“We didn’t cross borders, borders crossed us”: activism in universities against the Hostile Environment

 1. Introduction

“If the Home Office has its way, you will soon be living on Planet Cop. The police will live everywhere, watching you without you knowing it. There won't be any need for telescreens or security cameras; the cops live behind every face, waiting for your mistake, and then they burst out” (1) wrote Sam Kriss in a Vice article in 2017. This description is far harsher than the one used by the Home Secretary Theresa May, when she introduced the Hostile Environment policy in 2012: “the aim is to create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants.” May identified a specific target – illegal immigrants - while Kriss warned of a surveillance and disciplinary state. 

Yet, the two visions might be more similar than what it seems. Creating a hostile environment for immigrants requires imposing measures that completely change the way in which the public authorities act and are perceived, altering the relation between citizens and the State and, importantly, turning every citizen into a potential immigration officer. This is what Foucault identified as the “micro-physics” of power: “the power exercised on the body is conceived not as a property, but as a strategy, that its effects of domination are [attributed to] dispositions, manoeuvres, tactics, techniques, functionings; that one should decipher in it a network of relations, constantly in tension, in activity, rather than a privilege that one might possess.” (2) The implementation of the hostile environment policies have affected public institutions, going beyond traditional border policing: hospitals, city councils, schools, universities, landlords, and local authorities. Most communities’ interactions have been intruded on by the creation of ‘everyday borders’. What is the impact of such a policy on the personal relationships in local communities and in public spaces? And, on the other hand, how can we fight back against this policy and promote solidarity among people?

A good lens through which to analyze the impact of the hostile environment is that of university education and, in this case, “university borders”. This is not only because this journal is published within a university, where change is needed, but also because the focus on higher education can help in showing how different public institutions are interconnected. Use of philosophical thought connects this piece to the themes of oxford public philosophy, but more than that, philosophy is a useful tool for thinking about issues such as the hostile environment. Philosophical analysis, more so than economic or political analysis, can show the interconnection between immigration policy, public institutions, and the history of British colonialism. We need to understand where political agency comes from, what motivates it and what constrains it.

2. Planet Cop 

In the book Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, the French philosopher Jacques Rancière describes police as “an order of bodies [identified by the law] that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise.” (3) Such a definition applies fittingly to the UK border regime, and in particular to the system of detention centres, which were developed as a tactic of dispersal, to prevent undocumented migrants from entering cities and showing their bodies, letting people hear their voice. With the prevention of movement, borders turn individuals into a single ‘illegal subject', by getting rid of their histories and presenting them as potential criminals that may harm the well-being of society.

Nevertheless, the last decade of immigration policy has gone far beyond standard border policing, making Rancière’s conceptualization insufficient. Let’s start with an overview of the changes in immigration policy in higher education. Despite focusing on one single public sector, connections with many other sectors emerge in this analysis, confirming the cultural impact of the hostile environment. 

The hostile environment policy in higher education has its roots in the points-based immigration system (PBiS) instituted by Gordon Brown’s New Labour government in 2008 and rolled out between 2008-2010. In order for universities to sponsor international students and staff they had to open their institutions to Home Office monitoring via attendance records. With a reliance on non-EU international tuition fees to offset government cuts, universities complied with the PBiS. Initial rules were vague. However, PBiS required universities to open their institutions to pre-arranged or surprise visits from UK Visa and Immigration (UKVI). The brutality of the system was shown in 2009 when, during a Justice 4 Cleaners campaign at SOAS University in London, cleaners were called to an emergency staff meeting by the outsourcing company – at dawn – and found 40 immigration officers waiting for them: 9 people were detained, among which 5 were members of Unison – the union conducting the campaign, 6 of them were deported, and 2 were held in custody, while the SOAS management was accused by students of complicity in the “scapegoating of the most precarious and exploited members of the "academic community".” (4)

In 2012, the Coalition Government – Conservatives and Liberal Democrats – introduced the Highly Trusted Sponsor (HTS) status to universities. Universities had to gain an HTS status in order to sponsor non-EU international students and staff. The definition from UKVI is, “HTS status is designed to ensure that all education providers are taking their obligations on immigration compliance seriously”. When a university or school becomes a highly trusted sponsor they are allowed a greater deal of autonomy when recruiting students into their academics programs, but, to gain HTS status, universities have to open their doors to more pervasive monitoring by the Home Office. If universities do not meet HTS status criteria, they are considered to be inappropriate for the program and then can only accept students from the European Economic Area (which is going to change further with Brexit). This is important not only because it is a major form of marketization of university education, (5) which since then had to rely on student’s fees more than on public finance; but also because the measure directly affected several students who had grown up in the UK, but did not have British citizenship and therefore were considered as international students. 

