‘Not in my name’: Empathy and intimacy in volunteer refugee hosting

Abstract

This article draws on narrative interviews with volunteers in an English charity, providing temporary accommodation to destitute migrants and refugees. The aim is to investigate the ethical and emotional complexities and ambivalence of the tensions between hospitality and hostility, and conditional and unconditional hospitality, with a focus on stories of empathy. The article engages Ken Plummer’s concept of ‘intimate citizenship’ within the context of what William Walters calls the assent of ‘domopolitics’. The latter refers to how immigration is narrativised as a threat to the domestic order of the nation. Hosting, in this regard, has the potential to invert the logic of domopolitics, where the aspiration to govern the state like a home is one that can encounter contingent socialities of care, generosity and hospitality.

If the governance of migration is now central to the identity of polities across the globe (Stierl, 2020), it is a governing that is not always obvious. Several scholars have identified a forceful, yet oftentimes, obscured biophysical violence to contemporary borders (De Genova, 2017), wherein ‘people are abandoned to the physical forces of deserts and seas, which directly operate on bodily functions with often devastating consequences’ (Squire, 2017: 514). Highlighted in this work is the brutal geo-political corralling of unauthorised mobility. Through ‘diffused and dispersed’ forms of violence (Heller and Pezzani, 2017: 97), perilous environments have been mobilised to drown, starve, dehydrate, maim, wear down and terrorise the precariously mobile (Andersson, 2016). As disturbing is the criminalisation of civil society humanitarian interventions (Stierl, 2019), from search and rescue to individuals providing food and water to migrants (see Fekete, 2018).

As will become apparent, my interest in this article is with slower-paced and less spectacular modes of hostility and abandonment in the United Kingdom’s immigration regime and in civil society efforts to welcome and care for those on the move. I examine these dynamics through narrative interviews with volunteers in an English charity providing temporary accommodation to destitute migrants and refugees, paying attention to how hosting is storied through the ethical and political tensions between conditional and unconditional hospitality. I treat these unorthodox household formations as exemplary of Ken Plummer’s (2001: 242) ‘intimacy groups’, with the potential to stimulate novel dilemmas, debates and political agenda (see also Nava, 2007). The type of hosting I discuss is a conditional hospitality, organised through a civil society group to ensure that migrants survive as they pursue arduous claims for citizenship and residency. These micro-openings of welcome in the domestic sphere are emotionally and ethically demanding and politically ambivalent. They raise questions about the meanings and extents of hospitality that come under the rubric of what Plummer (2001, 2003) has described as ‘intimate citizenship’.

The turn to the intimate and the domestication of moral thinking in late modernity has been of much interest to sociologists. Discussions have identified the impact of accelerated technological innovation, ungovernable risk and the collapse of grand narratives – that previously prescribed universal, abstracted codes of conduct – as driving the search for ontological security into the intimate (see Bauman, 1993; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002; Giddens, 1991). The concept of intimate citizenship builds on these earlier conversations. More specifically, it identifies and investigates discursive and moral relays between the personal and the public, resonating with sociological interest in the meeting points of ‘personal troubles’ and ‘public issues’ (Mills, 1959). In Plummer’s (2003) intimate citizenship, personal practices and moral dilemmas – such as how to live with difference, how to understand and respect others – have become public concerns. Although, sociological investigations of the intimate have tended to centre on dyadic and sexual relationships (Latimer and López Gómez, 2019), feminist theorists have redrawn this preoccupation (see Puar, 2007: 164). Among others, Lauren Berlant has explored how intimate attachments make ‘people public, producing trans-personal identities and subjectivities’ (Berlant, 1998: 283).

My way into investigating intimate citizenship in refugee hosting is through stories of empathy and the conundrums hosting creates for hospitality as the giving of space and time. As Dikeç and colleagues (2009: 13) assert ‘every act of hospitality gives space, just as it gives time. . . . And without the wild swerve which is the gift of the other, there would only be a single, unwavering line which would scarcely be a future at all.’ What Dikeç and colleagues capture is a cross-reading of the work of philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. The provocation of this synthesis lies in extending thinking of hospitality beyond social differences, and rules and laws of inclusion and exclusion, to include temporal otherness as a rupturing of conventions, regulation and expectations, bringing with it the unexpected. ‘Is the stranger simply or primarily one who is recognizably “out of place”’, Dikeç et al. ask perceptively, ‘or is there more to being estranged than being dislocated or relocated?’ (2009: 4). It is these versions of otherness and alterity, as the stranger and the strange, that interest me.

