Institutions are required to notify the UK Border Agency (UKBA) if a student fails to enrol within the enrolment period, if they discontinue their studies, if they miss ten ‘contacts’ (lectures or tutorials) without permission, if the institution stops sponsoring them, if there is a significant change in the student’s circumstances, or if the student is suspected of breaching the conditions of their leave (for example, by working more than the permitted 20 hours per week).

An electronic ‘sponsorship management system’, compulsory from February, will ensure that all relevant sponsorship information is stored online for UKBA to access. The system includes online forms in which sponsors have to report on their students. Failure to comply will jeopardise the institution’s sponsorship licence.

The University and College Union

(UCU) has reported that members at a number of institutions have been told they must put attendance registers online, to be sent on to UKBA.

According to UKBA, the new system was introduced to crack down on ‘bogus students’ who enter on a student visa and instead go into full-time employment. Individual applicants are required to attend to have a biometric (fingerprints) taken before being granted a visa, and must carry identity cards when in the country.

UKBA claims that the points-based system helps keep alleged terrorists such as Umar Abdulmutallab out of the country. But the alleged Detroit bomber gave his tutors at UCL no cause for concern during his

three-year course there. He attended all his lectures and would not have been reported under such a system, while his subsequent application to attend a bogus college would have been refused under any system. Certainly, there is no evidence that a 47-page application form – including eight questions about applicants’ involvement in terrorist activity – keeps terrorists away.

Taking evidence of acceptance by an educational institution as proof of a student’s ability to follow the course, which the new system does, is an improvement on the old system where visa officers assessed students’ ability – a feature open to abuse by over-zealous or racist officers.

However, a recent study by the UK Council for International Student Affairs (UKCISA), found applicants refused visas for trivial or erroneous reasons (one was refused for listing her nationality as ‘Nigeria’ instead of ‘Nigerian’) and having to reapply – meaning another fee of up to £550. One student commented, ‘It was really horrible and painful experience because I was denied a visa due to the inadequacies of the British [officials]. Due to this, my parents vowed not to allow my siblings come to England for studies.’

Immigration minister Phil Woolas confirmed that between July and September 2009 around 20,000 overseas students were refused visas that were subsequently granted, often too late for the beginning of term. The obstructive behaviour of immigration officials means that tens of thousands of overseas students are being put off coming to the UK.

The government is currently doing a further review, this time to consider whether to give student visas only to students on degree and postgraduate courses. What would become of the hundreds of English language colleges, colleges of accountancy and business studies and so on if this proposal was carried through?

As well as the shortfall in student numbers enrolling in UK educational institutions against those expected to come in 2009-10, 96 per cent of universities and colleges reported to UKCISA that the recruitment and admission of international students had required additional financial resources. 85 per cent had needed additional staff. The combination of fewer numbers and heavier administrative burdens are likely to have serious repercussions for universities and colleges particularly reliant on overseas students.

The government is sacrificing the futures of thousands of would-be students and educational institutions – and the relationship between students and their educators, who should not be required to act as an unpaid arm of the immigration police.

To find out more see students not suspects blog and Facebook page

From 5 October 2009, support for destitute asylum seekers over 25 has been slashed from £42.16 to £35.15 per week, representing just over half of income support – the level of income the government has set as a basic safety net.

Since the Home Office took over responsibility for supporting asylum seekers in the late 1990s, its support has been grudging, mean-spirited and clearly designed to deter rather than welcome.

The level of support was set at 70 per cent of income support if destitution could be proved, but initially was ‘in kind’ – paid through vouchers redeemable in supermarkets, which were enticed to join the scheme with promises that they could keep the change. A campaign supported by the Transport and General Workers Union led to the abolition of vouchers, but they have crept back into use for ‘section 4′ support of refused asylum seekers who can show that they are unable to leave the country. After more campaigning, the vouchers are to be replaced by smart cards.

