Abstract
This article examines the enlistment of educational providers in the surveillance and policing of non-citizen students. Employing the USA, UK, and Australia as cases, it situates efforts that render universities responsible for managing migrant “illegality” in broader trends concerning legal control and security governance. In particular, it analyzes the development of electronic surveillance and information-sharing systems that mobilize the knowledge, energies, and access of educational providers for the purposes of identification, tracking, and reporting. University personnel’s conscription as de facto border guards accentuates the pluralization of migration policing, highlighting how techniques of governance and surveillance are effectuated through quotidian actors and sites positioned beyond the sovereign state. By drawing universities into the orbit of territorial gatekeeping and interior enforcement, emergent policies are producing numerous tensions, whether in relation to their officially stated objectives or transformations in higher education’s character, ethos, and mission and their implications for non-citizens’ legal and social identities. Alongside enhancing understandings of migration control, this paper advances conversations regarding the increasingly networked, pre-emptive, and ubiquitous qualities of social ordering and control.
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Notes
Australia, the UK and USA respectively receive 6, 10, and 19% of global student flows [36]. In raw terms, each received 250,000, 417,000, and 785,000 students in 2015.
The global market for international students is valued at over $100 billion [41].
In the USA, three of the 9/11 hijackers entered the country on student visas [47]. In 2009, the Labour government expressed concerns over ‘bogus students’ after 10 terror suspects arrested in the UK were found possessing student visas ([38], 168). In Australia, the Federal government has expressed concerns that, without robust regulations, student visas facilitate illegal migration, providing conduits for ‘people smuggling’, criminal elements, and potential terrorists [48].
Related initiatives include the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System and US-VISIT, which entail the collection, storage, and analysis of travel patterns and biometric data to pre-emptively identify terrorists, criminals, and undocumented migrants [22].
Since 2003, data on over 12 million individuals has been recorded in SEVIS [63].
Regarding attendance, universities must report students that skip classes and miss “ten consecutive expected contacts” without authorization ([71], 64).
While beyond this paper’s scope, subsequent studies could expand the scale of analysis and map the extent (or lack thereof) of such developments in other national settings. Doing so would help assess the degree to which the drift towards intensified surveillance and control is confined to the Anglophone world and linked to regional idiosyncrasies or part of a global trend and attributable to shared political-economic and security-related pressures.
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Walsh, J.P. Education or enforcement? Enrolling universities in the surveillance and policing of migration. Crime Law Soc Change 71, 325–344 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-018-9792-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-018-9792-9