In common with feminist scholars (Ahmed, 2004; Pedwell, 2014), I approach empathy as a thoroughly social relation, giving the impression of closeness while serving to differentiate and distance. For Ahmed, empathy often appears as the desire to feel the pain of the other, as a becoming of what one is not. ‘In this way empathy sustains the very difference that it may seek to overcome’ Ahmed writes (2004: 30). Empathy has been identified as a central motivating emotion for those who volunteer in migrant solidarity activism, evolving through volunteering relationships (Doidge and Sandri, 2019). As such, empathy for Doidge and Sandri is ‘not just about emotionally connecting with someone else, but resolving one’s own feelings aroused by the situation’ (2019: 473).

In this emphasis on the relational life of empathy are resonances with William Dilthey (1977 [1924]) and Max Weber’s (1947) elaborations of the concept/method of Verstehen. Rather than an intuitive capacity ‘to feel others’ experiences as states in ourselves’ (Harrington, 2001: 311), Verstehende approaches give attention to the grasping of the particular historical, cultural and linguistic contexts of an other’s experience. As I will show, empathic understanding of the historical and cultural circumstances of a refugee are not inherently hospitable. Empathy can close down hospitality when the social contract of hosting is tangibly intruded upon by – or comes to work in alliance with – the ever-present threat of deportation. At other times, empathy for trauma, pain and injury in the midst of distance and difference can go unrecognised as hospitality because it gives time and space to the strange and unforeseen.

In approaching voluntary hosting as prising open micro-locales of hospitality within a broader climate of hostility, I understand hosting as producing ambivalent and wayward socialities of care. This version of volunteering stands in contrast to former British Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron’s entrepreneurial and laissez-faire ‘Big Society’, envisioned as making minimal demands upon and disruption to the state. Refugee volunteering can carry the same conservative proclivities. Which is to say, refugee civil society groups can take on roles that are complementary to, or are in collaboration with the state (Mayblin and James, 2019), extending precarity and re-enacting the punitive conditionality that circumscribes refugee belonging and regimes of ‘deportability’ (De Genova, 2010). Refugee organisations also make demands on the state, illuminating unjust policies, structures and hidden histories. By putting into practice hospitable modes of living with others, I show how volunteers can reassemble more affirming discourses, spaces and everyday interactions in the register of what Squire and Darling (2013) call a ‘minor politics’. However, because organised hospitality develops in response to immigration regimes, such innovations bear the ambivalence of Fassin’s (2012) ‘humanitarian government’, carrying the potential to buoy up as much as regulate human existence.

Before I examine how hospitality can be practised in environments of political hostility to migrants and refugees, let me first contextualise British immigration policies and describe the methods used to elicit the hosts’ narratives.

Britain’s hostile environment

In 2012, Home Secretary Theresa May, of the UK’s coalition government, unveiled new measures aimed at reducing net immigration, making life especially difficult for those with irregular citizenship and residency rights. The approach was called the hostile environment. ‘The aim is to create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants’, May said (in Hill, 2017: n.p.). The policy set in train a new constellation of immigration laws and rules; namely, rights to regularise citizenship and rights of abode (‘patriality’), circumscribed by the 1971 Immigration Act and 1981 Nationality Act and more widespread checks on immigration status instigated by the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts. The latter drew immigration policing into the fabric of daily life in a ‘venacularisation’ of the border (Jones and Johnson, 2014), with border policing outsourced to an array of non-state actors (Yuval-Davis et al., 2017). Professionals in sectors as diverse as banking, health, education and housing were required to check immigration status. ‘Regardless of how removed their profession was from the world of immigration policy,’ Maya Goodfellow (2019: 2–3) has written, ‘the threat of being fined or sentenced to jail time loomed over them if they failed to carry out checks to ensure people they encountered through their work were in the country legally.’

This shift to the outsourcing and proliferation of borders as ‘a dense web of controls that displaces the border both inward and outward’ (Andersson, 2014: 798) is reflected in European policies, coinciding with heightened anxiety about Europe’s sovereignty and supposed post-national identity. ‘Europe’, as Etienne Balibar (2015: n.p.) more explicitly puts it, ‘forms a space within which borders multiply and move incessantly, “chased” from one spot to the other by an unreachable imperative of closure, which leads to its “governance”, resembling a permanent state of emergency.’ The on-goingness of the European emergency found ample discursive energy in the vocabulary of a ‘refugee crisis’ that began to garner media interest in the summer of 2015, subsequently feeding into media and popular discussions of the British referendum vote to leave the European Union (EU) in June 2016 (Brexit). As Fassin and Windels (2016) have also pointed out, in early 2015, a convoluted braiding of migration crisis narratives with those of an intra-European economic crisis, materialised in the harsh austerity measures implemented against Greece.