At the London Metropolitan University in 2012, due to what the government called a ‘serious systemic failure’ in its monitoring of its international student body, 2700 non-EU students had sixty days to find another institution or face deportation. The entire future of the university was put at risk. Importantly, the UK Border Agency allowed the sixty-day leeway only to those students already on courses and with valid visas; any student without valid permission to remain in this country - and the UK Border Agency says its checks found some - do not get the same 60-day leeway (6). In this latter category many students who grew up in the UK but are not yet recognized as British citizens run the risk of being deported. Anecdotal evidence reveals that there are students and prospective students at the University of Oxford today who face difficulty in taking up their offers due to the Home Office and, if their college successfully fights for their place in the university, are required to pay International Tuition Fees without a student loan, despite growing up in the UK. (7)

The Immigration Act of 2014 marked the official implementation of the Hostile Environment; the Immigration Act of 2015 introduced the NHS surcharge fee (£624 from March 2020) for international students and it demanded landlords to ask for immigration status before renting; the Immigration Act of 2016 introduces the motto “deport first, ask questions later”, so that Tier-4 students are no longer allowed to extend their VISA or change their VISA status from the UK. Moreover, international students from a list of 40 countries potentially at risk (24 of which are of Muslim-majority) have to register with the police on their arrival. Recent measures required by the Hostile Environment are: attendance monitoring via card reader, as well as the implementation – especially in post-1992 universities – of SEAtS software system for student attendance and predictive analytics. This happened during the November 2019 strike, when international students in Liverpool were threatened by university administration that exploited immigration guidelines to reduce strike capacity (8). 

The extent of this control – from university administration, to landlords, councillors, police officers, NHS staff, and local authorities – goes beyond law enforcement and aims at becoming a cultural approach to immigration and diversity. Indeed, while immigrant workers and students are the primary target, the system allows immigration officials to contact spouses and relatives of undocumented student or worker migrants living in the country if deemed necessary. The Hostile Environment imposes ‘everyday borders’ to make the UK a ‘hostile place’. Foucault coined the term ‘biopower’ to refer to “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations” (9). Rancière’s understanding of biopower is particularly compelling: 

This is probably what Kriss meant by “the cops live behind every face, waiting for your mistake, and then they burst out.” At the same time, however, the impact on the functioning of the community should not overshadow the primary targets of the hostile environment: immigrants. The political technologies illustrated in the paragraphs above constantly obstruct migrants, reducing their spaces of liveability; migrants – either students or workers – are not considered as a bare life, but rather as an exploitable life (10). Many of them take on the most precarious jobs in the labour market, workplaces where employers hardly recognize union’s rights and where speaking out against poor conditions is difficult. Exploitation in the workplace is different from violence in detention centres, the latter usually takes on a more concrete bodily form. However, the Hostile Environment and border policing must not be considered in opposition, but rather as part of the same mode of government of migration, and the UK in a broader sense: exploiting the work of the people that the law identifies as illegal immigrants, but whose status is checked mainly in situations of conflict (e.g. strikes, political activities, but also, more in general, labour-management relations and access to education), so as to break labour unity; and monitoring immigrant students and staff, but at the same time compiling full surveillance accounts of their network of friends, family and colleagues. What Foucault tells us is that policing may happen at every level of society; what Rancière adds to it - as we will see below - is that policing should be treated as class conflict. 

3. Resisting ‘University borders’

During the last university workers strike – February and March 2020 – the student-led movement Oxford Migrant Solidarity (OMS) brought forward a series of actions aiming to attract interest in the fight against the Hostile Environment and Immigration Detention. OMS first co-organized a walk around Oxford with Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group (11), as part of the project ‘The Refugee Tales’, which brought together migrants, activists and citizens to call for the end of immigration detention. ‘The Refugee Tales’ run monthly walks around the UK and a five-day walk every summer in the British countryside to show that people fight against this system. OMS executed an overnight direct action in Oxford, putting up posters on the town’s walls with conversations between volunteers and migrants stuck in Calais, to remind people of the hostility of current migration policies in Britain. 

