It’s now ten years since Britain’s home secretary, Theresa May, announced the so-called “hostile environment.” May’s self-consciously aggressive immigration policy led to the Windrush scandal, which saw dozens of people unlawfully deported from Britain to countries they had left as children.

Official hostility to immigrants and refugees dates back long before May entered the Home Office. The current British government is pushing the envelope even further, with Priti Patel’s scheme to forcibly transport asylum seekers to Rwanda. For all the theatrical cruelty of Patel and her allies, Britain is no outlier in a Europe where ideas once associated exclusively with the far right have entered the political mainstream.

Maya Goodfellow is an academic and the author of Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats. This is an edited transcript from Jacobin Radio’s Long Reads podcast. You can listen to the episode here.