Friday 10 May 2013

University lecturers as border guards

This is the programme of a workshop being run by a private sector organisation to train university staff in how to police the UK's border. I am posting it up not in order to recruit for it, but just to show the extent to which border regulation is being farmed out to other sectors, including the Higher Education sector, and also to note the extent to which the private sector are exploiting this. Be warned -- this is depressing:


As I am sure you are aware, your institution has a responsibility to prevent illegal working, provide evidence of an employee’s Right to Work and comply fully with UKBA regulations. The failure to do so can lead to punitive fines and a removal of your licence to hire migrant workers. It is also vital that academic institutions vigorously check their overseas students documents and academic records. Sponsoring students who hold fake passports, visas and educational certificates opens your organisation to wealth of potential problems that could result following any UKBA audit.

BFI’s Document Verification Workshop for Universities, Schools & Colleges will provide Admissions and HR teams with practical, hands-on training in recognising fraudulent documents; enabling attendees to get to grips with the legal responsibilities surrounding document verification for applicants: staff & students, spotting fake qualifications and ID documents, giving each delegate the chance to handle and compare fake and real examples.

Highlights include:

Legal overview of institution’s responsibilities;
* UKBA regulation
* Discrimination
* Data protection

Combating education fraud;
* What countries and agencies to watch out for
* Real life examples of fake degrees and diplomas

Masterclass in identity checks;
* Passports
* Photo ID and driving licenses
* Birth certificates
* Supporting documents
* Stamps
* Visas

Agenda

0930 Coffee & Registration

0950 Chairman’s welcome & introduction to the day

1000 DOCUMENT VERIFICATION: WHAT ARE YOUR LEGAL RESPONSIBILITIES WHEN EMPLOYING STAFF & SPONSORING STUDENTS?
* What are the consequences of getting document verification wrong?
* Understanding your obligations to prevent illegal working in the UK under the Immigration, Asylum & Nationality Act 2006.
* Right to work – what documents do you need to see and retain?
* What are the responsibilities of the employer regarding ongoing checks?
* Working within the law: avoiding contravention of discrimination legislation
* Issues around recording and storing data that you must be aware of


1100   Coffee Break

1115 COMBATING EDUCATION FRAUD: WHAT MUST YOUR ORGANISATION BE LOOKING OUT FOR?
This hands-on session will allow you to bring your policy questions directly to an education fraud expert and handle example fake documents ensuring that your staff members are fully equipped to recognise fraud.
* Demonstrating compliance: are your staff members able to recognise fraudulent documents?
* Avoiding pitfalls in your admissions policy
* Dealing with particular countries & agencies
* Spotting fake degrees: what red flags should you be looking out for?
* Practical examples of fraudulent documents
* English language requirements
* Which agencies can help you?


1245   Lunch

1345 MASTERCLASS - CHECKING IDENTITY: RECOGNISING FRAUDULENT DOCUMENTS
* Identity; attributed, biographical, biometric and chosen
* Do you know what to look for?
* Common scams to be aware of
* What to do when you spot an irregularity
* Passports
* Photo ID and driving licenses
* Birth certificates
* Supporting documents
* Stamps
* Visas
* Cross-referencing with other data
* How to proceed if you discover inconsistencies
* Addressing concerns directly with candidates – possible pitfalls
* Establishing and integrating secure documents and identity verification processes
* How easy is it to miss a forged document?
* What are the areas we should look at for verification?
* Live examples of fraudulent documentation
* Comparisons of real and fake documents
* Counterfeits and forgeries

Friday 3 May 2013

UKIP and the seductive power of Heimat



UKIP and the seductive power of ‘Heimat’

The surge of UKIP in this week’s local elections, and the influence they may have on where political power lies in the future, has shaken the political establishment. But why are people attracted to the party? What message is being sent out by the voters who support it?

Clearly it is an anti-immigrant vote. It is tempting to dismiss them as Moe Szyslaks: “Immigants! I knew it was them! Even when it was the bears, I knew it was them” (The Simpsons: Much ado about Apu).

But there is something else happening, perhaps, that is reflected in UKIP’s popularity, a mythological element, and UKIP reflect the power of myth. That is not only the power of popular myths about immigration and its effects, but also deeper mythologies, about what lies outside the boundaries of the nation and what lies at its centre.

The mythology of the ‘outside’ focuses on the immigrant is some kind of mythic threat, like a vampire.

That myth can take various forms. For example, we have to protect ourselves from those who want to over-consume liberal resources and drain the liberal state of its ability to supply liberal goods -- the immigrant as a resource-sucking vampire, over here to claim benefits, misuse the NHS, take our jobs and so on.

Or we have to protect our sense of community and identity from those who are so different that they can’t be assimilated, and so would undermine the community solidarity that we need for welfare institutions and democracy. Indeed, they may even have the power to counter-assimilate members and change their identity, with their strange customs and traditions.

Or at the extreme we need to protect ourselves from those who will bring with them disorder and chaos -- the immigrant infects the liberal state with disorder, eventually destroying it, the immigrant as a vampiric disease-carrier. They will bring crime and violence with them, in the shape of gangsters and suicide bombers.

But note that this mythic view of what lies outside the border rests on a mythic view of what lies within it, that which needs protection. So what is it that needs to be protected from the migrant?

On the face of it, our welfare services, traditions and communities need protection, but I think there is something deeper here that UKIP appeal to, and the idea of ‘Heimat’ that we find in much European thought helps us understand this.

