Classifications and clarifications: Rethinking higher education’s role in international student mobility and the voluntariness of migration

• In Event: Contesting borders and centering learners: Global migration across four continents

Proposal

How is the topic relevant to CIES 2024?

Our proposal advocates for a new way to conceptualize the intersection of migration and international education (IE). By thinking differently about how the growth of global migration confronts prevailing notions of IE, and international learners who are forced into migration in particular, we make a broader protest statement against the inequity of opportunity faced by migrant learners.

In reviewing literature or alternative perspectives, how does the contribution build on existing work?

The realities of international student mobility (ISM) are complexifying. As higher education (HE) systems become increasingly economically dependent on international students – and countries in the Global North increasingly depend on those international students as a source of future immigrants (OECD 2022) – HE institutions become migration actors within a larger HE-migration nexus (Author 2 2022; Cerna and Chou 2022). HE institutions are also becoming “important site[s] for the formation and cultivation of new diasporas” (Rizvi, 2023, p. 16) and integral to pathways to protection for displaced students, especially under the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) current Global Compact on Refugees (Hakimi, 2022; Oppen & Zaman, 2022).

Yet despite being highly heterogeneous, internationally mobile post-secondary students are still seen and described as having common motivations and experiences. Most ISM literature “fail[s] to differentiate between immigration statuses” (Murray 2022, 103), especially overlooking the unique circumstances of students from displaced and/or forced migrant backgrounds.

We need to better understand the complexities of ISM, as well its relations to HE institutions, to formulate a more inclusive and realistic view of international HE. Our presentation (based on an academic paper currently under review) seeks to fill this gap by suggesting a new typology of ISM.

How is the theoretical contribution situated in terms of linguistic, national, or geo-political contexts?

Until recently, ISM has been undertheorized in education, lacking both empirical and conceptual research (Lee et al., 2006; Ogden et al., 2020) and overlooking the “inequalities, discrimination, and power disputes” associated with international student flows (Lee et al., 2006, p. 580). Discussions initiated by IE practitioners rarely went “beyond crude economic and political assessments of student motivations” (Brooks & Waters 2011, 114). These critiques spurred research on ISM beyond the framework of internationalization. Critical insights from the study of migration and mobility are now recognized as relevant to ISM research, e.g. the ways mobility is historically enabled by colonialism (Kaplan, 2015), can be considered “a violently and unfairly distributed resource’ (Montegary & White, 2015, p. 4), and an ongoing process bound up in fluid, mobile lives rather than a discreet event (Madge et al., 2014). Our presentation builds on such insights from critical migration studies to rethink ISM.

What are the implications of the critique for future practice, policy, or theory?

We respond to an article in which Author 1 (2019) outlined three categorizations of ISM: (1) ‘mobility for enlightenment’ (voluntary IE, e.g. credit mobility, exchange programs); (2) ‘mobility for opportunity’ (IE driven by economic migration, e.g. degree mobility as an immigration strategy); and (3) ‘mobility for survival’ (IE undertaken alongside forced migration, e.g. refugee education) (p. 4). While insightful, we recognized a need for a more nuanced typology to better reflect the interplay between education, mobility, and migration, particularly relating to the voluntariness of migration. Our expanded typology encourages more attention to how migration’s reproduction, amplification, dissolvement, and restructuring of forms of privilege (Robertson & Roberts, 2022) shape international HE, and vice versa.

To situate our proposed typology, we address ‘messy terms,’ ‘messy data,’ and ‘messy practices’ within ISM, and we share a list of key ISM-related terms alongside their common usage as a resource to improve intelligibility of the field. In addition to making a theoretical contribution, our purpose is to inform those who serve and analyse internationally mobile populations, including education institutions (Unangst, 2022) and governments.

How original is the contribution?

Our presentation offers a new classification of ISM to better account for the way that messy terms, messy data, and messy practices permeate and muck up the discourse, study, and operationalization of ISM today. In doing so, we refashion Author 1’s (2019) categories of enlightenment, opportunity, and survival by separating out the elements they hinge upon: (1) the discretion to move (i.e. voluntariness of mobility), and (2) movement’s degree of impact on opportunity.

We propose a landscape of ISM that reflects a continuum structured by the interface of discretion (to move) and opportunity. We suggest discretion should be thought of as a spectrum, as layers of less (if not entirely non-) consensual forms of international movement driven by displacement are influenced by inequities driven by both historical and ongoing forces of empire and capitalism (Walia, 2013). Similarly, opportunity should be thought of on a continuum, especially as ISM is instrumentalised as economically beneficial for individuals (Kratz & Netz, 2018). This interplay between discretion and opportunity, we suggest, allows for a better understanding of ISM in all its permutations.

What do we learn that we did not know, and why is it important?

Our presentation makes three important contributions. First, in bridging studies of mobility, migration, and education, we clarify the relationship between the fields and some commonly-used ISM terms. Second, in outlining the messiness of ISM’s terms, data, and practices, we problematise the complexity of our subfield. Finally, in offering an updated landscape of ISM that reflects a continuum structured by the interface of discretion and opportunity, we offer an updated lens through which ISM can be better understood. We promote more nuanced discussions of the societal function of ISM today and the ethical paradoxes that it presents. We conclude with five provocations for discussion: (1) IE has much to learn from mobility and migration studies; (2) current ISM definitions and classifications fail to reflect the reality of migration today; (3) more consideration of ISM’s intersections with equity, diversity, inclusion, decolonisation, and social justice is required; (4) HE creates its own ‘HE border’ through administrative bordering practices; and (5) HE itself is engaged in ISM for enlightenment, opportunity, and/or survival as a sector.

Authors

• Lisa Brunner, The University of British Columbia

• Bernhard T Streitwieser, George Washington University

• Rajika Bhandari, Rajika Bhandari Advisors