The History of Anti-Immigrant Housing Myths

The history goes back to at least 1895, when a Tory MP ran in Bethnal Green on a platform blaming Jewish immigrants, many fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe, for increased rents and poor housing conditions in the area.

Three quarters of a century later, during the most infamously racist election campaign in British history, the Conservative candidate associated with the ‘if you want a n***** for your neighbour, vote Labour’ slogan successfully tapped into anti-immigrant sentiment around housing, blaming migrants for the 4,000 strong waiting list for council housing in the area and arguing that ‘if more houses can be built they should go to British people first’.

At the turn of the 1990s, in Millwall on the Isle of Dogs, the local Liberal Democrats took to campaigning on the basis of the myth that migrant communities were receiving preferential allocation of council housing. They reportedly stated in election materials that ‘Labour are deliberately giving a better deal to ethnic minorities’, and a Liberal Democrat councillor made plans to visit Bangladesh to pass on the message that there was ‘no room left for immigrants’ in the borough. All this was no doubt effective, assuming the aim was simply to get racists elected. While Liberal votes fell back, support for the BNP surged, and the neo-Nazi Derek Beackon was elected as the party’s first ever councillor in 1993.

The Labour Party, too, is no stranger to anti-immigrant narratives around housing. The recent high water mark was an intervention by then minister Margaret Hodge, who dusted off BNP talking points in 2006. Blurring the lines between ‘white’ and ‘British’ and ‘ethnic minority’ and ‘migrant’, she said local white residents ‘can’t get a home for their children, they see black and ethnic minority communities moving in and they are angry,’ and later suggested that the ‘legitimate sense of entitlement’ of ‘indigenous’ families to council housing should override the ‘need of new immigrant families who come in’.

Hodge did such a stellar job of making the case that she received a thank you bouquet from the BNP, who praised her for raising an issue which had featured in their manifestos for years. In response, the Equality and Human Rights Commission launched an inquiry into whether white families face discrimination when applying for social housing.

Myth and Reality

Unsurprisingly, this turned out not to be the case: the fact is it turns reality on its head. As the resulting independent report concluded, there is ‘no evidence that social housing allocation favours foreign migrants over UK citizens. But there is a small amount of evidence which suggests that they may, unintentionally, discriminate against ethnic minority communities.’ Further government research into the relationship between the housing crisis and migration has painted a similar picture.

In truth, racialised groups find themselves on the sharpest end of the housing crisis. No Recourse to Public Funds, an anti-migrant condition introduced by New Labour in the 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act, prohibits nearly 1.4 million people in the UK from accessing homelessness assistance and social housing, and it disproportionately affects people of colour. More recently, a range of measures which restrict migrants’ access to housing, including landlord checks on the immigration status of prospective tenants, have been rolled out.

As a consequence, migrants are hugely overrepresented among rough sleepers, and are far more likely to live in sub-standard accommodation: 40% of recent migrants live in housing deprivation, compared to 10% of UK-born households. Racialised housing inequality also affects minority ethnic groups, who are significantly more likely to be living in overcrowded conditions than white British households, and are often directly discriminated against when seeking housing.

And yet to this day myths about migrants ‘jumping the housing queue’ remain a favoured topic for local campaigns by far-right activists, with Britain First repeatedly harassing asylum seekers temporarily housed in budget hotels during the pandemic, this time on the spurious grounds that they were being granted accommodation ahead of homeless veterans.

The onslaught of propaganda has undoubtedly had an impact. Research from 2010 found that a quarter of white British people felt they were treated worse than people of other ethnicities by social landlords—a level of perceived discrimination only matched by black people in relation to their treatment by parts of the criminal justice system. A survey six years later found that over half (54%) of those who agreed there was a housing crisis believed that immigration was the largest contributor to it.

According to Fredi Gentz, organiser with the community and housing union ACORN, ‘anti-immigrant sentiment is a constant threat while organising.’ In particular, he says, ‘the myth about the preferential allocation of council housing to migrants is really, really common.’ While anti-immigrant housing myths may pose a threat to organisers like Fredi, their influence is highly convenient for those truly responsible for the crisis.

The Utility of Anti-Immigrant Housing Myths

This is evident in the case of New Labour. Deflecting from their ‘decade-long assault on council housing‘, laying the blame at the door of immigrants obscured both class dynamics and the effects of government policy.

At the time of Hodge’s intervention, New Labour had been in power for nearly a decade—in the course of which the UK had seen a nascent housing crisis blossom into something approaching its current form. Having built far less council housing than even the Thatcher government, a combination of the Right to Buy and estate demolition meant that the social rented sector had declined to just 18% of all dwellings in England, down from a height of 30% when Right to Buy was introduced. As a result, an estimated four million people languished on the social housing waiting list. All the while, the 1988 Housing Act’s ‘Rachmanism with tax breaks‘ reforms of the private rented sector remained in place, and landlordism was encouraged by way of buy-to-let mortgages. The end result: housing wealth accumulated at one pole, while housing misery accumulated at the other.

Anti-immigrant housing myths brush such inconvenient truths under the table. As David Robinson, Professor of Housing and Urban Studies at the University of Sheffield, argues, ‘there’s a shared working class experience, regardless of ethnicity, and one of the really effective roles these narratives play is in dividing and turning people against one another, undermining the development of a shared class consciousness.’

Such myths also cut the path for regressive policy changes which make the lives of migrants far harder, with the rest of the working class often next in line for the same treatment. As the authors of a 2015 paper write, ‘a review of successive restrictions on access to local authority housing leaves an impression that sometimes measures are trialled on migrants, with a view to later extension’. In 2009, for instance, in the wake of Hodge’s comments, the law was amended so that councils could discharge their duty to homeless households with mixed immigration status by way of an offer of private rented accommodation, instead of the offer of social housing which had previously been assured. Two years later, the same weakened provisions were introduced for all homeless households.

Indeed, since at least the 1993 Immigration Act, we’ve had a legal system defined by relentlessly escalating restrictions on access to adequate housing for migrants, and in that same period the housing crisis has worsened for all. As a programme for improving housing conditions for British nationals, anti-immigrant housing reform has been tested to bitter destruction—not to mention the devastating consequences it has had for non-British nationals. Something has to change.

Organising Against the Myths

Until such a change is brought about, anti-immigrant housing myths will doubtless remain a challenge. ‘As long as there’s a housing crisis, these myths are going to continue to be a problem,’ argues Kane Shaw of the London Renters Union.

In light of this—and in light of their damaging effects for the working class, migrant and non-migrant alike—it is important that those organising around the housing crisis are ready to constructively challenge such myths where they arise. ‘The threat is one that we have to engage with,’ says Fredi Genz, ‘because just like we want to mobilise immigrants, we want to mobilise people who might have anti-immigration sentiment.’

Unless we do so, collective challenges to the current system will flounder, and racialised housing inequality, fuelled by anti-immigrant myths, will deepen. To effectively fight the housing crisis, we need to challenge such myths; and to materially fight racism, we need to resolve the housing crisis—with only the patient work of organising to ensure that racism breaks on the rocks of solidarity, rather than vice versa.