http://archive.blogsome.com/2009/06/18/without-the-crossing-there-is-no-border/

‘We called for labour power’, playwright Max Frisch once said, ‘and human beings came’. The British government has called for higher education fees, and is discomforted by the actual arrival of non-EU students along with their overseas students’ fees. Apparently, it cannot tell the difference between overseas students and ‘illegal’ (undocumented or semi-documented) immigrants or even terrorists, so it suspects them of being one or the other unless they prove otherwise. The proof must be continual, in case they lapse, or ulterior motives are allowed to emerge.

Two years ago, in the backlash of paranoia after the failed London and Glasgow car-bomb attacks, the Telegraph dutifully duplicated a Tory press release: there was a ‘Student visa loophole’, rendering ‘Mr Brown’s overall strategies against terrorism … “fatally flawed”‘. The anti-terrorism ‘crackdown’ was ‘in danger of being undermined by a failure to monitor immigrants’ [1]. In a bidding war to be tough on terrorism, the crudest of xenophobic policies are quickly laundered and adopted across the political spectrum.

By April 2009, the Labour government had introduced its new ‘Tier 4′ of the Points Based Immigration System, whereby students from outside the EU or Switzerland must have their attendance and progress monitored by their educational institutions, and be reported to the UK Border Agency (UKBA) for any repeated absences. This is despite their already significantly proven commitment, usually at great cost to their families, since prospective students must have their fees for the first year deposited up front in a bank account in their name, plus £600 per month in living allowance plus £400 per month living allowance for each dependant. Educational institutions must be licensed by the UKBA in order to admit students from outside the EU, which universities are very keen to do, since they want the fees. Institutions failing to police these and other immigration regulations can have their licences downgraded or withdrawn. Moreover, all such overseas students are being forced to acquire biometric identity cards, of the sort that has been roundly rejected for the rest of the population. Educational institutions must keep on file the information on these cards.

The media announced the new visa fees and proof of savings required of non-EU students in the context of a racialised moral panic that migrant workers were a drain on the economy through their extra demand on housing stocks, health and education services and the resources of local councils – even though a recent London School of Economics study, commissioned by the London mayor, Boris Johnson, has calculated that ‘An amnesty for an estimated 618,000 ­illegal immigrants in Britain would provide a £3bn boost to the economy’ [2]. Ideology about ‘British jobs for British workers’, propagated by the prime minister and the British National Party alike, continues to circulate within the maelstrom of xenophobia. Coincidentally, perhaps, at this very time new legal requirements also came into effect for educational institutions with employees from non-EU countries. Their passport data and visas must be kept on file by their employers, and eventually, they, too, must hold biometric identity cards. It may be that employers, in order not to be seen to discriminate, are demanding copies of passports and the like of all new employees, whether or not they are British nationals, but there is no mistaking the intent of the provisions.

The significance of this ’surveillance creep’ has not been lost on the University and College Union (UCU), whose members will be required by their employers to give effect to the new regulations, and are already being directed and trained to do so. The union rightly reasons that it is not the job of workers in universities, for example, to become de facto agents of the UKBA [3]. Further, it is inimical to the functions and core values of higher education, and those who teach there, to be spying and reporting on their students. These measures, if implemented, would betray the trust and destroy the openness upon which academic processes and the ethics of the university depend. They are immoral. Nor should university staff be performing mini-Stasi roles for the immigration authorities in filing and submitting personal information about their colleagues from abroad: the data collection and functions of immigration authorities are not the rightful province of universities, nor are observing and reporting their attendance patterns and compliance with immigration requirements.

Even if there were a terrorist threat of the sort that is imagined, universities are not set up for a policing function and nor should they be. Forcing them to conduct surveillance would be an inefficient measure. ‘Terrorist’ students could adopt the simple precaution of attending classes. Moreover, if there has been a real problem with ‘bogus colleges’ and the exploitation of their students, this has been in large part caused by a privatising of education and the consequent marketing opportunities for cynical operators. It will not be remedied by bullying genuine educational institutions into harassing their students. If vulnerable students are being exploited in the labour market, then again the problem and the remedy lie there, and not in the institutions in which they are enrolled to study.

If the surveillance measures are to be implemented in universities, they can only be practically effected (in the case of the attendance records) through directing university staff to single out certain categories of students to be checked up and reported upon in a highly discriminatory manner. These staff have a legal right and a moral duty to decline these surveillance tasks. Further, the new controls and the ethos generated by recently introduced requirements are likely to run contrary to the Higher Education Funding Council for England’s widening participation agenda of ‘ensuring equal opportunity for … all ethnic groups’ [4], even if this is not designed with non-EU students in mind.

Accordingly, the University and College Union’s Congress overwhelmingly carried a resolution on 29 May that:

‘The UCU immediately launch a campaign of non-compliance with all such policing and surveillance duties (including recording details from foreign national students, supplying personal details to other institutions in our capacity as external examiners, assessors and lecturers, and refusal to request such details on behalf of our own institutions from external examiners, assessors and lecturers). The UCU will give unqualified support to any member disciplined or victimised as a result of this campaign’.

