Bordering public institutions through the routinization of borderwork and datafication: Internalized immigration regimes within UK health care and higher education

Abstract

The embedding of immigration checks into public institutions constitutes an integral part of contemporary bordering regimes. In this article, we situate recent changes to the UK’s internal borderscape in two parts of the public sector: higher education and health care. We argue that, analyzed from institutional perspectives, these changes reflect not only a dispersal and deterritorialization of the UK’s border regime, but also the emergence of specific relations between the government department responsible for this regime – the Home Office – and other parts of the public sector and its institutions. We maintain that these relations have developed into two main forms: the routinization of borderwork within public sector employees’ roles, drawing workers from across public institutions into relations with the Home Office and subordinating the needs of those institutions to the demands of the UK’s internalized border regime; and the establishment of information systems for datafication, to enable reporting and sharing data between public sector institutions and the Home Office, which are exploited for surveillance purposes. Such relations not only vulnerabilize public sector institutions by draining their resources and destabilizing institutional cultures, but also drive ongoing changes in the bureaucratic field of the state.