Emotional borderwork, a hostile affective milieu and everyday resistance in the British National Health Service

This chapter explores the emotional borderwork healthcare professionals perform as they interact with bordering infrastructures in the British National Health Service (NHS). The UK Home Office’s hostile environment policy, first announced in 2012 under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, is a set of administrative and legislative measures designed to make people living in the UK without the legal right to do so as uncomfortable as possible. Within the NHS, these changes in law, policy and practice restrict access to healthcare presenting practical, ethical and moral dilemmas for employees. We present empirical work exploring the perspective of healthcare workers, alongside our own experiences campaigning on migrants’ rights and work in the NHS. We show how affectively situated staff are shaped by, and shape, a hostile affective milieu within the NHS and reveal how conflict between this and their duty of care to patients opens possibilities for resistance.