When is a hostile environment for immigration not a hostile environment? When it has been rebranded as a “compliant environment”. Following Amber Rudd’s defenestration over the Windrush scandal, fresh-minted home secretary Sajid Javid explained: “I don’t like the phrase hostile. So the terminology is incorrect and I think it is a phrase that is unhelpful ... It is about a compliant environment and it is right that we have a compliant environment.”
A “compliant environment” does not mean that trees and squirrels do whatever we ask; in military and regulatory contexts it indicates that the rules are being followed. So it is not the environment itself that is compliant – from the Latin for “fulfil” or “accomplish” – but the actors within it. In war, you turn a hostile environment into a compliant one by shooting all the bad guys. Or, perhaps, deporting them.
Who, though, would object that it is wrong that we have a compliant environment? If no one in their right minds would disagree with some political claim, you can be sure it is euphemistic cover for something much more debatable.
