Crawford, J., McKee, K. and Leahy, S. (2020) More than a hostile environment : exploring the impact of the Right to Rent part of the Immigration Act 2016. Sociological Research Online, 25 (2). pp. 236-253. ISSN 1360-7804
Abstract
This paper is based on original data from a qualitative study on the impact of the Right to Rent part of the Immigration Act 2016 in Scotland. Our findings show that in addition to being an integral part of the government’s project of creating a “hostile environment for immigrants” the process of extending the state’s ‘law and order’ functions to organisations responsible for providing welfare services and distributing public goods is of wider political importance. Here we argue that this process, what Bourdieu calls the rightward tilting of the bureaucratic field, results in widespread discrimination as it entails a shift in focus of its criminalising gaze from ‘conduct’ to ‘status’. The effects of this rightward shift altered the categories through which welfare services were both conceived and delivered more widely. We found that the almost universal opposition of the housing sector to the unwanted imposition of duties previously confined to border control agencies shows the extent to which the state is not a unitary monolith but is, rather, a site of perpetual struggle and contestation. By locating the perspective of housing professionals in relation to the government’s attempts to redraw the boundaries of the state’s own responsibility, we can gain a valuable insight into the processes of state crafting, which have wider implications beyond merely the creation of a hostile environment for immigrants.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Authors/Creators: |
|
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2019 The Author(s). This is an author-produced version of a paper accepted for publication in Sociological Research Online. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. Article available under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). |
Keywords: | Bureaucratic field; Criminalisation; Housing; Immigration; State Crafting |
Dates: |
|
Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Urban Studies & Planning (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 24 Jul 2019 08:20 |
Last Modified: | 13 May 2021 15:39 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | SAGE Publications |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1177/1360780419867708 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:148775 |
Download
Filename: More than a hostile environment Final July 2019.pdf
Licence: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0