During 2015, more than 1 million refugees and migrants arrived in Europe via the Mediterranean (UNHCR, 2015) – more than double the number of arrivals in 2014. For Stierl (2020: 253), the 2015 refugee crisis marked ‘a catastrophe’ for the ‘EUropean’ polity in which ‘the tumultuous processes of national rebordering appeared to threaten the idea and being of the EUropean “postnational” project, a project often imagined as the very transgression of borders’. Imagery of the ‘crisis’ was characterised by ‘boats crowded to sinking point, faces trapped behind barbed wire fences or dead bodies of children tragically washed up on beaches’ (Back et al., 2018: 3).

It is debatable whether photographs of the lifeless body of 3-year-old Syrian Aylan Kurdi – washed up on a Turkish beach after the boat he was travelling in capsized – constituted a Badiouian ‘Event’, in which an intensity of appearance (a spectacle) perforates the taken-for-granted, inciting new political subject formation (Badiou, 2005). More modestly, the images of Kurdi have been understood as triggering ‘a certain ethical awakening in terms of the crisis’ (Evans, 2017: 60). Jones and colleagues (2017: 161) have noted how the photographs of Kurdi, who died on 2 September 2015, ‘brought “ordinary people” across Europe on to the streets in support of welcoming more refugees into their homes’, countering xenophobic rhetoric from politicians and the media (see also Sirriyeh, 2018). In the midst of the emergence of a novel cultural politics of immigration – where cultural politics connects ‘officially sanctioned state practices and public pressure’ (Nash, 2009: 8) – German Chancellor Angela Merkel pledged to take in 1 million refugees from August 2015, fortified by the rallying slogan ‘Wir schaffen das!’ (‘We can do it!’). In contrast, UK Prime Minister Cameron said that Britain would take 20,000 Syrian refugees from UN camps over a five-year period.

Across Europe during this time, charities supporting refugees saw significant increases in donations and offers of voluntary labour. For Doidge and Sandri (2019), it was anger and empathy that motivated British individuals to volunteer with pro-migrant groups. Doidge and Sandri’s ethnographic research was based in the Calais ‘jungle’ – an informal camp established by refugees in early 2015 – where ‘thousands of volunteers filled the humanitarian vacuum’ (Doidge and Sandri, 2019: 466). This type of border volunteering is driven by emergency intervention, ‘a politics of life’ (Fassin, 2007: 501). In the case of Calais, ¹ volunteers focused on ‘providing clothing and other forms of aid, such as shelters, first aid and a safe space for young people’ (Doidge and Sandri, 2019: 469). The volunteer hosting that I explore comes from the same galvanising political moment and similarly invoked narratives of empathy. Nonetheless, the nature of volunteering is substantially different. Hosting unfolds in the homes of volunteers and is centred on bodily maintenance. This reproductive labour in a domestic venue and where otherness is close by (see also Benhabib, 2004: 87) is inevitably caught up in the imperatives and contingencies of hostile environment policies, characterised by an inexorable shuffling and redistribution of uncertainty.

It is important to recognise that Britain’s immigration policies set in train differential hostilities. In early 2018, investigations by Guardian reporter Amelia Gentleman (2019) unearthed a more clandestine leaching of hostile environment policies. What came to light was the illegalising and deportability of Britain’s post-war labour migrants, dubbed (misleadingly) the ‘Windrush generation’ by the media. The Windrush events disclosed the diffuse, slow violence of the hostile environment (Gunaratnam, 2019a). Through the incremental recalibration and whittling away of citizenship and residency rights, those who had migrated to Britain from the Caribbean and other Commonwealth nations between 1948 and 1970, found themselves ‘silently “illegalised” by changing legislation and . . . struggling to obtain the complicated documentation needed to prove they had done nothing wrong’ (Viner in Gentleman, 2019: 2).

The Windrush scandal signified another turning point in British public opinion against immigration policies, with Katherine Viner, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, observing, ‘the scale of the outcry showed . . . that British people are not quite as racist as their governments took them to be’ (in Gentleman, 2019: 3). Yet, hard on the heels of the EU referendum of 2016, that had enflamed economic, cultural, generational and racialised divides, it is difficult to take Viner’s judgement at face value. Public sympathy towards the Windrush residents and anger at their treatment – which led to the resignation of the Home Secretary Amber Rudd – demonstrated the enduring force of moral dichotomies between worthy and undeserving migrants (de Noronha, 2020). As I will show, these moral judgements, of who is worthy of hospitality and who is not, also spill into civil society hosting.