The action was part of a broader campaign, ‘Undoing Border’, that involves movements in many UK universities connected through the network People & Planet (12). The campaign aims at dismantling the Hostile Environment by putting pressure on Vice-Chancellors to agree to ending surveillance measures, preventing the involvement of immigration officers in campuses, and reclassifying migrant students from “International” to “Home” students for fee purposes (as a way to acknowledge the long-lasting history of the UK’s colonialism). Forms of surveillance and potential intervention are completely at odds with the idea of university as a space, a community, where people can interact and learn: these measures divide the students’ community between those “who can” and those “who can’t”, but they are also intended to analyze and control the entire student body, which is seen as something that needs to be “domesticated”.

Finally, during the strike, OMS ran a teach-in (13) titled ‘University Borders Teach-in: the Hostile Environment and its impact on Higher Education’, with content in line with this essay’s second section. The teach-in was run jointly with NoTech4Tyrants, a collective of digital activists against the practices of surveillance in the public and private sector. 

OMS actions have continued before and after the strike, but during the strike an intersection emerged between the fight against the commodification of higher education and the racist policies of the Home Office. It is crucial to emphasize that the University of Oxford – proclaimed worldwide as the house of free-thinking – has actually implemented, throughout its history, practices of exclusion based on a Eurocentric and elitist definition of “academic excellence”, based above all on class, but also on many other privileges, including race. Graduate and undergraduate application processes require a cultural capital that cannot be untied from individual students’ economic background. In this sense, Oxford tends to become a self-selective institution, welcoming long lineages of families rich in money and culture. Scholarships and initiatives to diversify the student body are not yet enough to counter this trend. This is also to be related to the internal organization of the university that the Black Lives Matter protests in June have emphasized: western-centred curricula and the body of professors affect the functioning of the whole academic system. 

At the same time, the activity of OMS has been empowered by and in constant collaboration with structured groups in Oxford and in the UK. The activity of Oxford Against Immigration Detention over the past twenty years has been fundamental in the shutting down of the Campsfield House, an immigration removal centre in Kidlington (Oxfordshire) and they are now, together with OMS and individual citizens, establishing an anti-immigration-raids network in town. The work of Unis Resist Border Controls (14) (URBC) and MedAct (15) have been crucial in inspiring modes of actions, campaign strategies and in providing information on the policy. 

From the student occupation at SOAS in 2009, after the deportation of cleaners, to the action outside the University UK conference in London titled ‘Enhancing the students’ experience’, where Vice-Chancellors celebrated diversity and equality in their universities, students have collectively mobilized. The political activity of students embodied Rancière’s definition of politics, according to which, “politics exists when the natural order of domination is interrupted by the institution of a part of those who have no part.” (16) Politics is an antagonistic activity based on “the set of practices driven by the assumption of equality between any and every speaking being” (17). The struggle is not placed out of context, but movements that support migrants enter a long genealogy of struggle against UK colonial legacies, the commodification of education and public institutions, and, more broadly, against an exclusionary system.

Despite the attempts to silence them, practices of solidarity and civil disobedience represent a vision that is incompatible with the attempt to destroy and exclude forever an “enemy” of the political community; they represent the opportunity to rethink the pervasiveness of the UK’s colonialism and the choice to neglect that by promoting a new concept of citizenship. The actions and victories of activists’ campaigns may seem small – and they are, compared to the great deployment of financial and human resources operated by the Home Office – but they trace an alternative to the divisive and racialised treatment of the public promoted in the last decade. Universities can be an important ally in this path, and for this reason organizing has to continue.

A university, and in particular the University of Oxford, should play a central role in shaping public policy decisions not just by being the place where students are formed for a future profession - which is a definition of university that disregards all the practices of exclusion and recognition that happen (and can happen) within the university. The university should give more importance to the voice of its students: this would mean more free spaces where students and professors can develop their ideas and human relations; but also, in a more materialistic sense, more stability to develop these ideas, thus reducing job precariousness in academia, both for staff and professors; and, finally (which should come hand in hand with the previous two elements), by allowing a greater deal of transparency and participation in the decision-making process of university policies. In Oxford, in particular, a more articulated and profound internal dialogue - reflecting on the issues analyzed in this article, such as migration, colonialism and inequalities - would have a tremendous impact on the evolution of the city of Oxford itself. The University of Oxford should work so as to reduce the gap between "town" and "gown".