Compulsory ‘dispersal’ of asylum seekers out of London and the south east for the past decade has led to increased isolation and vulnerability to mental illness and racist attacks. At the same time, a policy that allowed asylum seekers to work was reversed, creating unnecessary dependency and contributing to popular racist myths of ‘asylum scroungers’.

The extreme reluctance of the Home Office to allow asylum seekers to work stems from its institutional perception of asylum seekers as disguised economic migrants seeking to jump the queue to work in the UK. This myth is fostered by its own conduct in excluding so many from even below-subsistence support – such as those who fail to claim asylum within three days of arrival – that they are driven to work undocumented.

Refused asylum seekers too are excluded from all support, unless they can show that they cannot be returned home, and it is this group – including Zimbabweans, Somalis, Iraqis, Iranians, Eritreans and Afghans – who have suffered the most hardship. Research by Refugee Action in 2007 estimated that 20,000 asylum-seeking households were destitute. On average those interviewed had been destitute for 21 months, and 60 per cent of respondents had slept on the street on at least one occasion.

In 2007 the parliamentary joint committee on human rights condemned the asylum support system in devastating terms, observing that ‘by refusing permission for most asylum seekers to work and operating a system of support which results in widespread destitution, the treatment of asylum seekers in a number of cases [is] inhuman and degrading.’

Its report referred to ‘countless examples of Home Office inefficiencies in processing support claims, with severe consequences for desperate, vulnerable people who have no other means to support themselves … The institutional failure to address operational inefficiencies and to protect asylum seekers from destitution amounts in many cases to a failure to protect them from inhuman and degrading treatment.’

The report condemned the inadequate housing often provided, and described the voucher scheme for refused asylum seekers as ‘inhumane and inefficient. It stigmatises refused asylum seekers and does not adequately provide for basic living needs.’ The committee concluded that ‘the government has been practising a deliberate policy of destitution … The policy of enforced destitution must cease.’

But the government refused to implement the committee’s recommendation that asylum seekers and some groups of refused asylum seekers who could not return home be allowed to work, and has appealed a High Court ruling to that effect. It is no surprise, then, that a 2009 follow-up to a 2006 survey into destitution among asylum seekers in Leeds found continuing high levels of ‘serious and prolonged’ destitution (Still Destitute: a worsening problem for refused asylum seekers, JRCT, 2009).

In its treatment of some of the most vulnerable people in our society, the government shows contempt for the basic principles of human solidarity and compassion.

www.stillhuman.org.uk

By the time you read this, the area of wooded dunes near Calais may have been cleared of the shanties that are home to over a thousand migrants and would-be asylum seekers. They come from countries including Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Eritrea, Somalia and Sudan, all seeking security in the UK.

In July, French immigration minister Eric Besson denied that the bulldozing of the camps was imminent and pledged that humanitarian organisations would be fully involved in any clearance plan. Calais deputy prefect Gerard Gavory immediately contradicted him, emphasising that the operation was to take place soon, that no notice would be given to the organisations providing humanitarian assistance, and that those in the camps would be forcibly deported if necessary.

Both the French and the British authorities want to get rid of the camps, considering them an embarrassing eyesore for tourists, and an emblem of the ‘disorderly’ movement of non-Europeans who insist on ignoring national borders in search of safety. Proposals include setting up a new detention centre for migrants in the British-controlled part of Calais docks to make control and removal easier.

In July, Gordon Brown announced that £15 million would be spent on more detection devices to search lorries leaving French ports for the UK, and in return French premier Nicolas Sarkozy promised to speed up the removal of undocumented migrants. Efforts have also been made to persuade those seeking asylum to claim in France rather than the UK.

The UN High Commission for Refugees full-time representative in Calais, along with NGOs such as France Terre d’Asile, has tried to disabuse the migrants of their hopeful fantasies about life in Britain; and in May the French authorities made it possible to claim asylum in Calais, instead of in Arras, 100 kilometres away. But the presence of relatives and friends, the enduring belief in British fairness and the Dublin Regulation laying down EU member-states’ responsibility for asylum claims all deter claims in France. The last allows removal to the migrants’ point of entry into Europe – generally Greece. Here await inhuman conditions, a refusal rate of 99.9 per cent and deportations to torturing states.

