For the first time ever, parents and caretakers of students in British schools are being asked to voluntarily turn over information about where their kids were born and their nationality.
The Guardian reports that the information is being gathered by the Department for Education (DfE). DfE officials say they won’t share the information with the Home Office — the government department responsible for immigration — but “disclosures under freedom of information laws have shown that the Home Office has been handed [national pupil database (NPD)] data on 18 occasions since 2012, while police requests for information from the dataset were granted 31 times.”
Concerns about how the data will be used led to calls for parents to boycott the DfE’s request.
Twitter users have shared details about how individuals schools are asking parents for information. Notably, students born in Britain are exempt:
UK Government has just started asking schools to find out which of their students were born abroad and what their nationality. pic.twitter.com/2b3m20o8OW
— Charles Kenny (@charlesjkenny) October 6, 2016
This is happening across the UK right now
Mapping of foreign born children pic.twitter.com/56Dq16M6ei— Brexodus (@hyper_linda) October 6, 2016
DfE’s drive to collect data about migrant students comes more than four months after British voters approved the Brexit referendum. The referendum’s most prominent supporter — Nigel Farage, the former leader of the right-wing UK Independence Party — campaigned on a message of anti-immigrant xenophobia that at times invoked propaganda from some of history’s most reprehensible regimes.
https://twitter.com/zcbeaton/status/743397112923230212?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
A similar white nationalist message is being articulated here in the United States by Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president. Farage campaigned with Trump in August and reportedly has been coaching him ahead of the second presidential debate. During a Fox News appearance earlier this week, Farage said he’ll be in attendance for the debate on Sunday night in St. Louis as one of Trump’s guests.
The DfE’s request for information about migrant students comes amid the rising popularity of xenophobic views in Britain and across Europe. A new YouGov poll in Britain found “authoritarian populist attitudes were shared by 48% of adults, despite less than 20% of the population identifying itself as right-wing,” according to a BuzzFeed report.
In the United States, a Langer Research Associates survey released late last month found that 38 percent of Trump supporters think minorities have too much influence in American society. Despite the fact that white men constitute 80 percent of Congress, while only comprising 31 percent of the country’s population, the survey found that 21 percent of Trump supporters actually think white people don’t have enough influence.
Earlier this week, officials in Britain’s ruling Conservative Party also outlined plans “to force companies to reveal the proportion of foreign staff they were employing and to make it harder for companies to justify employing foreign workers,” according to Al Jazeera. Trump, meanwhile, has vowed to deport America’s 11 million undocumented immigrants.