This article examines the production, working and impact of the UK's hostile environment on migrant families with precarious legal status. Our approach is informed by two bodies of scholarly work: critical border studies and research on migrant families. We bridge these literatures to show how the hostile environment is neither a singular, neatly bounded space, nor limited to a set of interactions between immigration enforcement and a clear-cut group of people (so-called ‘illegal immigrants’). It affects the lives of a wider segment of the UK population, in particular racialised migrants and citizens, by making their legal status more insecure and precarious, and percolates in multiple and intersecting domains in the lives of families, such as education, housing and welfare, making them ambivalent sites of protection and safety as well as control and enforcement. Drawing on ethnographic engagement with families with insecure immigration statuses, we explore how the hostile environment manifests in the everyday lives of families; how the hostile environment circulates and is re-enacted within the micro-politics of families; and how families negotiate the continuous work of protecting children from the effects of the hostile environment. In conclusion we argue that dramatic and rapid shifts in immigration rules and regulations undermine the capacity of mothers to navigate the policy environment and welfare for their children and to shield them from the consequences of state-driven hostility towards immigrants.

中文翻译：

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在恶劣的环境中养育孩子：移民家庭就福利和移民制度的关系进行谈判

本文探讨了英国恶劣环境对法律地位不稳定的移民家庭的生产、工作和影响。我们的方法基于两个学术著作：批判性边境研究和移民家庭研究。我们将这些文献联系起来，以表明敌对环境既不是一个单一的、边界清晰的空间，也不限于移民执法部门和明确的人群（所谓的“非法移民”）之间的一系列互动。它影响了更广泛的英国人口的生活，特别是种族化的移民和公民，使他们的法律地位更加不安全和不稳定，并渗透到家庭生活的多个交叉领域，例如教育、住房和福利，使它们成为保护和安全以及控制和执法的矛盾场所。通过与移民身份不安全的家庭进行民族志研究，我们探讨了敌对环境如何在家庭的日常生活中体现；敌对环境如何在家庭微观政治中循环和重现；以及家庭如何协商持续努力保护儿童免受恶劣环境的影响。总之，我们认为，移民规则和法规的急剧而迅速的变化削弱了母亲为子女驾驭政策环境和福利的能力，也削弱了母亲保护她们免受国家驱动的对移民敌意的影响的能力。