URBC Research & Communication Position Unis Resist Border Controls (URBC) is hiring an ad-hoc researcher & communication role to assist with administrative and comms work. Applicants must have previous documented experience in filing successful FOI requests. Duties will include the following:
Working with URBC to construct questions for FOIs
Submitting FOI requests
Organising FOI responses in an Excel spreadsheet
Organising key findings in a Word document
Support with general research that URBC conducts
Support with social media content creation (infographics, podcasts, & short videos)
We seek to hire a self-motivated person who is organised, completes tasks within an agreed timescale, is a clear communicator, and trustworthy.
URBC is a nine-year, migrant-led, grassroots national campaign working to end border controls via the Hostile Environment policy in UK higher education. We are not an NGO with an NGO-sized budget. Funds used for this research are intended to help support precarious racialised, disabled, and queer migrant students within UK higher education. Applicants should familiarise themselves with the work of URBC before applying.
Hours
The first two weeks of this position will be full-time at 35 hours at the UK living wage of £12.21.
The following weeks would be between 10-20 hours and/or when your services are needed.
To apply Send URBC a 500-word statement outlining your background, experience in activist-oriented work, and specifically with FOI research, and how your expertise in this can best support URBC’s mission. Submitting a CV is not needed for this position. A recommendation letter from an activist group that you’ve been part of is required. Application closes 11:59 PM BST, 20 August 2025.
Please send your application to: unisresistbordercontrols[AT]gmail[DOT]com
1 in 2 migrant students faced difficulties with visa applications.
30% of migrant students had experienced xenophobia.
1 in 3 migrant students had experienced racism.
1 in 5 migrant students worry about money all the time, with borrowing money or working part-time strongly correlating with financial anxiety.
1 in 2 migrant students reported experiencing poor mental health while studying in the UK.
The report found that migrant students believe they are treated as cash cows by both universities and the government due to rising tuition, visa, and International Health Surcharge (IHS) fees.
As we mentioned on our socials, this report corroborates what URBC has been stating consistently for nine years. However, the question is, why is such a report published now? We believe that this report has more to do with the perilous financial situation that UK universities are in. Earlier in May, The Guardianpublished a report from the Office for Students’ (OfS) that found universities in England had a third consecutive year of falling income. The report stated that declining migrant student enrolment was a contributing factor, indicating further, “recruitment levels for these students for 2024-25 are now projected to be about 21% lower than projected last year.” Migrant students pay significantly higher tuition fees than their home (British) student counterparts. Home students tend to forget that their tuition fees are subsidised by the higher tuition fees that migrant students pay. Otherwise, home students would be paying the same high tuition fees that migrant students pay and often go into debt to access the highly valued “world-class” UK higher education. To remedy their growing financial problems, universities are cutting staff down to skeletal levels and selling property. The last few months have seen an increasing number of university staff members from the University College Union (UCU) launch strike actions to stop job losses. For RGSU to publish such a report now concerning the migrant (international) student experience is to acknowledge that there are problems that they are remedying through both governmental and university recommendations. However, what are RGSU’s recommendations for these problems? URBC unpacks these recommendations and uncovers significant gaps.
RGSU recommendations are divided between government policy and university policy recommendations. URBC has grouped these recommendations into four main themes: immigration, financial, housing, and mental health, which are analysed.
Immigration
RGSUs’ government policy recommendations concerning the difficulties that migrant students experience with UK immigration are the following:
“Remove international students and their dependents from the Government’s net migration figures, recognising the temporary nature of their immigration.
“Conduct a cross-departmental impact assessment on how immigration policies and public messaging affect the international student experience.”
“Freeze student visa application fees and the Immigration Health Surcharge [IHS] for students.
“Work with students through RGSU and UKCISA to improve the experience of the visa application process.”
URBC’s thoughts
These recommendations are a microscopic bandage on a large festering wound of xeno-racist immigration policies. None of these government recommendations will be successful without working to end the Hostile Environment policy. What is the Hostile Environment policy, you ask? The Hostile Environment policy is the anti-migrant policy announced by then-Home Secretary Theresa May in 2012, though effectively in place for years previously. The policy extends border policing into universities, healthcare, schools, and other sectors, forcing workers in those sectors to enforce immigration policy. Learn more about how the Hostile Environment policy functions in universities here, in addition to Corporate Watch’s report that unpacks this policy’s effects on other sectors here.
