Written by Jenna Mittelmeier (University of Manchester)
The current situation (in brief)
While the oppressive treatment of international students in various visa regimes is certainly not new, we are presently witnessing unprecedented attacks on international students’ civil liberties in many of the most popular host countries through their increasing arrests, forced deportations, and visa cancellations. Most of these are in connection to their lawful and peaceful political activism, particularly concerning the genocide occurring in Gaza. This is most newsworthy over the last month in the United States, where the Trump administration has branded students who protest Israel’s human rights violations as ‘Hamas sympathizers’, revoking the visas of over 1600 international students now and threatening to remove student visa sponsorship rights from their universities. Arrested international students have been quickly trafficked across state boundaries, likely in an attempt to create greater legal hurdles for appealing their arrests. In some cases, their universities have not even been informed.
While the news about this issue is dominated by prominent examples in the United States spearheaded by the Trump administration, such erosion of international students’ rights is not limited to the United States, and there are growing concerns in many other common host countries, particularly in Anglophone and European contexts. At my own institution in the UK, for example, a Palestinian student’s visa was revoked last year for her statements about Israel (a decision which was later successfully legally challenged). Similar stories have emerged in recent years in contexts such as Germany, Australia, Canada, India, the United Arab Emirates, and Greece, likely among others. These examples have received comparatively less attention and there are challenges to finding reputable information about the scale of this issue. Nonetheless, international students’ political and civil rights are a pressing concern for the global field of international higher education.
Why should higher education scholars care?
The most obvious reason is because international students have human rights and those rights in many countries include the ability to peacefully oppose the political beliefs of their host institutions and countries. Beyond that, we should all be concerned about the erosion of students’ rights and civil liberties, because as individuals we are only as free as the most marginalised in our societies. It is for this reason that legal scholars in the United States have described international students’ arrests as a ‘struggle for the soul of the country’ and ‘test cases’ for attacking free speech more broadly (which is not hyperbolic, considering the Trump administration is already debating the deportation of US citizens). The increased precarity and unsafety faced by international students, then, is a litmus test for how our governments intend to treat political dissent among their residents. This means the mistreatment of international students sets a dangerous precedent for the repression of political views generally and globally.
But there is a more pressing human consideration here, and those of us who care about international students as people should also be alarmed by the climate of fear and uncertainty these actions have created. We have seen examples of international students choosing to leave their study context in fear of arrest and retribution. Others have taken to pre-emptively suing their host government over harassment by immigration agents or making contingency plans in fear of future arrest. But even for those who do not feel in imminent risk of deportation, a profound sense of unwelcome is building, exacerbated by an ongoing othering that delineates who has rights and whose rights are conditional. This is, bluntly put, not a fair or just or kind treatment of our fellow people. It also further exacerbates a two-tier structure where political activism is doubly risky for those with precarious visa statuses.
Where is the field’s voice?
News about international students’ deportations has featured prominently over the last month, and has been a growing concern across countries for years. Yet our research field has been relatively quiet, with fewer scholars speaking openly in opposition about this pressing issue. To be fair, one reason is that research with international students is a community with a large number of scholars based in the United States, and so many in our field face uncertain potential retribution in a context becoming quickly more precarious and dangerous (especially for migrant academics and international student scholars, who tend to work in this field). Outside the United States, there is perhaps a prevailing sentiment that this issue is limited to Trump’s America, while failing to see how the erosion of students’ rights there is impacting our global field and opening doors for injustices elsewhere. Thus, there is a need for those of us with relatively more security and safety to use our position as experts in research with international students to work in solidarity to dismantle these growing injustices.
But to state a bit more boldly my concern: How can our research field as a whole position our work in good faith as ‘critical’ if we simultaneously ignore the increasing weaponization of students’ visas to silence their political dissent? So many of us have built our careers and livelihoods on ‘understanding’ the experiences of international students, and it creates more injustice to remain quiet while their civil liberties are being stripped away on a global stage. It raises questions about whether there is any point in developing more knowledge about this population if we aren’t also advocating against the politics which make them more vulnerable and unsafe. This moment of global mistreatment, then, acts as a litmus test for our field: who among us is willing (and able) to practice what they write? How can we, within this moment, move beyond simply writing against coloniality, othering, stereotyping, and mistreatment, to taking action?
Research with international students is a field which too often prefers to depoliticize its subject. Yet, our work is inexplicably intertwined with the visa regimes under which students study, linking them inherently with the treatment of migrants generally (as highlighted by the recent announcement that ICE in the United States will now be monitoring immigrants’ social media accounts). These political conditions create the foundation for which many of the experiences we study are embedded – whether we recognize it or not, our work is political and we must, collectively and as a field, confront this growing injustice head-on. This is the kind of moment when our expertise is needed the most.
I wrestle with what this might look like in practice (both for the field and for myself), feeling uncertainty about what we might do to move from publication to action. Some ideas might include:
- Using our social media platforms to highlight the situation and share our concerns
- Using our connections and platforms to write for various academic and public outlets about our concerns
- Using our skills in data analysis to compile information which holds institutions and structures accountable (e.g., policies, statements, news, etc).
- Developing research projects which capture and document these injustices for future accountability
- Developing seminars or pamphlets which provide international students with information about their rights (working in connection with legal experts)
- Creating safe and open spaces for international students to support one another
- Advocating within our institutions for emergency support and acts of resistance
- Donating to migrant human rights charities or local grassroots organisations offering international students free legal advice or council
- Engaging with policymakers and politicians at local and national levels to advocate for international students’ fair treatment
- Refusing to engage with or contribute to institutions which are actively cooperating with immigration agencies to arrest or deport international students
But this remains an ongoing discussion for our field: how do we use our roles as experts to oppose international students’ unjust treatment not just in the United States, but globally? Because while international students increasingly lose their rights, we must remember that our field has not lost its voice.
*note: this article has been edited to clarify that 1600 students have had their visas cancelled, but have not necessarily been arrested