Seeking and creating home

Against a political backdrop of immigration being labelled as a crisis and a problem over recent years, my doctorate has been exploring the experiences of non-UK citizens who have been homeless in the UK. I was delighted to receive a bursary to present at the HSA annual conference 2025, and my paper discussed one of my key findings: the idea of a unique double experience of being a guest, in both individual homes and the national home.

My fieldwork drew on interviews with 15 people who had moved to the UK and experienced homelessness in the past decade, all of whom described lives marked by precarity and instability. Their housing pathways included rough sleeping, hostels and shelters, and staying as guests in others’ homes, either through formal hosting schemes or sofa surfing. It is the experience of staying with others that forms the focus of my paper. Participants’ guesthood operated both interpersonally and nationally: not only were they guests in the homes of others, but, as non-citizens, they also occupied a metaphorical guest status within the nation. The nation-state has long been understood as a collective home (Davies, 2015), a framing echoed in the name of the Home Office. Here, I outline the three dimensions of guesthood that emerged from my findings.

First, being a guest means meeting certain criteria, whether these are explicitly stated or implicit and unspoken. Hosts make choices about who crosses the boundaries of their home. Organised hosting schemes (such as Homes for Ukraine) may formalise a host’s criteria and rules, but these still exist even in informal hosting arrangements. On a national level, political decisions that create social policy establish criteria for who is allowed to be in the country, choices are made about who is desirable. Participants were aware of this, for example, one person said: “I didn't get asked many questions in the airport, I didn’t, saying that, that was me coming…as a Spanish. When I came as a Venezuelan I was barely allowed in.” 

Secondly, being a guest left them in a state of dependence. On the individual level, participants were reliant on their hosts for somewhere to stay, often as a last resort and having very few or no other accommodation options. Hosts did not have to have participants staying with them; participants were aware that they usually did so out of goodwill. On a national level, non-UK citizens are dependent on the Home Office for their ability to stay legally in the UK, and to gain a sense of stability. One participant talked about being able to cross the line of living a full life in the UK and meeting his goals: “that line is blocked by the Home Office”.

Finally, this dependence affects how participants acted, and the second aspect of guesthood that I identified is self-regulation. Being a guest rendered them highly visible: they felt scrutinised, judged and under pressure to ‘perform’ in a certain way, to be a ‘good’ guest, in order to keep their accommodation. For example, a participant told me: “some days I come back from work I'm thinking I don’t want to talk to anyone tonight but you have to be polite, you know.” The guest cannot fully relax; the space is not theirs, and they are therefore painfully aware of each and every action that they take, careful all the time not to cause any problems for their host. This pressure exists on a national level too. The recent ‘earned settlement’ proposals from the Home Office (Home Office, 2025), are a timely reminder of the pressure that migrants are under. The idea that settlement must be ‘earned’ contributes to the idea that there are ‘good’ migrants and ‘bad’ migrants, a sentiment that has continually been reinforced over the past years with the focus on ‘illegal’ migration (Walters, 2010; Blinder and Allen, 2016).

These aspects of being a guest - meeting certain criteria, being in a state of dependence, and therefore being conscious of all your actions and watching your every move - are heightened by being experienced both on an individual and a national level. Taken together, they create a real  instability and temporariness in people’s lives. These findings are particularly relevant at a time when the UK is undergoing a period of intense political debate over migration, welfare conditionality, and borders, and where shifting policies, tightened eligibility criteria, and increasingly punitive rhetoric directly shape who is recognised as deserving of support, who is excluded from it, and how precariously many migrants are forced to live as a result.

References

Blinder, S. and Allen, W.L., 2016. Constructing immigrants: Portrayals of migrant groups in British national newspapers, 2010–2012. International Migration Review, 50(1), pp.3-40.

Davies, M., 2014. Home and state: Reflections on metaphor and practice. Griffith Law Review, 23(2), pp.153-175.

Home Office (2025) Earned Settlement: Consultation Document. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/earned-settlement (Accessed: 25th February 2026).

Walters, W., 2010. Imagined migration world: The European Union’s anti-illegal immigration discourse. In The politics of international migration management (pp. 73-95). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.