Fortress Academy: The Points-Based Visa System and the Policing of International Students and Academics

Over at the Manifesto Club, Valerie Hartwich has written up a long report on the effects of the points-based immigration system on the quality of life of students and academics in the UK, as well as the effects on academia itself. From the introduction: 

Academic investigation naturally takes scholars around universities of the world, to share insights and seek dispute with peers from other countries. The points-based system threatens to block these valuable relationships ofintellectual collaboration and exchange.

Although the points-based system is targeted at non-EU academics and students, it bears the classic features of New Labour state regulation of its own citizens, including: tick-box requirements that make people’s lives more difficult, to little obvious end; systems for monitoring and control of people’s everyday actions; and a tendency to set up one group as state agents, with the responsibility to keep tabs on another.

The points-based visa system is making life hard for foreign visitors, and leaving them with a very hostile impression of this country. The system is also leading to greater monitoring of UK staff and students - with attendance registers being introduced for all students, and UK staff now subject to passport checks when they give talks at other universities.

At the Manifesto Club, we call for the points-based visa system to be reviewed, and ultimately scrapped. To say this is to celebrate relationships of international collaboration and exchange. It is also to affirm the ideal of civic autonomy, for UK citizens and non-citizens alike, an ideal that universities more than any other public institution are supposed to embody.

Check it out: http://www.manifestoclub.com/files/FortressAcademy.pdf