Whether or not the expected bulldozing happens, the migrants have more immediate problems. Apart from the ever-present threat of arrest and deportation, and the reality of frequent police round-ups and attacks with tear gas, they have to contend with living in utter destitution (since if they don’t claim asylum they are ineligible for any welfare benefits). For shelter, most have dwellings of plastic sheeting, cardboard and ply. There is no running water and no sanitation. In June a 32-year-old Eritrean drowned while trying to wash himself in the canal, and recently the insanitary conditions have led to an outbreak of scabies.

Salam, the main voluntary group working with the migrants, distributes food daily at seven coastal sites as well as providing legal advice and help. It has negotiated with the local authority to allow the provision of showers by a Catholic aid organisation, but no one knows when they will start or what conditions will be attached.

Most of the hostility to the encamped migrants comes from this side of the Channel. The Daily Mail, for example, has run scare stories about human chains of asylum seekers across Calais motorways carrying out knifepoint robberies of British tourists. But these stories have no basis in fact. The border police at Coquelles have had no such reports, and the Calais police denied the Mail’s story that they advised holidaymakers to keep car windows and doors closed.

The No Borders camp at Calais in June brought over several hundred protesters. But solidarity with the migrants attracts police harassment. The camp was blockaded and demonstrations in the town were attacked by police, who made more than 20 arrests. Meanwhile, harassment of volunteers distributing humanitarian aid continues, under French laws that criminalise assistance to undocumented migrants.

The immigration minister denies that this law, designed to target traffickers and profiteers, penalises solidarity. He has promised to meet solidarity groups and to extend exemptions for social and medical workers. But Salam notes that the proposed exemptions don’t cover volunteers, and point to the recent prosecution of its vice-president, Jean-Claude Lenoir. Although he was acquitted in July of insulting a police officer, the prosecution has appealed.

No Borders Brighton’s ‘Mailwatch’ is at
http://nobordersbrighton.blogspot.com

All the suspects were released without charge two weeks later after a thorough investigation found no evidence. But ten Pakistani students remain in detention, in category A conditions, held by the UK Border Agency for deportation as a ‘threat to national security’. An urgent application to release the students on bail was heard on 12 May but was refused pending a full bail hearing in July – too late for them to sit their exams.

Despite rulings from the House of Lords and the European Court of Human Rights denouncing detention on the basis of secret evidence, the men remain in the dark as to the reasons for their detention and proposed deportation. One of them, Tariq Ur Rehman, returned to Pakistan on 11 June, disillusioned and disheartened about the prospects of making a future in the UK. The British government agreed to withdraw the deportation decision against him but declined to intervene to seek assurances from the Pakistani government that he would not be ill-treated. Pakistan’s intelligence services have a fearsome reputation for torturing terror suspects.

People from across the country who were angered by the treatment of the men met in Manchester in early May to set up the Justice for the North West Ten campaign (J4NW10). This held an immediate protest vigil outside Strangeways prison, and has since organised public meetings, letters, protests and other activities in Islamabad, Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield and London to draw public attention to the treatment of the men.

On 28 May, the University and College Union (UCU) conference overwhelmingly voted to support the campaign and to demand the immediate release of the students to allow them to continue their education without the threat of deportation. An early day motion (EDM 1453) has been signed by 20-plus MPs, and a letter has been signed by over 70 academics calling on the vice-chancellors of two of the institutions attended by the students to ensure they receive course materials and take their exams in prison. A packed public meeting at SOAS in London on 2 July heard a recording of the brother and father of two of the students speaking by phone from Pakistan of the hopes they carried with them to this country, and the disillusion and anger over their arrests.

