Universities invest millions in companies that profit from borders – from detention and deportation to surveillance and military technology. For People & Planet, the question was how to turn that sprawling system into a campaign students could realistically win. Its first attempt focused on universities’ role in enforcing the hostile environment. But with practices varying widely between institutions, organisers struggled to build a single national demand. Drawing on the student network’s experience of fossil fuel divestment, they changed course and launched Divest Borders.
André Dallas, People & Planet’s co-director for migrant justice and one of the campaign’s key organisers, spoke to openDemocracy about how they identified universities’ financial links to the border industry – and turned a broad commitment to migrant justice into specific, winnable demands.
Why did you decide to target university investments?
All of our campaigns at People & Planet are decided democratically by our student network. In 2019, the network voted to work on migrant justice, but with quite a vague mandate to figure out what we could actually do.
The first campaign focused on how the hostile environment manifested on campus. Students were receiving emails threatening to report them to the Home Office if they missed a lecture. There was differential surveillance of international students and universities cooperating with immigration enforcement.
We wanted to resist that complicity, but practices varied so much from campus to campus. Having a unified UK-wide movement was difficult because you needed bespoke research into every institution, different decision-makers and different departments.
Even though our research showed that universities were massively over-complying with the Home Office, students found it difficult to get their teeth into because the demand was so unfocused.
We went back to the drawing board and asked: how can we strategically approach universities’ complicity in border injustice? That took us back to our core strength, which was divestment work.
We had helped lead the fossil fuel divestment movement across the UK, with more than 75% of universities committing to divest. We realised that model could be applied to the border industry. It would give students a targeted way to act, expose their university’s complicity and make a material change.
The campaign came out of the failure of another approach and a recognition that we needed to be more focused, strategic and replicable.”
How did you identify which companies counted as part of the border industry?
That was a huge piece of work. We decided to target universities’ links to the border industry and then had to reverse-engineer it, because the border industry did not really exist in people’s minds as a defined industry.
With fossil fuels, there were established lists and categories. We had to ask: what is the border industry? What are the boundaries for counting a company as involved? We built on research already done in the US and worked with a consultant to develop a methodology we could maintain ourselves.
We also spoke to frontline groups and people who had experienced detention or dangerous border crossings. We asked which companies they had encountered and which would have to be included to capture the full picture.
We built an initial list of 70 companies across five areas: physical borders, deportation, detention, data infrastructure and surveillance.
But most universities were not invested only in the biggest and most visible border companies. Their exposure was often through companies such as Amazon, Microsoft or RELX. That meant making an additional argument about why these were divestment targets. We shifted our framing towards revoking the social licence of the border industry as a whole.
The material divestment from one company might not always be enormous. But a university publicly recognising that profiting from border violence is unacceptable can create a much wider ripple effect.”
How did the first university commitment happen?
Our first win was quite unexpected. People & Planet runs a university league that ranks UK universities according to environmental and ethical criteria. Universities take it seriously. When we started Divest Borders, we added a question asking whether universities had excluded the border industry from their investments.
About a year later, while researching policies for the league, we discovered that Cardiff Metropolitan University had quietly introduced a clause excluding the border industry.
There had been some engagement from students and students’ union officers, but it was not a campaign involving huge public pressure. Cardiff Metropolitan had very little exposure to the companies on our list, so it was almost a no-cost decision.
We achieved that first win more through the carrot than the stick.
But the precedent was incredibly valuable. Students elsewhere had been told that divestment was impractical or that nobody else would do it. They could now go into meetings and say: ‘Actually, one of your peers has already done it.’
The first commitment made every subsequent demand seem more realistic.
What did organisers do differently at Edge Hill?
At some smaller universities, students face barriers that are less common at institutions with established organising cultures. They may have jobs alongside their studies, commute to campus or have less time and money to take part. Our traditional model was to give students a campaign, help them form a group and support them to run it autonomously. At Edge Hill, we recognised the need for a slower movement-building approach.
We advertised an eight-week training programme through the students’ union and volunteering channels. It combined political education on climate collapse, migrant injustice and university complicity with practical training in how to run a campaign.
Students learned how to build a petition, persuade their peers, run meetings and identify who held decision-making power. Edge Hill had never had a People & Planet group.
We started with a handful of students meeting on Zoom. They moved to regular meetings in the students’ union, handed out flyers, gathered petition signatures and passed students’ union motions.
Within a year, Edge Hill had committed to divest from both the fossil fuel and border industries. It was an incredible win. The students went from doing something they had never done before, on a campus where it had barely been done before, to achieving a real material change in policy.
They now see themselves as migrant justice and climate justice campaigners. That is part of our work too: giving people a winning moment that can sustain them through years of organising.
Where did the campaign struggle or fall apart?
Flux and turnover are the norm in university organising. Campaigns sometimes die because people graduate or exams arrive when the main organisers have to focus elsewhere.
We try to mitigate that with handovers and by involving students from different years, postgraduate students, staff and alumni. But if a campaign hits a roadblock, the organisers may have left before you get through it.
At Falmouth, we had a very strong campaign. The Bibby Stockholm barge had raised the profile of the border industry and the conditions people were being detained in.
Students at Falmouth and Exeter worked with local groups, held demonstrations and got students’ union officers involved. At one university meeting, students protested outside with flares, a megaphone and chants, while supportive officers made the case inside.
It was strategically organised, but the university was focused on profit and unwilling to move. Many students then graduated, and we were unable to rebuild the same momentum.
That campaign appears to have fizzled out without the university changing its policy.
But we keep detailed records of meetings, decision-makers and previous activity. If new students restart it, they will not have to begin from scratch.
Running the campaign across multiple campuses also means we can move resources towards where the energy is. If one stalls and another is close to winning, the network can help concentrate pressure there.
How do you stop a university from making a symbolic commitment and carrying on as before?
Universities can adopt the language of a campaign without absorbing its deeper demands.
That is why we campaign not only for changes to investment policies but for student representation on the boards and bodies making those decisions. Students need to be in the room asking questions and holding the university accountable.
Our university league also asks whether institutions are implementing their policies. Universities used to say they were ‘in the process’ of fossil fuel divestment, and nine years later they could still be in the process.
We also use each win as a gateway to the next demand.
If a university calls itself a sanctuary university, that gives students a foot in the door to ask why it supports the border industry. Once it commits to divestment, students can ask why it still has academic partnerships with those companies, or why a company that runs detention centres is operating its cafeteria.
We do not see divestment as the endpoint. It is a way to keep pushing universities further.
We stand on the shoulders of wonderful organisers who came before us. We are not reinventing the wheel. We are carrying their work forward – and we are excited about what comes next.
