In The Wall, the United Kingdom responds to waves of climate change refugees by walling off the country from the rest of the world. The Wall is science fiction, but anti-immigrant sentiment plays a role in contemporary European politics, especially in the United Kingdom. Lanchester satirizes anti-immigrant ideology in order to show the natural end of virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric—dystopia.

Calls to exclude or eject immigrants from Europe and the United States have surged since 2015, bringing nationalist, far-right candidates and parties to power (Tanvi, Misra. “The Year in Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric.” Bloomberg. 2015). Politicians who use anti-immigrant rhetoric channel the grievances of people who have paid the cost of globalization, the increasingly international nature of business and capital. According to this rhetoric, perceived surges in crime, a lack of jobs that pay a living wage, erosion of support from safety net programs like the National Health Service in the United Kingdom, tax increases, and the loss of British national identity are all the fault of immigrants.

This rhetoric has had an impact on national and international policies vis-à-vis immigrants. European countries have tightened up their laws to make it harder for people fleeing war in Africa and the Middle East to gain asylum; the comparatively generous treatment of forced immigrants from Ukraine during the Russia-Ukraine War indicates that racism and old colonialist ideas about the Middle East and Africa may be at work in immigration policy.