The timing of the men’s arrest and detention is interesting, to say the least. The UK Border Agency (UKBA) is currently seeking to bully university and college staff to spy on students through the introduction of a points-based system that changes the way foreign students are allowed into the UK. In future, universities and colleges wishing to enrol non-EU students will have to register as sponsors, and to do this they must give an undertaking to the UKBA to report students who miss lectures. Failure to monitor students who subsequently abscond or breach conditions can lead to withdrawal of the institution’s sponsorship licence. The J4NW10 campaign is part of a wider campaign to keep immigration control out of education.

join the campaign

Campaign website

Online petition

If you are an academic (or know an academic), please write or send an email to the vice chancellors of two of the institutions at which the students were studying:

Ask your MP to support the campaign: Mohammad Sarwar, an MP of Pakistani origin, has submitted an early day motion (EDM) demanding the students’ immediate release so that they can continue their studies

Ask your organisation to support the campaign’s demands. Send messages of support to j4nw10@yahoo.com

The Algerian government refused point blank to allow independent monitoring of its interrogations. UK government representatives were touchingly sympathetic, murmuring about ‘post-colonial sensibilities’. The Jordanian government agreed to monitoring – by an organisation with no experience or medical expertise.

Desperate to get rid of ‘undeportable’ national security detainees – whose three-year internment in Belmarsh was condemned in 2004 by Lord Bingham’s House of Lords’ judicial committee – the government has allowed the unthinkable to became acceptable.

The new, executive-friendly set of Law Lords, now headed by Lord Phillips, have given the green light. In the case of Abu Qatada, the Lords have also allowed deportation backed by torture evidence to be acceptable, brutally repudiating Lord Bingham’s 2005 judgment that torture evidence taints the whole judicial process.
They also say all this can be done on the basis of secret evidence, concealed from the accused and their representatives. Appellants, say their Lordships, need not know about any secret diplomatic negotiations smoothing the path for their return, nor what their own governments allege against them. It’s hardly surprising that Abu Qatada’s lawyers plan to take his case to the European Court of Human Rights.

To make matters worse, confidential information about the men’s asylum claims and allegations made against them in the UK will be given to their national governments. States with poor human rights records don’t take kindly to their citizens complaining about them to other governments, and reprisals are likely against the men and their families. ‘National security’ now trumps all such considerations. On 27 January, the high court ruled that confidential information could be handed to officials of the receiving state. Another golden rule of refugee law, the absolute confidentiality of refugee claims, lies broken.

It is worth pointing out none of the men facing deportation on national security grounds have been convicted in the UK of any terrorist offence. The convictions some have, in Algeria or Jordan, were obtained by the methods the Lords are now so reluctant to condemn. Ask what these men have actually done and there is no answer. The judges have presided over a system in which, as criminologist Magnus Hörnqvist warned five years ago (‘The birth of public order policy’, Race & Class 49:1, 2004), the judicial determination of guilt on the basis of evidence given in open court has been replaced by administrative assessments of largely secret intelligence. They are ‘deemed’ a ‘threat to national security’ on the basis of their sympathies, their associations. Neither they nor we know much more than that.

Some of these men have been detained or quasi-detained (subject to lengthy curfews, electronic tags, reporting five times a day, forbidden mobile phones or computers, allowed no un-vetted visitors, etc) for over seven years. They see no end to it, as they cannot clear themselves from unformed and untold allegations.

In ‘Besieged in Britain’ (Race & Class 50:3, 2009), Victoria Brittain movingly describes the human impact on those detained or on immigration bail in the UK. They endure a Kafkaesque process of defending themselves against deportation on the basis of largely unknown allegations, whilst languishing for years in maximum security prisons, or facing stringent bail. Their wives and families, meanwhile, have to live with constant intrusions and searches. They can’t have friends to visit, use mobile phones or computers, and above all live with the daily humiliation and denial of basic dignity which the process entails. And they face the ordeal alone, ostracised by their communities.
It’s not surprising that our security services seek to draw a cloak of secrecy over the methods with which they obtain their ‘operational intelligence’ – including the sub-contracting of torture to friendly intelligence services such as those in Pakistan, as recently revealed in Binyan Mohammed’s case. But it is the judges who have presided over it all that have made such methods possible.

