteristic of perceptions of immigration. Though numbers may at first appear to be an objective fact, they are also subject to subjective representation. Alongside frequent references to 'illegal immigrants', such representations may bias the public towards viewing migrants not only as inherently illegal but also as 'too many' and 'always growing' in number. This can play on existing 'white replacement' fears – the idea that 'insider' white populations are being 'replaced' by people of colour immigrating from other countries. In discussions about broader terms like 'migration' and 'immigration', there was a persistent focus on scale and reduction, with terms such as 'mass', 'net', 'cut', and 'reduce' dominating word associations. This framing reinforced perceptions of migration as an overwhelming and problematic phenomenon to be controlled or minimized."
Researchers found that after the 2012 announcement of the hostile environment policy, media mentions of '(im)migration' and '(im)migrants' surged by 137%, while parliamentary debates on the topic increased by 30%. This intensified rhetoric framed immigration as an escalating problem requiring urgent solutions, reinforcing negative stereotypes of migrants as illegal, suspicious, and overwhelming in numbers. The repetition and volume of such narratives normalised exclusionary measures, masking their radicalised aims and legitimising the hostile environment agenda, including the 2014 Immigration Act and the 'deputisation' of immigration enforcement to the public. From 2012 to 2014, 'illegal' was again the word most strongly associated with 'immigrant' in news and parliamentary data.
A further key finding of the report is that the term '(im)migrants' overwhelmingly refers to people of colour and ethnically minoritised individuals, both before and after 2012 This racial targeting is evident in the nationalities and ethnicities most strongly associated with migrants, such as Eastern European, Bulgarian, Romanian, and African. The portrayal of these groups as criminal and dangerous outsiders legitimised their systematic targeting by the hostile environment.
In concluding, the report highlights how UK immigration laws and related discourses have been deliberately designed to reduce the presence of ethnically minoritised people without overtly appearing racist. These policies sustain societal inequalities by normalising racial hierarchies that obscure class divisions and foster divisions based on race. The report says that this dynamic was starkly evident during the racist riots of August 2024, where chants echoing government slogans targeting asylum seekers underscored the harmful consequences of dehumanising political and media rhetoric on immigration.
Recommendations made in the report call on the Labour government to end hostile-environment immigration policies, and to take action against racist hate speech by high-profile figures and politicians, as recommended by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). In addition, the report calls for a statutory, independent regulator for print and online media to ensure ethical journalism and address harmful narratives about migrants and immigration.
Dr Shabna Begum, CEO of the Runnymede Trust, said: "It's clear that 'hostile environment' immigration policies are racist, and this report provides a solid evidence base to make that claim. 'Hostile environment' policies are not new, but last summer's racist riots are the undeniable outcome of normalised and intensifying racism, and must serve as a sharp reminder that these policies and the deep racism they invoke can have spectacularly violent consequences. … We are at a crucial moment, both domestically and internationally, where racist far-right narratives are threatening to dominate and erode our rights and democracy. Where migrants are dehumanised and scapegoated in ways that foment nothing but resentment and hate. We can no longer deny how racist these political discussions have become, and the trajectory that leads us toward, unless we put a sharp stop to it, now."