Methods

The empirical research that I draw from consists of 13 qualitative interviews with 15 volunteers at an English civil society hosting charity. The volunteers were part of a network of home owners who provide temporary accommodation and support to destitute migrants and refugees. The convenience sample was recruited through email invitations sent out by the charity to all of its volunteers. The interview participants included volunteers (‘support workers’) who undertake initial assessments and remain points of (separate) contact for each host and guest during a placement. The organisation, based in a City of Sanctuary, was founded following a large local demonstration about the death of Aylan Kurdi in September 2015. The group went on to receive funding in early 2016. The interviews took place during September 2017–January 2018. Most of those interviewed were women (n = 12), of varying white British and European ethnicities (one person was British of South Asian descent). Those hosted included asylum seekers, refugees and individuals who had entered the country legally but had become irregularised due to lapsed or revoked immigration visas.

While not wanting to collapse home owning into class difference, all of the research participants can be described as the ‘established middle class’. This group holds economic, social and cultural capital (see Savage et al., 2015), along with the capacity for the intergenerational gifting of assets that has been identified as a vital mechanism through which class status is maintained (see Adkins et al., 2020; Piketty, 2014). Hosting also disturbs intergenerational asset flows – not least for those living in urban centres where property can accrue value at a faster rate than wages or inflation – by temporarily eroding asset holding and inheritance. Hosting a refugee can diminish the potential rent raised by letting out spare rooms and can delay downsizing – the move to smaller housing when children have left home – thereby deferring the freeing up of assets. (Although these assets are also threatened by the increasing need for means tested elder care).

At the level of culture, there are affinities between middle- and upper-class privilege and humanitarian discourses in their emphasis on egalitarianism. The ‘symbolic negation’ of status differences, as some sociologists have noted, is becoming a vital feature of the cultural capital and embodied Bourdieusian practical sense of a (white) middle- and upper-class habitus (Jarness and Friedman, 2016: 17). Other scholars have pointed to the figure of the cultural omnivore as evincing class distinctions through an ‘open, cosmopolitan orientation to both people and cultures’ (DiMaggio, 1996: 161). There are thus material and cultural class-imbued dynamics that infuse the hosts’ narratives, although we should not elide such features of class distinction with whiteness (Wallace, 2018). It is relevant that whiteness in the sample was mediated by family histories of seeking refuge for two participants, who both suggested a sense of genealogical indebtedness in their motivations to host. ²

The interviews that I did with hosts drew from the biographical narrative interpretive method (see Wengraf, 2001), centred on narrative-inducing questions. These are questions that ask about events and are open, ‘what happened?’ type questions, rather than asking directly for opinion, rationalisation or feelings. This is because opinions and narrated feelings can be constrained by what is socially acceptable or desirable. They tend to be pre-formulated and rehearsed, at times providing more insight into autobiographical theory and prescriptive, canonical narratives rather than experience. The interview topic guide was designed to open with one broad narrative-inducing question (see Riemann, 2003). Subsequent questions were framed by this initial narrative, following the order of the topics freely associated by the narrator. The rationale behind this format is that the initial, uninterrupted narrative has a shape or gestalt of sedimented experience, produced by the teller’s unique frame of relevance. A narrative interview ideally allows the gestalt to emerge undisturbed, no matter how jumbled or meandering certain accounts can feel.

In discussing the hosts’ narratives, I will offer a broad overview of motivations to host, moving on to close readings of empathy narratives in two interview extracts. The first reading examines conditional hospitality when hosting rules are breached. The second, shows how domestic intimacies can become hospitable in the midst of unbridgeable distances and difference.

Becoming hospitable

Motivations to volunteer and host were most commonly talked about in the interviews through an individual’s past activism, faith-based principles and personal family histories of displacement and exile. Being spurred to host following the media coverage of Aylan Kurdi’s death, and those of others crossing the Mediterranean Sea in 2015–16, was a recurring topic. Although some hosts had become volunteers primarily to support Syrian exiles, through their subsequent relationships with the charity, they became aware of the needs of those who ‘had fallen through the cracks’ of welfare support and had become destitute. At the time of writing, asylum seekers waiting for an immigration decision are not allowed to work or to claim non-contributory social security benefits. ³

Several volunteers spoke about the impossibility of everyday survival under current hostile environment policies that produce impoverishment (see Mayblin, 2020). Reflecting on the experience of one of her ‘guests’, a host ruminated, ‘how does the government expect them to be able to survive if they don’t let them work? She’s not allowed to study too as she’s not got recourse to any public funds, and if she can’t work how is she supposed to fund any study? . . . She’s completely stuck at the moment.’ In such circumstances the host felt that hosting networks were a lifeline:

like for instance, if someone is lucky enough to get asylum and they become a bona fide refugee, they get 28 days notice to leave their hostel accommodation which the government has provided. So in 28 days they have to save up enough money to get a deposit on a room somewhere, they’ve got to get a job, and they’ve got to get their national insurance card, all in 28 days. That’s why agencies like us have to help them. It’s just not possible.

