On Wednesday 29 August 2012 the UK Border Agency (UKBA) revoked the ‘Highly Trusted Status’ of London Metropolitan University (LMU), thereby removing the university’s ability to sponsor international students for visa purposes. The detailed reasons for this decision have not been given. It represents a deliberate attack on one of the most working class universities in the country, which also has 2,600 non-EU / European Economic Area students.
The decision had been leaked to the Sunday Times the weekend before, and LMU demanded to know from the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary and the Immigration Minister where the leak came from. This disgusting maneouvre caused a wave of anxiety for international students, only to be followed by the official shattering notification a few days later.
The fees from these international students have become vital for the existence of LMU and most other universities in Britain as the whole sector has been forcibly privatised. On 16 July, the UKBA had suspended the University’s Highly Trusted Sponsor status over ‘fears’ that a small minority of its international students did not have the correct documentation to remain in the UK. In the following 6 weeks LMU tried to contact the UKBA to understand its intentions, which seem to be focused on processes related to the legacy of the previous incompetent Vice Chancellor and his team. The UKBA (bonuses during 2011: £3.58m) seemed incapable or unwilling to answering basic questions from LMU despite more than £10 million in losses created as new student applications could not be processed. Now 2,600 undergraduates and postgraduates have been thrown into limbo. They will be expelled from the country if they fail to find an alternative university that will let them join in mid-course. These students have followed every requirement made of them and studied hard in a foreign language, only to be treated arbitrarily as pariahs.
LMU has been caught up in a wave of anti-immigrant racism promoted by the British State in the face of its deepening economic crisis. Unemployment is officially 2.56m. The TUC calculates that underemployment is an additional 1 million, and at least that figure again is made up of the insultingly categorised NEET’s (Not in Employment, Education or Training). The widespread riots against police killing last summer have put the state on an even more aggressive path to frustrate and crush the ambitions of the working class. Racism in the form of finger pointing at ‘international students’ (the ‘jonnie foreigner’s’ – without a vote) is an instinctive divisive tactic of the ruling classes.
Unsurprisingly the LMU condemned the UKBA’s action. Not only did the border police seem to have absolutely no idea of university processes, but no evidence other than the class registers seemed to be acceptable to them. In reality these are often only filled out until three quarters of the way through a semester and then left incomplete as university teaching staff deeply resent being a compulsory arm of the Border Agency. It is easy to show that the vast majority of these students subsequently took their exams and so must have been present. Furthermore, since students have to pass electronic barriers in and out of LMU each day, their presence could easily be demonstrated. None of this was acceptable to an Agency determined to demonstrate that LMU is an open gate to foreigners. Its own electronic border system simply hasn’t worked and now it demands that organisations like LMU effectively act on its behalf, whilst changing the rules as it goes along. UKBA rules have changed 94 times since 1994 (Statement of Changes in Immigration Rules: House of Commons 565, 5 Sept 2012), and 14 times in the last three years.
In the September 2012 Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report the Border Agency were described as ‘not fit for purpose’. Margaret Hodge MP, chair of the PAC, said that its failure to deliver robust systems had created a “huge amount of bureaucracy for universities” and “an increasingly complex system for students to navigate”. Of course these criticisms, while exposing the incompetence and failure of the private contract process, are made in order to improve border control, rather than out of concern for students themselves. The LMU Students’ Union has attacked the government and held sit down protests at Downing Street and the Home Office on 5 September. Daniel Stevens, the NUS’s International Students officer, from Brazil, told demonstrators that the UK was treating international students like criminals. The Lecturers’ University and College Union correctly condemned UKBA’s move as outrageous
Parents of potential international applicants are already telling agents across Asia that they can no longer trust a British government that arbitrarily revokes visas held by their children, endangering their futures and penalising families, who often take on huge financial burdens in the process. Other students’ families are beginning legal actions against UKBA. Nevertheless Damian Green MP, the then Immigration Minister, was apparently delighted to reply to the PAC that “Our hard-hitting new measures are beginning to bite – we have already seen the number of student visas issued drop by 30% in the twelve months to June 2012, compared with the same period in 2011, and recent enforcement action has seen four hundred student over-stayers leave the London area and return home.” “Tough new rules have seen 500 fewer colleges being able to sponsor international students, and last week London Metropolitan University’s licence to teach non-EU students was revoked after it failed to address serious systemic failings”.
The superficiality of this statement is obvious. The attack on LMU has no real basis. Fewer applications to UK Universities are inevitable as a result of the global economic crisis. Competition from English Language degree providers from Holland to Singapore, Turkey to Malaysia, Australia to Canada, is intensifying. Over-staying by a few days or weeks is common as students arrange return flights and is commonplace even among visitors with tourist visas. The UKBA’s failure to meet its own targets is far more serious that the ‘leakage’ arising from supposedly poor record keeping by LMU. However having done his ‘wet job’ on LMU, Mr. Green was very appropriately made Minister of State for Police and Criminal Justice in the cabinet reshuffle on 5 September. The new Immigration Minister Harper has expressed complete agreement with his predecessor.
The bottom line
Other criticisms on the UKBA’s actions at LMU were quick to come. The Economist newspaper, its eyes firmly fixed on overseas income generation and the business goodwill generated by students studying in Britain, has furiously condemned the move as xenophobic and isolationist (The Economist 8 Sept 2012 p 14, Leader). MP Jeremy Corbyn, raised the same concerns in a speech to Parliament on 3 September. An Observer editorial (Sunday 1 September) put all fault on the Government.
Yet these standpoints fail to address the government’s strategic concern. Facing a consequent loss of some £30m this year, whatever the outcome of LMU’s appeal to the courts against the UKBA announced on 3 September, the University’s future was intentionally put into doubt. In order to survive, whether or not it is returned to the UKBA ‘most trusted’ status for Tier 4 visa recommendation, LMU will have to unload every remaining item of property and every member of staff that does not explicitly contribute to profit. Further commercialisation, by whatever means, will have to be accepted. The courts might smooth the financial crisis by allowing distressed students to continue unhappy and disorientated for a year, but the threat of closure will still hang over LMU. Education for direct profit is the name of the game and getting these institutions entirely off the state’s budget is the top priority. In April the College of Law, one of only 5 private providers in the UK with degree-awarding powers, was sold to a private for-profit firm, Montagu Private Equity. This establishes a model for the potential sale of universities, in whole or part, to for-profit buyers.
Pushed into an impossible position by the Home Office, LMU has had to ask for elementary decisions on students’ rights from the Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), which is filling the gap with a dribble of ‘concessions’ in the face of UKBA’s obduracy. The UKBA belatedly announced the creation of a taskforce including HEFCE, Universities UK, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) and the National Union of Students (NUS). The taskforce will cover up the most shocking and immediate consequences of the decision and allow students who are currently in courses to complete them. Consequently, on 6 September, postgraduate students who are about to submit dissertations were ‘allowed’ to complete the process and have their work marked and degrees awarded. How kind!
Administrative incompetence may well be found at LMU and even more in the yet uninspected universities around the country. Yet what we really have here is a retreat from internationalism in the face of economic crisis, the promotion of nationalism and suspicion of ‘foreigners’, an assault on the idea of genuine public service, and blind faith placed in private greed as the key motor for ‘economic’ growth. Education for the betterment of the mass of the people, a sense of which hesitantly arose in brief periods of prosperity in the last half century, has been thrown out.
James Martin