We witnessed the Hostile Environment policy in effect last year when Nigerian students were affected by the Nigerian currency crash, making it difficult to exchange naira for British pounds. As a result, Nigerian students encountered problems paying their tuition fees. Instead of understanding the financial difficulties that these students experienced, which affected their safety and mental health, universities began to withdraw these students, which contributed to the revocation of their student visas. Notable cases were found at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) and Teesside University, which also aided in deporting Nigerian students from the UK. URBC had a campaign at MMU, #StopVisaWeaponisation, which uncovered that from our small sample, 25% of Nigerian students at MMU had either been withdrawn or were about to be withdrawn and now faced visa revocation. The Hostile Environment policy makes visa revocations easier, and with zero safety nets in place, migrant students can quickly fall through the cracks with little to no support from their student unions, who do not have training on these matters.
Even if the government removed migrant students from the net migration statistics and allowed migrant students who are undergraduates and on taught masters courses were able once again to bring their dependents, the Hostile Environment policy would persist for them and all other migrants, asylum seekers, and undocumented people. Both migrant students and their dependents would still be harmed by No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF)- a policy that came into effect with the passing of the 1999 Asylum Act and Immigration Act. This means that visa holders, including those on student visas, are prevented from accessing welfare benefits. During the COVID-19 lockdown, URBC had an avalanche of casework of migrant students who found themselves destitute because of a woeful lack of hardship funds at their universities and because of NRPF. That is why we had a campaign during the COVID-19 lockdown to end NRPF for migrant students. RGSUs and UKCISA did not join URBC in calling for the government to end NRPF provisions for migrant students.
As for the RGSUs recommendation for a freeze of visa and IHS fees, URBC has long demanded that these fees are exorbitant and designed to exclude working-class migrant students from studying in the UK. Both RGSUs and UKCISA failed to stop IHS fees when they were implemented in 2015, with the first set of the Hostile Environment policy passed under the 2014 Immigration Act. Neither organisation has launched any legal pushback against the IHS fees. Previous migrant students who studied in the UK never had to pay to access healthcare. The student movement from 2010-2015 was woefully unprepared to stop IHS fees- much of this was the result of national chauvinism within the #FreeEducation movement that sought to prevent the implementation of £9,000 tuition fees for home students. As a result, issues central to migrant students were often isolated and outrightly ignored. Student unions need to do better and link up with campaigns to end the Hostile Environment, like our own and others. We don’t need a freeze- we need to see the end of IHS fees and adopt the Docs Not Cops #PatientsNotPassports #ScrapTheSurcharge campaigns. Visa fees must be lowered, not frozen, and not just for student visa holders, but for all other migrants.
For their university policy recommendation, RGSU believes that universities should “Adopt UKCISA’s #WeAreInternational Student Charter as a framework to improve the international student experience.”
URBC’s thoughts
How does #WeAreInternational, a campaign which was developed by Sheffield Students’ Union in 2013 and later fine-tuned by Peggy Lim between 2016-2018, working under the University of Sheffield Vice Chancellor’s Office & Corporate Communication to market “brand British” higher education abroad, can be seen as a strategy to support migrant students? Lim, who was formerly an international student sabbatical officer at Sheffield Students’ Union between 2015-2016, indicates on their LinkedIn that they,
“Managed and developed the #WeAreInternational campaign, building and maintaining relationships with MPs, Lords and other key stakeholders such as Universities UK and the British Council. Worked with senior University staff (including the Vice-Chancellor) to determine objectives of the campaign. Devised communication plans, measured and analysed the impact of the campaign.”
It seems fitting that the University of Sheffield found a willing migrant student to exploit in their promotion of “model migrant students” while the Hostile Environment policy was being implemented. #WeAreInternational is a smokescreen campaign designed as damage control during the first wave of the Hostile Environment policy, which included the end of the post-study work visa in 2012, the “Go Home” vans instituted by former Home Secretary, Theresa May, and the Home Office revoking London Metropolitan University’s highly trusted sponsorship license. This meant that the university could not sponsor any student visa holders, and 2,700 of their migrant student population had 60 days to find another university to transfer to or face administrative removal by the Home Office. These events cause UK universities to look for ways to instil confidence in their product in order to compete with universities in the United States, Australia, and Europe, who are all vying for a fresh crop of migrant students into their respective countries in addition to the financial incentives these students bring.