The idea of Heimat is found in the German-speaking world. ‘Heimat’ is an extraordinarily complex idea and I can’t hope to do it justice here, but it captures the feeling of being at home, or, more accurately, is a reaction to the experience of not feeling at home.

In other words, ‘Heimat’ is a reactive idea, a reaction against the fluidity and change experienced under conditions of modernity, which result in alienation and a feeling of lost-ness. Heimat is an idea of a place where one really belongs, and so is an imaginary home set up against our experience of alienation. It is essentially backward looking and nostalgic, and so it does not exist in the present. But equally it does not exist in the past.

Although it is a place, and exists in the past in one sense, it is not a place that has ever existed. It is an imaginary place when things were, we are told, more innocent and simple and stable: it is motion-less and change-less.

Elizabeth Boa and Rachel Palfreyman tell us: “Key oppositions in the discourse of Heimat set country against city, province against metropolis, tradition against modernity, nature against artificiality, organic culture against civilization, fixed, familiar, rooted identity against cosmopolitanism and hybridity, alien otherness, or the faceless mass” (Elizabeth Boa and Rachel Palfreyman Heimat: a German dream – regional loyalties and national identity in German culture 1890-1990 (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 2).

This place of Heimat is not open to rational criticism. When people say things were better in the past, pointing out to them that this past has never actually existed – it is an imaginary reaction to the present -- brings about no change in their nostalgia. And although as an idea ‘Heimat’ has played a role in both right and left politics in Germany, one key element of it is mistrust of the outsider, whose presence is at least one cause of the loss of ‘Heimat’.

Boa and Palfreyman again: “Heimat must always be ultimately bounded and defined through visible or hidden exclusion of the radically different and alien” (p.27). And: “Who must be excluded and who can be integrated are as crucial to a community as who is from the start included: a place is as much defined by its others as by the self” (p. 28).

And Peter Blickle says: “… the idealization of a home ground in Heimat has led again and again to borders of exclusion” (Heimat: a critical theory of the German idea of homeland (Camden House, Rochester, NY, 2002), pp. 157-158).

And so the mistrust of motion and those who move is deeply embedded in the idea of ‘Heimat’. This mistrust certainly extends throughout European thought. Tim Cresswell explains: “…the whole apparatus of state bureaucracy in most countries has long depended on the notion that people should live, work, pay taxes and vote in a fixed location, so that to be of no fixed abode is already to be a suspicious character, and mobility itself comes to be seen as a form of geographical deviance.”

Mobility as deviance comes from “the positive valuation of roots in a place-bound, property-owning society…”, where “mobility…appears to be a kind of superdeviance … [which] disturbs the whole notion that the world can be segregated into clearly defined places … [and] becomes a basic form of disorder and chaos – constantly defined as transgression and trespass.” (Tim Cresswell Inplace/Out of place (University of Minnesota Press 1996) pp. 85-87).


This mistrust of motion certainly informed the anti-semitism of the German fascist movement. Hitler said “…it is impossible that those who are at home everywhere [by which he means the Jews] can know what Heimat is, because they do not have one.” And we need to remember that this mistrust of motion and the mobile extends throughout European thought. We have to keep reminding ourselves that the anti-semitism that led to the Holocaust was European-wide, not confined the Germany.

Although the idea of Heimat is explicit in the German-speaking world and has no simple equivalent in the English-speaking world, I have no doubt that it is present in the way we think.

Patrick Wright’s description of ‘Englishness’ in his article, “Last orders for the English aborigine”, certainly fits the model. This Englishness “…finds its essence in that sense of being opposed to the prevailing trends of the present. It’s a perspective that allows even the most well-placed man of the world to imagine himself a member of an endangered aboriginal minority: a freedom fighter striking out against ‘alien’ values and the infernal workings of a usurping state” (Patrick Wright, “Last orders for the English aborigine”, in Sally Davison & Jonathan Rutherford (eds), Race, Identity and Belonging: A Soundings Collection, (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2008), p. 63)

At its heart is an idea of England “…in which the very thought of difference or change is instantly identified with degeneration, corruption and death” (p.69).

What we learn from the idea of Heimat is that this is accompanied by a nostalgia for a lost England which was a purer, more innocent place. The danger is, of course, that people will struggle to restore this mythic purity, this mythic innocence, by cleansing the nation of that which has corrupted it.

All the evidence shows that the mythic idea of ‘Heimat’ is here, like a so-far-undetected black hole, exerting enormous cultural power that can distort ethical and rational principles. It is anti-theoretical, anti-intellectual. The facts will not get in the way.

This presents those of us who wish to confront anti-immigration politics with a very difficult challenge. I have been in rooms of people who I consider to be intelligent and well-informed, but who have been transformed into an irrational rage when it comes to discussions of immigration, and who displayed a stubborn refusal to even consider any empirical evidence on the question, and who replied to my arguments with mythologies.

I have no answer to this challenge here, except to alert those of us who do wish to pursue evidence-based arguments to the seductive power of ‘Heimat’. But Patrick Wright’s description of “an endangered aboriginal minority: a freedom fighter striking out against ‘alien’ values and the infernal workings of a usurping state” perfectly captures what is at the heart of UKIP and their appeal.

The complexity of that appeal lies in the fact that, although the migrant is the object of the hostility, it is because they symbolize change, modernization, globalization, all things that disrupt tradition and the sense of ‘home’ people carry with them, an imaginary ‘home’ which never existed, and yet which must be defended from change.