Themes of social responsibility and care were common, as well as the practicalities of hosting being enabled by biographical changes, namely retirement, decreased work commitments and ‘the empty nest syndrome’, where children had left home and more space was available within a household. ‘I have two spare rooms in my house’ one host said, ‘I often have guests to visit, why not help other people when you can?’ The material and relative privilege of being in a position to host elicited ambivalent feelings, ‘Part of it for me was about, well here I am sitting in this house on my own, so I may as well try and make use [of it] because it’s a fairly big house for one person. Maybe there was some sort of guilt. I hadn’t quite explored that.’

The individualising of hospitality was framed by one participant as holding an inherent tension. She recognised how, ‘refugees are internal within society’, adding, ‘On the other hand, we’re absolving society from how they do politics.’ For this host, ‘Hospitality has to do with a sense of powerlessness.’ Another host described hosting as a political palliative, ‘We’re like little bits of sticking plaster, but it makes a difference if you’re bleeding.’ He continued, ‘I don’t do the work I do for the government to claim they are doing what they should be doing.’

Volunteering in some interviews signified and made real the transition from an ethics of conviction to an ethics of action (Fassin, 2007), most often expressed as the difference between giving money to charitable causes and a more personal, practical generosity, ‘There is something very tangible about giving someone food and warmth . . . it’s a way of staving off despair.’ The impetus to volunteer could also be framed as a performative and prefigurative politics, ‘We’re showing that this country wants refugees. The asylum system treats them so badly, hosts counteract that.’ Another host, from an East European refugee family, spoke of her reasons for hosting like this:

I felt I had the time and the availability of accommodation to do something more practical for people, so I was specifically looking to do something practical . . . [O]ur government were saying we were full and I thought that was nonsense. . . . I felt somewhat ashamed of the government’s response, in particular to the Syrian crisis, and I just felt, you know ‘Not in my name’.

Such narratives are sociologically interesting in at least two respects. First, they animate how middle-class identities can be practised in hosting through the braiding of how ‘the economic and moral work through each other to produce different forms of value’ (Wood and Skeggs, 2011: 18). The reparative place of the resourceful middle-class hospitable household in the last extract is also heavily freighted against the national, peeling away the lamination of whiteness from the nation. Second, the narratives demonstrate the political ambivalence of refugee hosting, encapsulating what Plummer (2003) has identified as a tension between citizenship as a status that carries political and legal weight and an identity carrying ‘social and cultural weight’ (2003: 50). Emerging and alternative intimacy groups, Plummer believes, speak a new and more inclusive language of citizenship, offering heterogeneous identifications, no longer tightly bound by affinities to national politics, laws, biological kinship or dichotomies between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Yet, as Jasbir Puar (2007) has shown, counter-conventional intimacy groups can be accomplices to emerging regulatory norms and realms of exclusion, and this deserves critical investigation.

A spectrum of hosting: ‘lodger’, ‘guest’ and ‘like family’

For those interviewed, hospitality ranged from the most practical (a room for a night or a week or two) to the more expansive and unforeseen, such as a refugee living with a family for months, or becoming a valued part of an extended family network. There are similarities here with Sirriyeh’s (2013) identification of three relationships of hosting to those providing foster care to unaccompanied minors, ranging from ‘lodger’, ‘guest’ to ‘like family’. In my interviews, the ‘like-family’ relationships were more of a queer kinning; familial intimacy could be refused or break down; might open outwards from the privatised nuclear household into broader transnational or local refugee networks; or could recede into more low-key bonds that enable the receiving of intimacy without obligation, reciprocity or coercive control. Continuing bonds in this sense are relatively unpredictable and precarious owing in part to the variety of the relationships that can develop in situations of profound precarity. Local conditions, such the high costs of accommodation or lack of employment and training opportunities for instance, meant that some refugees were unable to remain in the area and develop deeper and/or more long-lasting relationships with hosts.

How hospitality and intimacy are negotiated is also affected by pre-migration/exile experiences, British border policies, and the changing needs/wishes of the host and guest. ‘She doesn’t want to be part of the family’, one host said of her guest. For another host, their guest ‘was very clear that what made a difference to him was that he needed a home, not just a roof over his head. . . . It’s all about family. Not just having a room, so we would include him in things . . . .’ For others, hosting was narrated as a temporary, transitional space, with relationships spanning the ‘lodger’ and ‘guest’ relationships identified by Sirriyeh. In the words of one host, ‘It is important for a guest not to think it’s permanent. . . . It’s always a moving-on place.’ Another host described limiting ongoing contact with her guest because she found the relationship emotionally demanding at a time of personal difficulty:

what I decided at the time was I needed a clean break, because I wasn’t sure then that I could continue to provide her with support, as I found it quite emotionally difficult at that time, so I decided not to. I mean if I see her I’ll say hello and have a chat, but there was a part of me thinking I don’t want this relationship to become too dependent, and that was my reason.