These are strong words and bespeak a firm stand. Yet in these days of Thatcherised industrial relations, union leaderships are timorous of anything with the whiff of illegality. (So much for our history!) Already four days before the Congress, UCU General Secretary Sally Hunt was pre-emptively recoiling from this position: ‘Members need to be clear that these duties are part of a legal obligation on universities, and that the union’s protection of members cannot extend to endorsing a breach of the law relating to the points-based system, or defending members who do so’ [5]. The leadership of the union’s forerunner already has a record of deferring to lawyers and ceding its democratic decision-making in the matter of the academic boycott of Israel in 2005. It will therefore require a good deal of pressure from the rank and file, from whence this current resolution came, to hold the leadership to the Congress’s non-compliance decision.

This democratic pressure must be applied. Otherwise, it starts with spying on our students, and very easily leads to some being incarcerated, while the rest – academics and students alike – learn some obvious, unpleasant, and not unprecedented lessons.
References: [1] Carlin, B., Steele, J. and Gardham, D. (2007) ‘New UK terror threat from foreign students’ Telegraph, 9 July. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1556904/New-UK-terror-threat-from-foreign-students.html accessed 15/6/09. [2] HEFCE (2009) Widening participation http://www.hefce.ac.uk/widen/ accessed 15/6/09. [3] Labour Research (2009) ‘We are not border guards’. June. http://www.lrdpublications.org.uk/publications.php?pub=LR accessed 16/6/09. [4] Lipsett, A. (2009) ‘University lecturers may boycott immigration ’snooper’ rules on foreign students’, Guardian, 25 May. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/may/25/lecturers-foreign-students accessed 15/6/09. [5] Travis, A. (2009) ‘Migrants amnesty would aid economy by £3bn, says study’, Guardian, 16 June. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/jun/15/migrants-amnesty-immigration-london-johnson accessed 16/6/09. For further information email: Scott Poynting: S.Poynting@mmu.ac.uk or Steve Tombs: S.P.Tombs@ljmu.ac.uk.

On Friday, June 12 cleaning staff at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), employed by the company ISS, were called to an emergency staff meeting, where they were set upon by forty immigration officers and taken away for questioning. Six of the cleaners have already been forcibly removed from the country, while two remain in custody. Students at SOAS have rightly protested against the intolerable conduct of immigration police and ISS (already criticised for their maltreatment of workers on the London Underground) and the lack of any opposition to this action by university management.1 This scapegoating of the most precarious and exploited members of the ‘academic community’ is deeply objectionable.

Cleaners at SOAS had recently made important gains, in conjunction with other workers and students, in their struggle for better working conditions and the London Living Wage.2 In a country where union activity is already curtailed, and where the desire to roll back the gains of the labour movement continues to obsess elites, it is perhaps not surprising if government and employers respond to struggles for elementary rights with such expedients. Yet at a moment when all over Europe economic anxieties are playing into the hands of xenophobes, who propose that we shore up our security by excluding or oppressing those whose lives are most insecure, it is particularly urgent to resist the blinkered authoritarianism that lies behind these arrests, which are not only unjust but hypocritical. Even the mayor of London (hardly a critical sociologist) has recognised the extent to which London’s economy depends on the labour of immigrant and undocumented workers.3 It is bad enough that this city is the site of extreme economic inequalities, it is totally unacceptable that those at the bottom of the rung – often made invisible by the hours and conditions of their work – should be rewarded for their toil with such contempt.

Needless to say, universities are not special places, reservations for freedoms absent from the ‘real world’ beyond. But they are institutions whose critical vocation and cosmopolitanism should hold them to certain standards. The students at SOAS have clearly been more faithful to this calling than those who facilitated these arrests or turned the other way. They have demanded of their institution a minimal coherence with its reputation for research on human rights and migration. They have rejected the pervasive cynicism that allows us to be critical in theory but indifferent to, or complicit with, practical abuses of power. They have testified to the idea of universities as places where the questioning of how we’re governed, how we work and how we live together is not a purely speculative pursuit.

If tolerated or ignored, current moves to integrate education, business and the state will effectively make a mockery of any vision of the university as an institution that seeks to foster independent thought and broaden our solidarities. This is true both of the often invisible and precarious labour that makes university life possible and of academic life in general. If the government has its way, universities will become extensions of the border, with lecturers and administrators effectively required by law to monitor their students on behalf of the Home Office.4 This is not a question of some unique moral mission bestowed on academia. What Friday’s arrests and deportations bring home is that universities are workplaces much like any others, microcosms where all the stresses and contradictions of our society – inequality, the exploitation of migrant labour, the expansion of state power – are manifest. But they are also places where we supposedly foster critical thinking – an activity that is irreconcilable with the callous and hypocritical treatment of the SOAS cleaners.

