Migrant Experiences of Homelessness During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Charlotte Sanders | Simon Stewart
Location: South England
Timeline: 2020-2022

PROJECT DETAILS

The UK government’s Everyone In scheme, announced in March 2020 in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, required local authorities to temporarily house all homeless individuals in their area regardless of immigration status. This ensured that many migrants received homelessness assistance for the first time.

In many ways, Everyone In was a great success and showed what can be achieved with relatively modest sums of money. However, the project’s findings also indicate that many migrants missed out on the initiative and remained on the street during the pandemic. Moreover, the initiative remained embedded within a 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.

This research project drew on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over 18 months as part of the broader ESRC/UKRI-funded Researching Migrant Homelessness project. This involved interviews with staff at nine homelessness organisations across three cities in the South of England, and life-story interviews conducted with migrants receiving support from those organisations.

The project’s findings and recommendations have already been captured in several outputs and incorporated in reports published by the Health Foundation (2021), the Kerslake Commission on Homelessness and Rough Sleeping(2021), Homeless Link (2022), and The No Accommodation Network (NACCOM) (2023).

APPROACH

The project deployed the life story method, which offers alternative modes for seeing the world, and situates narrator participants as experts in the contexts and conditions of their own lives. The life story method can make space for complex personhood and “messy” experiences.

The project introduced the notion of ‘cultivated invisibility’ which refers to a habitual and embodied practice that involves staying on the move and blending into the crowd, and finding ways to eat, wash and sleep in public places while going undetected. But it also refers to experiences of being unseen despite having come forward for help.