Click:applications of nano satellites
Hospital and housing administrators, 2013. Wikicommons. Some rights reserved.Theresa May’s ‘hostile environment’ policy is under
scrutiny. The government is doing all it can to contain the Windrush scandal
from spilling over into a broader criticism of the last decade of UK
immigration policies (but, in fairness, some elements date back to the Labour
government). Various affected groups and advocates, on the contrary, are
vociferously arguing that far from an
exception, a distortion or a bureaucratic error – all explanations offered by government’s
supporters – the treatment of the Windrush generation is instead the tip of the
iceberg, and the iceberg is the policy-driven ‘hostile environment’ built under
Theresa May’s tenure of the Home Office. Admitting defeat on her flagship policy, the one that arguably
made her a darling of the likes of The Sun and Daily Mail, would land a major,
perhaps even fatal, blow to her premiership.
One tenet of the ‘hostile environment’ is that it
operates diffusely, co-opting public service providers, landlords, employers
and even private residents in the job of immigration enforcement. Border checks
are no longer one-off encounters between border guards and immigrants confined
to the geographical borders of states, but are routinely repeated in a myriad
of micro-encounters. They have penetrated the everyday, mundane interactions in
people’s daily lives and imposed new meaning on them. Pregnant women
avoiding interactions with their GPs or cutting short their stay in hospital
after delivery for fear of being reported to the Home Office for their
immigration status is but one example.
The proliferation of internal borders came in stages,
one little step at the time, and often changes were initially challenged but
then they came back, slightly repackaged, and they slipped in unchecked. The British Medical Association, for example, mounted a challenge to initial attempts
to impose visa checks on patients in hospitals. Doctors are not border guards
it was said. But then visa checking came back more subtly: it was not doctors who
would be in charge of it, but less paid and less vocal administration staff.
New compliance officers appeared all over public services. ‘Compliance’ is a
key word, apparently depoliticised and yet far more bureaucratically effective
in filtering access to services to various groups of the population. Visa checking came back more subtly: it was not doctors
who would be in charge of it, but less paid and less vocal administration
staff.
In the higher education (HE) and further education
sectors, more stringent visa checks on students were introduced to unmask
abuses of the immigration system by allegedly bogus English language colleges. But they travelled a long way from there, and are
now a central part of the bureaucratic machinery of British universities:
imposing straining and time-consuming bureaucratic requirements, leading to numerous
new administrative appointments, and more
importantly affecting the relationship between students and teachers and the
very nature of what universities should be about, that it is the production and
circulation of knowledge across disciplinary and geographical boundaries.
Recent news stories in The Guardian
and Times Higher Education highlights the broad ranging and far reaching
consequences of the ‘hostile environment’: behind the veil of compliance,
universities are embracing the Home Office agenda to the point of having become better border guards than the Home
Office itself. The unconditional and zealous endorsement of this policy affects
international students and international staff. Any individual who fails to
report their attendance as well as any time spent off campus on a weekly basis is
at risk of being reported to the UK Border Agency. Failure to comply may result,
it is explained in an email sent to international staff in a British
university, in ‘disciplinary action and/or withdrawal of your
certificate of sponsorship, and thereby your eligibility to remain in the UK’. Universities are
embracing the Home Office agenda to the point of having become better border
guards than the Home Office itself.
Thousands of non-UK citizens working in UK universities, including many
EU nationals, find themselves in a paradoxical position: at the same
time co-opted in the job of border guarding their students, for example
collecting signatures, reporting unjustified absences and even being
granted the power to decide if an international student can or cannot
travel back home for a wedding or a funeral – while increasingly
experiencing themselves the ‘hostile environment’: border guards and
border guardees.
One may be excused for thinking that such an
unconditional and zealous endorsement of this policy, by producing docile
international staff whose rights and freedoms are restricted by the
requirements imposed by the Home Office with limited rights, for example, in
relation to participation in the recent strike actions, subject to continuous
monitoring of their activities and whereabouts, may serve well the now dominant
model of university that thrives on casualized work, precarious contracts, underpaid academic staff and a systematic undervaluing of academic work.
Not only
about foreigners
The normalisation of border checks in public services
must be resisted. The ‘hostile environment’ is not about ‘illegal migrants’. It
criminalises preventively all migrants, treating all as potentially ‘illegal’.
But, be sure, this is not only about ‘foreigners’. The Windrush scandal shows
the contempt of the UK government for those who came from the former colonies
as British subjects, a contempt no doubt deeply rooted in colonialism and
racism. The ease with which the UK government has turned the EU citizens living
in the UK in bargaining chips in the Brexit negotiations is also a testimony of
the extent to which the hostile environment is pervasive and operates as a
logic of governance that reshapes the rights of citizens and immigrant alike
and the relationship between the state and its subjects, redefining the meaning
of citizenship in the process.