Mobility Under Watch: Power, Policy, and the Global South Student

• In Event: Politics and Policies of Threat: Detention, De-authorization, and Disappearance of Pk-20 Immigrant & International Students

Abstract

We are still waiting for the Foreign Student Lists from Harvard so that we can determine, after a ridiculous expenditure of BILLIONS OF DOLLARS, how many radicalized lunatics, troublemakers all, should not be let back into our Country.
- President Trump
The last few months have seen an intensified criminalization and hypersurveillance of international students in U.S. higher education amid the current political climate. International students have seen a shift from being positioned as contributors of knowledge and valuable members of the academic community to objects deemed to be suspicious about and contained (Allen & Bista, 2021; Castiello-Gutiérrez & Li, 2020). While much of the existing research on international students focuses on psychological challenges/emotional responses such as homesickness, culture shock, academic adaptation etc., the political vulnerabilities that international students face in the context of restrictive immigration policies, visa revocations, and the infringement on civil liberties remain under-explored.

Recently, the U.S. has enacted anti-DEI policies, a series of visa restrictions, including imposing 3-month single-entry visas for students from certain sub-Saharan African countries and revoking student visas for minor traffic violations such as speeding tickets and parking violations. These measures have been coupled with a temporary pause on student visa appointments, deliberations on OPT/Work authorization reduction/removal and attempts to prevent Harvard from enrolling international students, alongside increased scrutiny of student visa (F, J, M) applicants' social media pages with demands that these profiles be made public (BBC News, 2025; Al Jazeera, 2025; Harvard University, 2025; PBS, 2025) . These policies, often enacted with little to no warning, contribute to an atmosphere of constant surveillance, privacy violation, and pervasive fear among international students. Additionally, hostile policies such as the aforementioned, treat international students as scapegoats, political pawns, disposable commodities whose value is contingent on their economic (tuition dollars and cheap labor) and academic utility to the institution (Marginson 2012). This reality begs critical questions: How are these hostile immigration policies affecting the everyday lives of international students? How do higher education institutions become complicit in surveillance and enforcement of restrictive immigration policies against their own international students?

To examine how such policies shape mobility and student agency in a globalized context, this paper highlights how international students, particularly those from the Global South attending universities in the Global North, navigate, negotiate, and sometimes resist the constraints imposed by policies designed without their agency in mind. Drawing from a range of sources including the media, state and federal policies, and institutional policies from universities, we analyze the impact of these policies on the international student and more specifically, how global power asymmetries manifest themselves and are reproduced in the lives of international students in higher education. The critical contribution of this paper lies in what Diem and Young (2017) identify as central to critical policy analysis: the imperative to uncover and examine the hierarchies of power that underpin policy, discourse, and implementation.

Authors

• Eunice Laryea, Miami University (OH)

• Abisola Aminat Adegunju, Miami University (OH)