A/HRC/41/54/Add.2 56. The Government’s underlying immigration enforcement strategy relies on private citizens and civil servants to do front-line immigration enforcement, effectively transforming places like hospitals, banks and private residences into border checkpoints. In the context of national economic and security anxiety, in which racial and ethnic minorities (including and especially those who are refugees and migrants) have been the popular scapegoats for a wide range of societal ills. The Government must urgently abandon this strategy. Under such conditions, racial and religious profiling in the exercise of immigration enforcement by private citizens and civil servants is a predictable and arguably incentivized outcome. To be clear, international law, including international human rights law, protects national sovereignty, including in the area of immigration enforcement. However, where the strategy for immigration enforcement is so overbroad, and foreseeably results in the exclusion, discrimination and subordination of groups and individuals on the basis of their race, ethnicity or related status, such a strategy violates international human rights law and undermines the Government’s stated commitments to racial equality. 57. The hostile environment policy described above will remain in place for as long as the legal and policy frameworks rooted in the Immigration Acts 2014 and 2016 remain in place. Shifting from the rhetoric from “hostile environment” to “compliance environment” will have little effect if the underlying legislative framework remains intact. Efforts such as eliminating deportation targets can achieve only slight cosmetic changes to an immigration enforcement regime that has permeated almost all aspects of social life in the United Kingdom. It is important to underscore that a hostile environment ostensibly created for, and formally restricted to, irregular immigrants is, in effect, a hostile environment for all racial and ethnic communities and individuals in the United Kingdom. This is because public and private actors continue to deploy race and ethnicity as proxies for regular immigration status. Even where private individuals and civil servants may wish to distinguish among different immigration statuses, it is likely that many are confused among the various categories and thus err on the side of excluding all but those who can easily and immediately prove that they are British or those whose White ethnicity confers upon them presumed Britishness in certain contexts. 58. It should be noted that there are significant differences between England and the rest of the United Kingdom in terms of approaches and openness to immigration. Asylum and immigration are not devolved matters and remain reserved powers of Westminster. However, the devolved nations have responsibility for the implementation of integration policies and the delivery of basic services to asylum seekers and refugees. In her consultation with local authorities in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, the Special Rapporteur generally encountered more human rights-based approaches to immigration among government authorities in the devolved nations. For example, on 22 March 2018 the Welsh parliament launched a consultation on a draft plan for refugees and asylum seekers 89 to seek views on proposals intended to develop and improve access to help, advice and services for people seeking sanctuary across Wales. The consultation also included proposals aimed at tackling inequality and poverty experienced by communities. 59. In Scotland too authorities and politicians have promoted a more welcoming and human rights-based approach to integration. The New Scots Refugee Integration Strategy 2018–2022 outlines a vision of a welcoming Scotland that supports the early integration of refugees and asylum seekers from the moment of their arrival. The Strategy adopts a rightsbased approach and emphasizes the importance of ensuring the involvement of refugees and asylum seekers in shaping the Strategy and its implementation. 90 Although the Special Rapporteur was informed about certain difficulties in implementing the Strategy in practice, interlocutors appreciated that the Strategy is a departure from the rhetoric and policies of the hostile environment. 89 90 16 https://beta.gov.wales/sites/default/files/consultations/2018-11/181116-nation-of-sanctuaryresponses.pdf. https://www.gov.scot/publications/new-scots-refugee-integration-strategy-2018-2022/.