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Maya Goodfellow is a writer, researcher and academic who has written for the New York Times, the Guardian, the New Statesman, Al Jazeera and the Independent. She is a trustee of the Runnymede Trust.
Migrant crossings in the Channel have been described as a ‘national crisis,’ but the real crisis is the war and persecution that forces families to flee their homes – and the border regimes that brutalise them.
While ministers clapped every week for migrant workers on the frontline, the Hostile Environment cast them as criminals – and exposed the myth that we’re all in this together.
The roots of the ‘Hostile Environment’ go a long way back – to the racial categories of the British Empire, and the classing of Jewish refugees as ‘aliens’.