#WeAreInternational has been ubiquitous within UK higher education for a number of years, adopted by Universities UK and UKCISA alike through producing brand Britain propaganda exemplified by these well-produced videos; examples here, here, and here. But we know that #WeAreInternational promoted by Universities UK is not friendly to migrant students who are involved with Palestine solidarity activism on campus, best exemplified by the initial treatment that Dana Abuqamar received at the University of Manchester and by the Home Office. Until UK universities dismantle their investments and partnerships with genocidal industries that are also used in the enforcement of carceral border controls, in addition to ending their collusion with the Hostile Environment policy and the Prevent Duty, #WeAreInternational is a hollow campaign that refuses to confront the real systemic problems plaguing migrant student safety.
Financial
In terms of financial problems experienced by migrant students, the RGSU report’s government recommendations include,
“Provide greater flexibility in when students can work, with the ability to spread the total number of hours across the calendar month during term time. Such as 48 hours in 2 weeks during term-time.”
“Permit self-employment for international students to promote freelancing and entrepreneurship.”
The report’s university recommendations also suggests,
“Fix international students’ tuition fees at the point of entry, ensuring they pay the same amount each year through the duration of their studies.”
“Ensure hardship funds are available to all international students who need them with transparent and clear eligibility criteria.”
URBC’s thoughts
Again, these are bandage solutions to the economic barriers experienced by migrant students. A significant number of migrant students are advocating to work above the 20 hours per week limit imposed by their visa conditions. Even if migrant students were able to work more hours per week, they are still hampered by high tuition fees that increase each year. The RGSU report found a direct correlation between migrant students working part-time and/or borrowing money to worsening mental health. Therefore, we have serious reservations about a report that acknowledges mental health problems because of working part-time, yet seeks to remedy financial precarity by increasing migrant student work hours. Is the report suggesting that the only migrant students who can fully participate in the student experience are those with a sizable disposable income?
Even if migrant students’ work hours were increased to 30 hours+ per week, migrant students would still experience financial instability because of rising UK inflation. While the report recommends that migrant students should pay the same amount at the start of their course for the duration of their studies, this proposal does not do enough to combat the original problem- the exorbitant tuition fees that migrant students are forced to pay. Depending on the course, migrant tuition fees can be anywhere between £13,000 to £45,000+ per year. The problem is that tuition fees are still too high. Offering hardship funds and increasing the number of scholarships for migrant students, while needed, are still woefully inadequate measures that will not stop migrant student financial precarity in the UK if migrant student tuition fees are outrageously high. We need a higher education system that does not make financial distinctions between home and migrant students. The very least decolonial, anti-imperialist, anti-racist academics and students should be advocating for now is free education for all students.
More worrying is that the report failed to recommend measures to stop what happened to Nigerian students last summer. Without policies in place to prevent a student’s immigration status from being weaponised as a result of not being able to pay their tuition fees because of financial and political upheaval in their homeland, this abuse within higher education will happen again, aided by the Hostile Environment policy.
Housing
The report’s government policy recommendation includes:
“Work in partnership with local authorities and universities to develop affordable, purpose-built student accommodation in areas of high demand, addressing the housing supply shortages and rising costs facing students.”
“Introduce a requirement that all universities commit to a Student Living Guarantee, which asserts their belief that every student who lives away from home will be able to access housing that is of a reasonable price, a reasonable standard, and a reasonable distance from where they are studying.”
The university policy recommendation is to “Work with their Students’ Union to establish an accredited ‘good landlords’ scheme to better support students in navigating the private rental market.”
URBC’s thoughts
While all of these recommendations are welcomed, we are still very much away from seeing affordable housing in the UK, much less in the student housing sector that has a myriad of problems outlined here. What is proposed in the RGSU report is general to the entire student housing issue. What is missing from these recommendations is acknowledging that the Hostile Environment policy via Right to Rent checks and guarantor process creates further grounds of exploitation that also routinely happen to migrant students. Relating to last year’s Nigerian student cases, what happens to students who cannot pay rent because of financial and political upheaval? Again, the RGSU does not propose anything about this. Migrant student homelessness does happen, best exemplified by Aimée Lê’s case that went viral in 2021 after she related her story as a migrant student forced to live in a tent during her PhD studies. While the story was positioned as a cautionary tale of the exploitative nature of casualised university employment, it also relates to the Hostile Environment policy and NRPF, whereby migrant students and all other migrants have restrictions in accessing affordable housing because of their immigration status. As we argued, if Lê was caught in a Home Office rough sleeper raid, she would have been arrested and potentially could have had her student visa revoked under immigration rules for engaging in migrant rough sleeping. While the Vagrancy Act 1824, which has criminalised rough sleeping, will be repealed next year, it remains to be seen how this will relate to migrants who are forced to rough sleep. A report that fails to underscore how the Hostile Environment policy relates to migrant housing policy is only telling a fragment of the situation at hand.