Further reading: International Commission of Jurists’ February 2009 report, Assessing damage, urging action. www.icj.org

The UK Borders Agency (UKBA), established as a sinisterly-described ‘shadow agency’ of the Home Office, is to gain new customs and visa powers, protecting our borders from ‘impermissible’ substances, commodities and people. Its powers will include detention without statutory limit, including detention of children.

Detention, according to the UKBA, is increasingly important in immigration policy. The ‘detention estate’ has grown from 200 places in the mid-1990s to 2,500 places today, with plans for another 1,300 to 1,500 places in the next three years. This has attracted the attention of Europe’s human rights commissioner, who also objects to the failure to set limits on detention.
Entering the country will become harder. The ‘authority to carry’ scheme will require airlines to perform real-time immigration checks on passengers, meaning no one will legally be able to travel to the UK without prior approval. The stated aim is to stop people using fake passports and visas, but the effect will be to condemn those seeking international asylum to illegal and dangerous methods of travel.

There will also be new powers of detention and questioning away from ports. This power is already applied by officials who raid small businesses daily in search of ‘illegal’ workers (always claiming the raids are ‘intelligence-led’, pre-empting accusations of illegality). Officials sometimes carry hand-held fingerprint terminals to check whether those arrested have applied for asylum or otherwise been fingerprinted.

Such technologies are increasingly important. Biometrics are taken from all visa applicants, and by December 2007 more than a million sets of fingerprints had been taken. On 24 November 2008, the first biometric ID cards were ‘rolled out’. Eventually, everyone subject to immigration control will have to carry one, and show it to do everything from opening a bank account to receiving NHS treatment or getting married. All aspects of life will be subject to immigration status.

The integration of visa, port and internal controls, together with the enhanced powers of examination, arrest, detention and powers of data collection, consolidate UKBA’s position as a powerful, autonomous border police. But structures of accountability are absent.

Alongside enhanced powers for the enforcers, the proposals erode migrants’ rights. Under the cover of ‘simplification’, anyone who is not British or a European Economic Area (EEA) national will need ‘immigration permission’ – including Commonwealth citizens who have the right to come and live here. Other ‘simplification’ proposals could replace deportation and administrative removal processes with expulsion and a re-entry ban, applicable with the same force against students who work 22 hours per week instead of 20 hours as it is against murderers.

The much-trumpeted ‘earned citizenship’ provisions reflect the facile and condescending debate over ‘British values’. They require not only testing on language and life in the UK but also longer qualifying periods, with unpaid community work used to shorten the period. Other provisions – from the requirement of bail bonds to powers to charge above the administrative cost for processing applications and to require deportees to pay the costs of their own removal – show that migrants are seen as at best a source of income.
With this inhuman and instrumental approach to migration in the ascendant, human rights and asylum (already dirty words in some quarters) look set to continue their long downward slide.

New immigration minister Phil Woolas sees his task not as educating the country in the social, political and economic benefits of an internationalist outlook, but as showing the right-wing press how tough he is on immigration. ‘It’s been too easy to get into this country in the past and it’s going to get harder,’ he tells the Times. He says employers shouldn’t employ immigrants (‘you should … attempt to fill skills shortages with your indigenous population’) and the NHS shouldn’t treat them (‘it’s not an international health service’). He adds that he has to be tough to pre-empt BNP support: ‘We’ve never had a BNP councillor [in his Oldham constituency] – I hope I’ve had something to do with that.’

But with Labour policies like this, what’s the difference? Opposition to such cynical ministerial soundbites and government policies needs to be loud, determined and principled if universal human rights are not to be undermined by little Englandism.

To view the government’s proposals visit:
http://www.official-documents.gov.uk/document/cm73/7373/7373.pdf

The Citizenship, Immigration and Borders Bill
Immigration Simplification Bill http://www.commonsleader.gov.uk/output/page2668.asp