Aliens with extraordinary abilities: Locating transnational student-migrants in narratives of citizenship and immigration

• In Event: Educational journeys and narratives within and across borders: Case studies of migration and education in Africa, Asia and the Americas

Abstract

The contentious relationship between citizenship, rights, and responsibilities is not unique to a particular nation-state; however, what is distinct is how one’s identity, compliance with national documentation regulation, and performance of citizenship mediates these rights and responsibilities. I consider Aihwa Ong’s discussion on flexible citizenship in understanding the group that Robertson terms “transnational student-migrants”. According to Robertson’s reading of Ong, “student-migrants simultaneously display characteristics of highly skilled and highly mobile ‘flexible citizens’ and of the vulnerable and exploitable labor migrants” (2013, p. 4). Robertson and Runganaikaloo’s (2014) discussion of “education-migration nexus,” focuses on the significant role of assimilation and integration, in the varying immigration processes to nations such as Australia, US, Canada, UK, New Zealand, France and Germany. While these nations certainly have varying pathways for foreign student transitions from universities to permanent or temporary-skilled migration, what they do have in common is a process where “immigration regimes […]screen and select applicants on the basis of their ability to both rapidly integrate into the labor market and to create minimal burden on state-sponsored social services” (p.2).


Thus, in this theoretical essay, I discuss how African immigrants regardless of their class position, share in the “paradox of legal citizenship, economic disenfranchisement and that has come to determine contemporary African American political identity” (Tillet, 2012, p. 140). While new African migrations have changed the “changed the composition of social formations in the contemporary era” (Ferguson, 2011, p. 114), and it is it is important to acknowledge heterogeneity of Black communities, this conversation, the distinctions have become a site where “one of the shifting nature of racialist discourse” (Pierre, 2004, p.143).


African student-migrants, by the very nature of their racialized experiences, complicate discourses of race, gender, class, globalization, transnationalism, and diaspora that exclusively rely on mobility. While these student-migrants don’t experience the same intolerance as blue-collar migrant workers, refugees and asylees, they are still in positions governed by visas, which are tied to various institutions. As Pierre trenchantly argues, assimilation of African immigrants (I include international students, in this narrative) is racialized, like other migrant populations in American history. Whereas assimilation is often part of the process of affirming belonging in US American culture, this is not the case for Black people. Reliant on the assumption that African American subordination in US society is a reflection of cultural pathology, immigrant “cultural distinctiveness” reaffirms US racial hierarchy while simultaneously “pathologizing of African American life and culture” (Pierre, 2004, p. 151.) This rejection of assimilation reveals the racial aspects of assimilation as per the “education-migration nexus”.


This essay discusses the role of citizenship and immigration documentation as producers and mediators of rights and responsibilities. I identify how experiences of immigrants and the processes of transnational migration impact and are impacted by identity markers how legal categories are supported or challenged by cultural citizenship. To understand immigration (and the different categories of immigration) in relationship to citizenship, I draw upon Esposito (2008; 2010). Contextualizing citizenship rights in relationship to student-migrants in, I discuss the classed experiences of two postcolonial African immigrant populations, using Agamben (1998), Esposito (2008), and Weheliye (2014) analysis of biopower to discuss race, class, and immigration status. This essay concludes with a discussion of the literature genealogies of Black migration patterns (Ferguson, 2011). I address the questions, what do the experiences of migrants and marginalized citizens reveal about the limits of citizenship? How do race, class, and gender factor in what queer theorist Isaac West calls the “performativity of citizenship” (2013) and the distribution of rights? I close with a discussion of the perils of what Jemima Pierre calls “Black/African postcolonial immigrant ‘cultural distinctiveness’” (2004, p. 143) and how such rhetoric aids the evasion of political discourses about the persistence of racism in the US.

Author

• Brenda Nyandiko Sanya, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign