A hostile environment: language, race, surveillance and the media is the second of two reports analysing the language used in parliamentary and media debates. It shows how the UK government and media are complicit in enabling racist violence.

This report provides analysis from two datasets of a combined 62.7 million words, collected across 52,990 news articles and 317 House of Commons debates on immigration. In the period between 2019-2024, ‘illegal’ remains the number one association for ‘immigrants’ and has moved up from fourth to second most strongly associated term for ‘migrant’ in the news data.

The report details the continued use of racist tropes and stereotypes, including representations of Muslim migrant men as threats to women, and associations of migrants with deception and laziness.

The British media and politicians have played a key role in creating a culture in which racial discrimination is not just permissible but increasingly normalised. In parliamentary debates and media reporting, negative terms like “illegal”, “flood” and “influx” are persistently used in association with migrants, posing them as a threat, dangerous and outsiders.

News and parliamentary debates confect claims about migrants exploiting state resources and being a burden to the UK taxpayer, even though migrants tend to add more than they actually take. People seeking asylum are almost universally negatively represented and treated with suspicion.

Other key findings include:

• ‘Immigrant’ typically refers to a person of colour, with the strongest nationality associations with the term being ‘Mexican’, ‘Chinese’ and ‘Indian’.
• Word associations for ‘asylum seekers’ show a preoccupation in news and parliamentary debate with accommodation, circulating false narratives about people seeking asylum taking the country’s resources, stoking up public anger and making accommodation such as hotels a clear target. 
• People who have come into contact with the police as victims and survivors  of slavery, trafficking and abuse are having their information shared with Immigration Enforcement:
  
  • FOI requests found that more than 750 victims a year are still being referred to the National Command and Control Unit (NCCU) with over 1,100 victims referred to the NCCU in 2021 alone. 
  • Of the victims referred to the NCCU by the police from May 2020 to December 2023, the top five nationalities were Vietnamese, Albanian, Romanian, Chinese and Pakistani. The majority of victims referred to the NCCU from Vietnam, Albania and China were victims of modern slavery, while the majority of those from Romania were victims of human trafficking.
  • The police continue to share the data of survivors of domestic abuse who have irregularised immigration status with the Home Office for immigration control, with the majority of such referrals being from Pakistan.
  • Our analysis of news articles from 2019 to 2024 found stories of violence against women and girls (VAWG) being used to represent migrant men, especially those from Muslim majority countries, as threats to white women. Yet the analysis of data-sharing arrangements between the police and the Home Office shows that, when it comes to victims of VAWG who are migrants, concern for their welfare is missing and instead they are referred to hostile authorities.
• Other hostile immigration practices disproportionately harm people from Eastern European countries and countries with large populations of people of colour:
  
  • People from Nigeria are charged 245% more on average for NHS treatments than people from North American countries.
  • People from countries such as Nigeria, Poland, Ghana and Albania are more likely to be charged for treatment, and ‘Mixed White/Black African’, ‘Asian/British Asian – Indian’ and ‘Black/Black British – African’ ethnicity groups are potentially being charged more. 

Dr Shabna Begum, CEO of the Runnymede Trust, said:

“This report once again highlights how mainstream narratives, uncritically recycled and compounded by the media, create the conditions in which migrants and people seeking asylum in this country are routinely and actively demonised and dehumanised. 

Whether it is Starmer reaching back to Powellite rhetoric in his now infamous ‘Island of Strangers’ speech, or MPs imagining the public safety threat posed by Muslim women’s clothing, words have consequences. They incite insecurity and hatred and they foster violence. 

We all deserve better than this pantomime politics that offers us easy villains but deals with none of the urgent economic issues that are the real cause of hardship and inequality.”