Benchekroun, Rachel Natalie; (2021) Mothers with insecure immigration status: enacting relational belonging and sharing support in a hostile environment. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

In the context of ever-more stringent and discriminatory immigration legislation in the UK, it has become increasingly difficult for individuals to obtain residency rights, especially for those from the Global South. The UK government’s Hostile Environment strategy excludes people with insecure immigration status and no recourse to public funds (NRPF) from public services and mainstream welfare support. Migration scholars have begun to examine the ways in which national immigration policies constrain lives through bordering, as well as considering belonging practices in response to structural and everyday exclusions. Yet very little research has so far examined the specific impact of hostile bordering on, or responses of, women/mothers. Drawing on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in an inner London neighbourhood, this thesis examines how racially minoritised mothers with insecure immigration status and NRPF resist their marginalisation, particularly in the context of the Hostile Environment strategy, and how they enact relational belonging and citizenship as mothers. The thesis argues, however, that by eroding institutional trust and generating precarity and ‘status anxiety’, the hostile environment fundamentally undermines particularised trust, shaping interpersonal relationships, restricting access to social support and reducing individual wellbeing. Within intimate and social relationships, mothers are forced to negotiate dialectical tensions in ways which are specific to their structural position as racially minoritised women/mothers with insecure immigration status: between the need for intimacy and the need for privacy (the ‘problem of trust’); between autonomy and dependency (or care and control); and between the need to access resources and their (perceived or actual) scarcity. The thesis concludes that these structural tensions (re)produce ontological insecurity, impede access to support and increase vulnerability to exploitation. The thesis shows that the UK’s hostile environment renders motherhood precarious for targeted groups and exacerbates structural inequalities by denying rights of residency, citizenship and associated rights to racially minoritised mothers and their children.

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