Ahead of university open days, bus-stop sized posters resembling open day adverts were placed by activists across multiple university towns including Brighton, Sussex, Oxford, Nottingham, and London calling for universities to divest from an “abuse-ridden border industry.”
The posters draw attention to the hypocrisy of institutions aiming to attract international students while investing in companies such as Accenture, British Airways, Amazon, and Mitie who profit from the mass surveillance, detention, and deportation of asylum seekers, refugees, and other migrating people.
For example, Accenture has been instrumental in the creation and maintenance of the EU’s ‘virtual border walls’, propagating the threat that terrorists could be posing as refugees in order to create demand for their biometric technologies such as facial recognition systems which harvest, store, and share the data of migrants. Accenture has also been responsible for the training needs of border agencies across Europe including in Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey, where increasing violence has been observed from militarised security forces.
André Dallas, Co-Director for Migration Justice at People & Planet, said: “Students are sick and tired of hearing their universities branded as ‘welcoming’ and ‘international’ communities when they know that isn’t the case. They see their classmates scapegoated and deported, they encounter companies infamous for abuses at immigration removal centres roaming campus, and they hear silence from management in the face of escalating violence against migrating people. If universities want to truly represent the values they claim, they must break all ties with the border industry and use their platform to help build a world where all are free to move or stay as they desire.”
Since launching in 2021, the Divest Borders campaign, coordinated by student campaigning charity People & Planet, has gained public support from over 100 migration scholars and university workers from across 35 universities. The campaign is calling on universities to end their complicity through investments in border regimes that kill, injure, and violate the rights of migrants and people seeking safety. At this time, six universities including Kent, Northumbria, Worcester, and Cardiff Metropolitan University have now committed to exclude the border industry from their current and future investment portfolios.
Research by People & Planet estimates that over £300 million of university endowments remain invested in the Border Industry, in addition to numerous research partnerships and service provision contracts.
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