García Rodríguez and Watkins, ‘Other than in the hotel, I feel safe almost everywhere’, 2026

Diego García Rodríguez and Leah Russon Watkins, ‘”Other than in the hotel, I feel safe almost everywhere”: Hotelized containment, governable (in)visibility and LGBTIQ+ survival in UK asylum hotels’, Migration Studies, Volume 14, Issue 4, December 2026

Abstract

Drawing on participant observation and semi-structured interviews with LGBTIQ+ people seeking asylum in England and Scotland, this article explores the role of asylum hotels as sites of governance in the United Kingdom using two connected concepts. Firstly, we use the term ‘hotelized containment’ to explain how hotels are repurposed into quasi-institutional spaces of enforced waiting, everyday control, precarity, managed dependency, and limited autonomy. Secondly, we introduce the notion of ‘governable (in)visibility’ to explain how LGBTIQ+ residents can simultaneously be hyper-visible to the state and accommodation providers while being compelled to conceal their identities in their everyday communal lives. We argue that accommodation is not incidental to LGBTIQ+ asylum governance but constitutive of it by showing how asylum hotels can generate exposure to institutional disbelief and reactive safeguarding. Using queer necropolitics as an interpretive lens, our findings illustrate how avoidable harm becomes normalized within the ordinary operation of asylum hotel life for LGBTIQ+ residents.