Sign Petition
Notes

1. http://freesoascleaners.blogspot.com/ [^]
2. http://mercury.soas.ac.uk/unison/slwc/news.htm [^]
3. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/apr/15/boris-johnson-illegal-immigrant-amnesty [^]
4. http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/apr/14/student-immigration-rules-boycott [^]

Tags: academy, citizenship, immigration, labour

Alberto Toscano teaches sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (forthcoming from Verso), and sits on the editorial board of Historical Materialism.

RALLY 4.30pm TODAY OUTSIDE SOAS, ON THE STEPS…

Student and worker activists at the School of Oriental and African Studies
(SOAS) in Central London have occupied the university’s directorate block
in protest at an immigration raid and potential deportation of 9 cleaning
workers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9WoqaqLXuk&feature=channel

Their blog is online at http://freesoascleaners.blogspot.com/, and their
Facebook group is at
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=89511288639&ref=mf.

Please use these sites to find out more information and for details of how
to send messages of support/solidarity.

Protest monday 15th 8.30 SOAS.

Defend the migrant workers facing deportation after they unionised and secured a london living wage.

I thought given the nature of the UCU boycott of these draconian immigration practices people might be interested in supporting this struggle…

See London student for more details:
http://www.london-student.net/2009/06/12/students-protest-sudden-deportation-of-soas-cleaners/

Wednesday, 17 June, 6PM

Lecture Theatre 106, First Floor, Roberts Building, UCL, Torrington
Place(opposite Waterstones, Malet Street).

This meeting is open to anyone interested in discussing the new
immigration rules, and to think of ways of campaigning against them. It is
called by London Region UCU (HE) and hosted by UCL UCU. It is an open
public meeting.

Speakers:

Frances Webber, campaigning immigration lawyer

Arun Kundnani, editor ‘Race and Class’

Ann Singleton, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for the Study of Poverty and
Social Justice, University of Bristol, signatory on Times Higher Education
letter, available here:
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=406422

For more information, see: http://www.ucu.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=3698

Download a flyer here:
http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/ucu/flyers/pbimeetingflyer.pdf

———————–
SOAS IMMIGRATION RAID

Without any advance warning from their ISS bosses nor the
university management, SOAS cleaning staff were confronted by a
hefty team of immigration officers at 6.30am this morning (Friday
12 June).

Fearful cleaners were detained on SOAS premises as the officers
demanded to see their papers. Some were taken into rooms of the
university to be interviewed. A shocked witness said that someone
had to intervene when a heavily-pregnant cleaner was being
manhandled by immigration officers.

Nine cleaners were taken away by Immigration Officers.

SOAS staff and students, many who had been at a protest at the
sacking of another cleaner and UNISON Branch Chair, Jose Bermudez
Stalin, were shocked and outraged by the raid and fear that the
cleaners may be deported very soon.

There has been widespread support amongst lecturers, staff and
students for the successful campaign for the living wage and union
recognition led by mainly migrant cleaners.

Graham Dyer, SOAS UCU Branch Chair said: “It is no co-incindence
that there is an immigration raid at a time when the UCU ,Unison
and the NUS are fighting against the victimisation of a migrant
worker who has been at the heart of a fight that has improved the
pay and conditions of workers here at SOAS. It is also not
coincidental that ISS had only just signed a union recognition
agreement with UNISON last week. Our fight has united lecturers,
staff and students and has rocked SOAS management. Those managers
are now lashing out. It is a disgrace that SOAS management saw fit
to use a seat of learning to intimidate migrant workers. This is
their underhand revenge and we will do all we can to stop migrant
workers paying the price.”

Ken Loach, director of the film Looking For Eric, stated:

“This raid is the action of a bully. Migrant workers are amongst
the most vulnerable – poorly paid and far from home. Recent action
by Unison to secure better wages and conditions at SOAS was good
news. Now we wonder if the SOAS cleaners are being targeted because
they dared to organise as trade unionists. We should all stand with
them in solidarity in the face of this victimisation.”

The living wage campaign has had the support of John McDonnell MP ,
who said:

““As living wage campaigns are building in strength, we are
increasingly seeing the use of immigration statuses to attack
workers fighting against poverty wages and break trade union
organising. The message is that they are happy to employ migrant
labour on poverty wages, but if you complain they will send you
back home.

It is absolutely shameful.”

Press Enquiries/messages of support to Dr. Graham Dyer :
gd1@soas.ac.uk 07940 539 027

See http://www.solomonsmindfield.net/ for updates

Bored at work and trying to come up with names for this publication. Do you think ‘toten Hund’ is too goth? I think it’s way too goth, but I kind of like it because of that. ‘Dead Dog’ would be the punk rock version; way too full on, but it appeals because it’s so unsuitable. Better ideas and suggestions gratfeully received

Tom