In offering to host, whether it is through temporary accommodation, sharing meals, driving and accompanying someone to an immigration reporting centre, taking individuals shopping or being a reliable presence, volunteers can find themselves in contact with the day-to-day precariousness and degradations of immigration regimes. It is to these intimate zones of contact between homes and border regimes that I now turn.

Empathy and hospitality

As previously discussed, space and time are common themes in the literature on hospitality and empathy. In the following two interview extracts, I read for how space and time appear in stories of conditional hospitality. Although empathy and stances such as compassion and generosity are often taken as close kin of hospitality, a focus on space and time reveals more fraught and surprising ethical tensions, not least when located in cross-cultural relationships and citizenship precarity. For Rob Shields (1996), drawing from Verstehen approaches, empathy when applied to intercultural encounters cannot but assume a closing down of intersubjective and cultural distance, with ‘some sort of a-symptotic merging of two sets of personal and cultural understandings’ (1996: 279). Yet, as I will show, empathy for a refugee’s vulnerability within hostile environment policies can result in a shrinking back of hospitality without necessarily foreclosing intersubjective intimacy. I therefore try to show how hospitality articulates with empathy, so that they can become mimetically entwined, without allowing them to collapse into each other.

The following close reading shows more of the ambivalence and co-articulation of these relationships between empathy and conditional hospitality. The extract comes from a Skype interview with Phillipa (all names are pseudonyms), a white middle-class professional who lived in a five-bedroom house with her husband, on the rural outskirts of the city. Phillipa’s four sons were in their twenties and no longer lived in the family home. The excerpt is taken from a point in the conversation when Phillipa was free-associating stories of hosting. The teenager she is talking about had arrived in the UK when he was 13 years old. Phillipa retold his story like this: ‘he cried for most of the journey, he was terrified . . . he remembers nearly drowning and when he entered this country, he and three others was in a coffin-like box underneath a truck for a day-and-a-half until somebody heard them banging and let them out.’ The young boy was subsequently taken into foster care and attended a local school. As he approached 18 – the age of legal adulthood in the UK – he became increasingly anxious that he would be deported to a country where he had few connections.

Despite him being an ‘easy’ person to host, Phillipa went on to talk about the breakdown of the hosting relationship:

Unfortunately, we had to throw him off the scheme because, we went away for the weekend and we came back and we found, um, that he’d borrowed my husband’s BMW [Interviewer: Oh my god], um (laughs), um, he’d been washing it and we weren’t there and we weren’t due back and he had a driving licence and he had the keys in his hand and he only went 3 miles, but of course when we got home the garage doors were open and the car was gone and so I had to tell the manager of the charity that. I mean I phoned him [the young man] and he said ‘Oh, I’m very sorry’ and he brought it straight back, but there had been a breach of trust (Interviewer: umm) and if he’d been stopped by the police, he’d have been deported in an instant, because at that point he hadn’t got his new, you know, he was going to appeal his decision and he had to get a second asylum application in and because it wasn’t in he was in No Man’s Land and he could have been deported at any time. And I was really quite cross with him and I, [2], my husband was more ‘Oh he’s just a teenager, just a stupid teenager’, but, I was upset that he’d put himself at such risk (Interviewer: yeah), you know.

The story gathers together and ignites the ethical drama of conditional hospitality, surfacing through Phillipa’s attuned understanding of the implications of the risks taken by the teenager, as well as a domestic ‘breach of trust’. The extract calls attention to the uncomfortable interplay between autocracy and democracy that characterises all households (Mitropoulos, 2012) and the wider immigration system; the latter demanding migrant exceptionalism. Because of his precarious immigration status at the time, the young man is not allowed to be, indeed he cannot be, ‘a stupid teenager’. He must be a responsible, worthy, would-be citizen. The denial of multiplicity in a refugee’s life, not least the desire to seek out and enjoy spontaneous rather than deferred pleasure, is integral to the dehumanising disciplinary power of immigration regimes, bearing down heavily on some young men. The onerous reproductive labour of hosting can then become a pre-emptive bordering, affectively full and utterly embedded in a moral economy in which care and control are intertwined (Van der Veer, 2020). That the threat of a brutal and unforgiving immigration system cannot be negotiated, even when transgression has gone undetected, underscores how ethical imagination can be overwhelmed by border politics. And we must ask whether this shrinking of ethical imaginaries is also an aim, and not only an unforeseen effect of hostile environment policies and the pervasiveness of the border.