Mental Health
Relating to migrant student mental health concerns, the RGSU government policy recommendation suggests a launch of “[…] fund to support better university-NHS collaboration to achieve a more joint up approach to mental health and wellbeing care to ensure international students are able to access services.”
URBC’s thoughts
Wouldn’t it be better to end IHS fees in accessing the National Health Service (NHS) to ensure that health services, including NHS mental health support, are truly accessible for migrant students? As the RGSU report indicated, migrant student mental health is a growing problem because of anxiety and stress caused by affording high tuition fees, and paying for equally high visa and IHS fees, in addition to being able to afford daily maintenance (rent, utilities, & food) as a result of growing inflation in the UK. Like the other categories, without student unions working with URBC to end the Hostile Environment policy and NRPF conditions that create the perfect storm that a significant number of migrant students are currently dealing with.
What about the views from sanctuary university students?
Glaringly missing from the RGSU report are the thoughts and opinions from refugee, asylum seeker, and undocumented students on sanctuary university scholarships regarding their treatment within UK higher education. While UK universities have a number of sanctuary university programmes, used as a publicity exercise to show that they have a commitment to anti-racism and diversity, many gaps within these programmes put students in harm as a result of the Hostile Environment policy. Through student activists, URBC learned of a Palestinian student at a Russell Group university who encountered housing problems during their sanctuary scholarship period that the university failed to adequately rectify. In 2022, URBC worked with SOAS sanctuary scholarship students on the #NoSanctuaryAtSOAS campaign that SOAS sanctuary scholarship recipient and activist, Khalfan Al-Badwawi describes in this short video as the key failures within the programme that put him in an unsafe situation because of the Hostile Environment policy. The omission of sanctuary scholarship students from future RGSU reports suggests a gross dereliction in understanding better how immigration policy and barriers, because of the Hostile Environment policy, cause problems also for students in these programmes.
Concluding remarks
While the report’s findings corroborate much of what URBC has said over the nine years we have operated, its solutions to the problems that migrant students are experiencing are deeply insufficient, and deliberately so. URBC believes that the real intention of such a report is to assuage migrant students into thinking that UK higher education is serious in tackling these problems that have plagued universities, many of which we have uncovered in the course of our work and activism.
University bosses have made it clear that they also welcomed a Trump presidency in the United States, as it would help increase migrant student enrolment and alleviate financial problems plaguing UK universities. UK Academics and students alike have been horrified by the persecution of US migrant students involved in Palestine liberation activism, best exemplified in the disturbing treatment of Yunseo Chung, Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Momodou Taal, and many other cases. There is an increasing number of migrant students detained on ICE raids who had nothing to do with Palestine solidarity activism. Recently, California State University was forced to hold all classes online because of ongoing ICE raids. UK university bosses view the events stateside not with fear, but as an excellent opportunity to benefit from attracting migrant students who would have gone to the US for their studies.
However, the UK’s carceral border policy and attacks on student activism, especially the recent revelation by Liberty that found Raytheon UK had requested that Heriot-Watt University spy on student activists involved in arms divestment and Palestine liberation activism, do not elicit much confidence in “brand British” higher education. How does one gain that confidence back? By allowing student unions to admit to problems in the higher education sector for migrant students, with a “we’re working on it” type of non-committal, woefully deficient solutions that lull migrant students into believing that the UK is a safer option to study in. However, the RGSU recommendations fail to tackle the larger problem- the Hostile Environment policy and universities’ collusion in this policy. Student unions should be guided by URBC on ending the Hostile Environment policy & work with us on supporting migrant students.
This is the long form piece by Sanaz Raji, following the edited piece that was published in the Times Higher Education, 20 December 2024.
