Cultivated invisibility and migrants’ experiences of homelessness during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The UK government’s Everyone In scheme, announced in March 2020, required local authorities to temporarily house all homeless individuals in their area regardless of immigration status. In providing support through safe and secure accommodation, Everyone In also provided a crucial moment of visibility for migrants experiencing homelessness. Yet, just as it provided life-changing opportunities for some, the scheme was not straightforwardly a celebratory moment for migrants. It remained embedded within a wider context of immigration governance and social inequality in the UK, which has both invisibilised migrant homelessness as a crisis and hypervisibilised migrants as undeserving, suspicious or ‘illegal’ subjects. In this article, we explore life-story narratives co-produced with migrants across three urban contexts that capture their experiences of homelessness before and during the pandemic. In doing so, we introduce the notion of cultivated invisibility, referring to a habitual, deeply-ingrained mode of practice through which migrants respond to and navigate their experiences of being read as ‘Other’, in racialised or classed terms. It is developed through conditions of material scarcity and in the course of multiple engagements with racial capitalism’s various ‘faces of the state’ in an increasingly hostile environment for migrants. Cultivated invisibility involves staying on the move and blending into the crowd or avoiding it altogether but it also includes the experience of being unseen despite having come forward for help. Importantly, we demonstrate that cultivated invisibility becomes a cause of illegalisation, just as much as a response to it.

Enduring Borders: Precarity, Swift Falls and Stretched Time in the Lives of Migrants Experiencing Homelessness in the UK

“…The four narratives explored in this article derive from a broader ESRC/UKRI-funded research project entitled ‘Homelessness during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Homeless Migrants in a Global Crisis’ (see also Stewart and Sanders, 2023). Researching migrant homelessness during the COVID-19 pandemic provided an exceptional opportunity to meet with and learn from migrants experiencing homelessness, as the government’s Everyone In initiative extended unprecedented homelessness support to all individuals irrespective of their immigration status.…”

‘A tide of homeless, drug-addicted and mentally ill people’: Representing homeless people in MailOnline content

“…Despite acknowledging some of the complexities related to homelessness, including addiction and mental illness, examples tend to provide only one solution: that people experiencing homelessness be moved on and rendered invisible to wealthy residents. While invisibility can be cultivated by people experiencing homelessness (Stewart and Sanders, 2022), in this context it is being imposed by institutions for the sake of the housed communities. The linguistic and discursive strategies used to produce these depictions are similar to those employed to represent other socially marginalised groups, such as immigrants, suggesting that there may be systematic discursive devices for the exclusion of social actors in media texts.…”

Culture(s) on the Margins: An Introduction

“…Those 'beyond the pale' are rendered abject, considered to be 'matter out of place' (Lawler, 2005;Skeggs, 2004;Tyler, 2020). Among the social types identified on the margins, there is the Simmelian figure of the stranger who 'comes today and stays tomorrow', who is invisibilized and ignored, or hypervisibilised and racialised (Simmel, 1971(Simmel, [1908; Stewart and Sanders, 2023). Strangers are part of the group and yet do not fully belong.…”