In a political and social policy register there are numerous mirror images of this domestic scene (see also Flemmen and Savage, 2017, on how populist nationalism is articulated through familial attachments). An event, uncannily close, concerns Chevon Brown, one of a large number of ‘foreign offenders’ deported from the UK to Jamaica between 2019 and 2020. Brown was deported in 2019, after he had been convicted of dangerous driving and had spent seven months in prison. He was 21 at the time of his conviction and had come to the UK from Jamaica at the age of 14. ‘I admit what I did was wrong. I know I am guilty of dangerous driving but it wasn’t a stolen car; nobody was hurt, I didn’t crash into anything, there was no damage’, Brown said. ‘I feel I was treated unfairly. I know a lot of English people who commit driving offences and don’t get classed as serious criminals’ (Gentleman, 2020: n.p.).

In juxtaposing Brown’s and Phillipa’s story, what emerges is the inescapable complicity of conditional hospitality with what Walters (2004) thinks of as ‘domopolitics’, in which state policies entangle the home with the nation as sites of securitisation. In this imbrication, ‘enhanced immigration and asylum controls’ flow into ‘an improved sense of citizenship and community within British society’ (Walters 2004: 239). Even though hosts might distance themselves from domopolitics, in Phillipa’s story through an empathic understanding and care for the vulnerability of the teenager she is hosting, the threat of punitive state surveillance and deportation overshadows the relationship. In such novel dilemmas of intimate citizenship, a host must be prepared to police and domesticate their ‘guests’ within the ominous canopy of border controls that surround the hospitable home. We should also not forget that forced expulsion for those who have spent their formative years in the UK is a terrifying ordeal; and these deportations have risen sharply in the past thirty years (de Noronha, 2020).

The breach of trust and subsequent exclusion of the young man from the hosting scheme is awash with the schematics of domopolitics as the rationalisation of ‘a series of security measures in the name of a particular conception of home’ (Walters, 2004: 241). The ultimate security measures in this story are not only in the wake-up call to the teenager of the threat of deportation but also in protecting the hospitality of the transitional humanitarian home, whose future hospitality is jeopardised by the unruly guest.

I now turn more directly to how relationships of time are configured by immigration policies and hosting, examining hospitality more explicitly as the giving of time and space.

Time and the other

Hosting as a transitional space is also an effect of immigration policies and rules. Those seeking asylum can be offered accommodation – under section 4(2) of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 – if they are homeless and destitute. To secure accommodation, some migrants can choose temporary homelessness. And if a section 4 offer is made, some hosts can ask their ‘guest’ to move on to free up space for those who are more in need. Migrants and refugees can also wait for months, in some cases years, for decisions about their immigration applications, moving from one host to another while waiting. Volunteers observed how their ‘guests’ were made passive, ‘only waiting for something to happen’, describing how ‘life was put on hold’. For Khosravi (2018: 39), being suspended in states of deportability robs ‘an individual of the viabilities of life. It wipes out the vision of a better future.’

The interrelation between living in the transitional space of being hosted and ‘waiting for something to happen’ can rearrange the experience of time, its pacing, rhythms, intensity, tempo and duration for both migrants and hosts. Time that is appropriated by immigration controls can come and go in erratic pockets and whirlwinds. There is the febrile time of having to respond to short deadlines, long drawn out periods of waiting while decisions are being made, and spikes of hope and anguish (Griffiths, 2014). There are also the warped temporalities that are a part of mental ill health and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The ascendancy of clock time and time discipline since the expansion of industrialisation has spawned modern temporal fetishisations of speed; of making the most of every moment and of living with time poverty. That immigration regimes erase conventional temporal coordinates through unpredictable decelerations, wastage and accelerations, is a perverse contemporary injury. Drowning in uncontrollable time, what comes to mind as a practice of time-boarding, is a dispersed, barely legible cruelty (Gunaratnam, 2019b). It is easily overlooked and difficult to hold to account, normalised as the collateral damage of precarious mobility. For instance, time can be lost or ‘stolen’ (Khosravi, 2018) in the dashed hopes and plans shattered by unfavourable immigration decisions, so that ‘you have to start again’, as one volunteer put it. Volunteers also spoke of how they observed ‘guests’ becoming emotionally withdrawn and disconnected from the temporal rhythms of sociality in a local community, household and/or their transnational networks in discordant cycles of inertia and depression. Witnessing and being brought into cycles of waiting, hopefulness, despondency and ‘starting again’ are a part of the emotional demands and labour of opening your home to refugees.