Eleven years ago I launched a public campaign as a migrant PhD student at the University of Leeds. This campaign happened when the third year of my scholarship funding was rescinded, only two weeks from the start of the 2011-2012 enrolment period. Funding was pulled in breach of the university’s rules. I was expected to find £13,700 in four weeks’ time before the end of the enrolment period in order to finish my PhD research. This incident followed a campaign of victimisation that I experienced during the start of my PhD. Three requests for a change of my primary PhD supervisor were denied. I was forced into a supervisory arrangement that did not work. During this period, I had a number of health problems that my supervisory team weaponised against me. I was forced to work while unwell. The department claimed that I wasn’t making sufficient academic progress. However, they created the consistent barriers that prevented me from advancing with my research. Taking away funding at the third year into the PhD and expecting me to locate funding quickly to meet the enrolment deadline was a most convenient and vicious way for my primary supervisor to appear blameless while they offloaded me from the department.
Since Unis Resist Border Controls (URBC) was established in March 2016, we have provided voluntary casework support for migrant staff and students impacted by the Hostile Environment policy and UK’s draconian border controls both within and outside of the university. In the course of providing voluntary and free casework, we have concluded several high profile and successful campaigns, Shiromini Satkanurajah, Ahmed Sedeeq (#LetAhmedStay), and Riham Sheble (#LetRihamStay) along with helping both migrant university staff and students in a private capacity. These campaigns have helped underscore how Hostile Environment policy operates both within the university and intersect with other issues, particularly health and disability.
Our casework surgeries and campaigns have helped to inform our knowledge of the changing manner of Hostile Environment policy in higher education & in other environments. However, casework has taken the bulk of our time, meaning we have had less capacity to craft new strategies to help migrant students, migrant university workers and their allies in launching a united force in ending Hostile Environment policy as practised within our universities. This is why URBC members believe we must cultivate a new direction as immigration policies are increasingly becoming more stringent and attacks on migrants, asylum seekers and undocumented people are so thoroughly mainstreamed that they prompted the race riots we witnessed in August 2024.
New Direction
We have recently received an award from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust (JRCT) Grassroots Movement fund, which will enable URBC to take a new direction as an organisation. With the funding provided to us, we are looking to take on group cases that touch on the following themes affecting migrant students and/or migrant staff:
Disability issues
IHS fee hikes
Free speech issues, e.g., where visa status is weaponised by an institution
Pushing back on more intrusive surveillance devices used for attendance monitoring.
URBC is a volunteer-led grassroots organisation. This means that we must protect our members’ physical and mental health in order to ensure that we can continue our work. We therefore have limited capacity for individual casework and other activities we undertake. Overworking and burning out our members does not advance our cause.
In this spirit, we have a new way of working.
Casework
We will no longer take on individual casework at this time. Instead, casework will involve group cases of 4 or migrant students in UK higher education that could be used to launch a legal case as listed in the New Direction section.
To address community needs, we are offering a Casework Surgery once every two months, starting in November – book here.
We will use this time to launch a toolkit geared for university staff and students, teaching them the methods we have honed in launching successful individual campaigns. Additionally, we will resume online and in-person workshops during the year to answer questions and get students, staff and other abolitionist skilled up concerning the Hostile Environment policy in UK higher education.
Since late 2023, we have implemented a Casework Agreement Form to set appropriate expectations for both URBC and those who solicit support from us. The purpose of the Casework Agreement Form is to ensure that the casework we take meets the merits of our mission and that our members avoid unmanageable workloads.
Communications
We maintain a 3–7 working day turnaround for emails (except for active cases).
We are excited by this new direction that URBC is embarking upon. URBC looks forward to continuing our mission to end Hostile Environment in the university and beyond.
Borrowing from the Asian Youth Movement (AYM) who coined the motto, “Labour Tory both the same, both play the racist game,” Unis Resist Border Controls (URBC) are sharing this A4 poster that you can distribute in your community to let Labour and Tory candidates know that their respective party’s support of Israel setter-colonialism, their allowing the genocide in Gaza to continue eight months on, in addition to their continued scapegoating of migrants and pushing for a more carceral border regime is wrong and wholly unacceptable.
This is why we say – Labour, Tory, both the same, a vote for genocide and shame!
Check here to see what your MP’s position is on Palestine
Use this link to see your MP’s position on migrants, asylum seekers and refugees.
