Migrant Futures is a digital resource for migrants and allies working in culture and organising, interested in support, activation, solidarity, action and agency in hostile environments. Migrant and Global Majority culture workers and organisers are often isolated, working in urgency, reactivity and grief; they navigate hostile, tokenising, exclusionary and difficult infrastructures for their work, but also carry knowledges, connections, practices that can shape and vision new futures.
This digital resource presents a curated selection of a wide range of material from Migrants in Culture and many other artists, culture workers, collaborators, collectives, organisations, migrant justice and campaigning groups and others engaged in rehearsing migrant-led futures, and has been developed over a period of four years (2020-2024).
Migrant Futures centres roots and routes, seeking to foreground migrancy as a site of ancestral, embodied and multiple forms of knowing, sensing , resisting and working.
The Migrant Futures resource has been funded by a UKRI grant from The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama alongside a pilot project in collaboration with ArtsAdmin looking at migrant-led mentorship in the cultural sector and designed by Studio Hyte and led by Dr Diana Damian Martin.
How does it work
Migrant Futures brings together materials for migrants with secure and insecure immigration status. This resource can also be useful to those who are considering moving to the UK, organisers and allies, and those who are keen to browse openly and whose experiences might cross-over.
Migrant Futures has been designed by migrants for migrants to support navigating the hostile environment in the cultural sector; it is not an exhaustive list of links to support, and is an expanding resource.
For the purposes of navigating the platform, we have sought to acknowledge some of the many disparities that inform migrant experiences in order to best connect needs with existing resources. We denounce and where possible, seek to divest from languages of the Hostile Environment.
Click on what feels right for you, and return as many times as you need.
How you can get involved
These resources have been mapped, developed and designed over a four year period 2020-2024 and the time frame reflects what is present here.
Due to the fast-paced and precarious nature of immigration regime and its hostilities, .
You can email us here: migrantfutures@migrantsinculture.com
Glossary
Migrant We acknowledge the different oppressions and privileges that can be hidden by the term ‘migrant’, from the division between good and bad immigrants to the racialisation and othering of Black and Global Majority citizens. When we say ‘migrant’ we include people who have lived experiences of migration or are being profiled as migrants because of the colour of their skin, their accent or other characteristics, regardless of their legal status. Migrants can have a variety of legal statuses, including as visa nationals, temporary or permanent residents, refugees or asylum seekers, traveller communities, undocumented or citizens. There are migrants who have been residing in the UK for a long time, those born of migrant parents, and those here for a shorter while. What allows us to build coalitions (without erasing difference) is our collective opposition to borders. Expats, economic migrant, asylum seeker, refugee, citizen, immigrant are terms that indicate different immigration statuses and claims to belonging and hierarchies based on racist and colonial logics.
Migrant culture worker We work in economically and legally precarious workplaces, where we are invisible (as there is little understanding or care of how immigration regimes impact our lives) or hypervisible (co-opted as tokens of internationalism and diversity) in a monoculture. We live, work and pay taxes in the UK, but have no, or limited, political representation and access to healthcare and social services. We recognise that the forces of systemic racism and the legacies and continuation of empire, colonisation and extractive capitalism have created a culture sector characterised by borders, oppression, discrimination, and exploitation for migrant and racialised populations. We reject the instrumentalisation of culture for social power, social cleansing and nationalist agendas. We reject the false binary of the good / bad migrant. We question the ways in which the professionalisation of cultural work has led to systemic oppression of racialised and migrant workers
Hostile Environment The JCWI describes the “Hostile Environment” as “a set of policies introduced in 2012 by then-Home Secretary Theresa May, with the aim of making life unbearably difficult in the UK for those who cannot show the right paperwork. Or, as she said at the time; “The aim is to create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants.” To achieve this, the Government set about trying to cut undocumented migrants off from using fundamental services including the NHS and the police, and make it illegal to work, or for a landlord to rent them a property. The Home Office also accesses the data that public sector organisations use – so whether you are a patient speaking to a GP, a victim reporting a crime or an exploited worker reporting your boss to the authorities, your data can be checked by immigration officials.”
In recent years, there has been an expansion of the Hostile Environment through the introduction of a points-based system, the Nationality and Borders Act of 2021, a new Policing Act in 2022 and The Illegal Immigration Act of 2023, to name a few. These changes have seen increasing government interference and crackdown on the right to protest, as well as eroding the ability of migrants and asylum seekers to ‘challenge state decisions and entrench exclusionary policies at great human cost’ (Liberty Briefing, 2021).
The Hostile Environment is a manifestation of systemic racism and the legacies and continuation of empire, colonisation and extractive capitalism. The Hostile Environment is also embedded in a culture sector characterised by borders, oppression, discrimination, and exploitation for migrant and racialised populations.
‘Migrant methodologies’ This describes ways of activating lived experience leadership for migrant justice. There is plenty of sector attention and research that recognises how change-makers and innovators with lived experience shape social movements in a different way from those without lived experiences. But there is less research on how to activate our lived experiences and navigate barriers in our artistic and cultural work.
Migrant Futures is part of our ongoing, collective investment in how we can reclaim and revalue ancestral, diasporic and migrant knowledges, practices and tools (knowledge we already have) to bring our multiple experiences to our work and worlds.