Despite the impositions of state, as well as institutional and domestic conditions of hospitality, the reality of living close to an other’s precarious life produces unexpected and feral temporalities. For example, it is an explicit policy of the hosting charity that hosts are not qualified to provide emotional support should they feel a guest is traumatised or depressed. Rather, this sort of care must be established through referral to another specialist refugee centre that provides therapeutic support from qualified professionals. Yet, visitations of the turbulent violations of immigration regimes are a constant threat to hosting policies. In the following interview extract from a face-to-face interview, Dylan – a single, retired, white British man, with two adult, non-resident children – talks about such a state of exception. The story is about a man from Eritrea who had lived with Dylan in his four-bedroomed house for five months. It was another freely associated story, told when Dylan was reflecting on guests who had had an impact on him. The story trailed off without a formal ending or coda, suggesting that it remained an unfinished experience:

In the second week, no the third or fourth week that he was here . . . his wife went into labour and the baby was breach I think, and she lost the baby and we were here on the phone to her . . . so, he was talking to her on the phone as far as he could and she was with a friend. Anyway she was hiding out in Sudan pretty much. She lost the baby and was losing blood herself but they then managed to get her to hospital and she survived. It was a very difficult night. . . . I mean partly, their first baby had died and partly because it looked like for two hours that she might die and then we lost phone contact and we didn’t know and it, it was like 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning and you know that can happen . . .

The extract re-tells a deeply traumatic event. However, we need to be careful in drawing lines between the quotidian and the spectacular. What concerns the poet and Black Studies scholar Fred Moten (2017) is how the invoking of a traumatic event serves to enclose and delimit suffering, preserving ‘the appeal to the very idea of redress even after it is shown to be impossible’ (2017: xii). To speculate about the violations of global hostile environments in Dylan’s circumstances – about what it means to hear through a phone, in a temporary shelter, in the company of a relative stranger that your first child has died and your wife’s life risks ebbing away, is to begin piecing together a referent for an ethics of hospitality and intimate citizenship that recognises how transnational empathy can entail/demand distance and difference (Pedwell, 2014).

In contrast to sociological Verstehende approaches, which can assume some plane of synchronicity and coincidence between the self and the other for intersubjective understanding (Shields, 1996), the structure of relationality in Dylan’s story is embedded in separation. Neither is otherness in the account easily subsumed under cultural signifiers of identity. These matters of distance and difference have been central to feminist explorations of ‘coeval’ relationships (Bastian, 2011) and critiques of empathy. Such work asserts that crosscutting differences can be lived intimately at the same time with distance, so that simultaneity is not mistaken for shared experiencing or understanding. Or, as Dikeç and colleagues (2009) put it, we must be careful of ‘figuring the embrace of otherness with spatial inclusion and the disavowal of otherness with exclusion’ (2009: 8). What this means for the ethical and political ambivalence of hospitality becomes clearer when thinking about Dylan’s story as necessitating an unconditional hospitality to the other; one that is not hemmed in by rules or policies and is an unanticipated visitation (see Barnett, 2005). Here, intimate citizenship holds the tensions between hospitality as a legal and/or territorial relationship, and as a non-volitional, affective exposure to another. This is not to suggest that refugee hosting is more about the former than the latter, but rather that conditional and unconditional hospitality can exist within the same volatile moment.

Conclusion

The contemporary hosting of migrants and refugees is producing new and ethically fraught dilemmas of intimate citizenship for those committed to materialising hospitality at a time of intensified nationalism, xenophobia and racism. As a performative welcoming, hosting can also conscript civil society into border and detention politics and a humanitarian logic. Rather than evaluating certain hosting relationships and practices as better than others, I have wanted to draw attention to situations of hospitality as exemplars of conundrums of intimate citizenship, through which immigration systems can intrude upon the social contract of hosting in unexpected ways. These situations are marked by located embodied, affective and temporal excess, reaching beyond how hosting and its conditions can be envisaged or aspired to in the abstract.

The two hosting dilemmas that I have investigated through close readings are characterised by disturbances that get under the skin, forcing and inciting thinking and feeling. In this, they do more than offer insights into the chasms between idealised commitments to hospitality and a more ambivalent reality. They show how hosting is tightly bound up with the immigration nexus to the extent that humanitarian reasoning and empathy can as much re-enact disciplinary power as counter it. Nonetheless, there is nothing inevitable about these relationships.

More broadly, with and through political and ethical ambivalence, hosting is diversifying the public realm and the UK’s hostile environment, illuminating the diverse relationships to migrants and refugees that are possible, while also enabling survival. In the future contingent of these plural and counter-cultural arrangements for living together, the lower-case intimate citizenship politics of hosting necessarily opens lives to new assemblies of discomfort and dispossession. While generative of a situated ethics, hosting brings home the extensive structural force and violence of borders.