Editorial

The era of constant growth in international student mobility appears to be at an end. A global benchmark study found that nearly a third of responding universities had seen a decline in international undergraduates, and more than 40% had experienced reductions in international graduate students (Greenfield, 2024). This appears to be the result of what some are calling the “great policy backlash”—a fundamental shift in government priorities in some of the leading student receiving countries (Mitchell, 2024). Canada is the epicentre of this backlash. As discussed in a previous CIE/ECI editorial (McCartney et al., 2023), international student mobility is less popular and more controversial in Canada than it has been in decades. A new international student cap has caused a steep decline in the number of international students entering the country (Keung, 2024), and popular opinion about international students is declining rapidly (Neuman, 2024). International education, and especially international student mobility, have long been seen as fundamental to contemporary higher education. However, there appears to be a new era dawning, in which postsecondary institutions lack public trust, international mobility is seen as a threat, and international students are viewed as competition for limited resources. But how did we get to this position? And why are institutions themselves not doing a better job of making their case for international student mobility? What is the future of the international education project if international student mobility has lost its appeal? In Canada it has been common to blame postsecondary institutions for “misbehaving,” recruiting too many international students and causing a number of downstream problems in the surrounding communities. However, this ignores the larger context that produced the drive to recruit international students. Two linked global phenomena have produced this current “crisis,” and make governments’ claims that they were surprised by the effects of student mobility especially unconvincing. The first is the reorganization of borders in the era of globalization. Starting in the 1970s, governments began to redraw border policies to enable more selective forms of human mobility, away from primarily race-based systems towards efforts to recruit immigrants based on human capital (though often still characterized by institutionalized racism). In Canada this was most obvious in the Immigration Act of 1976, which both formalized the point system for immigration (theoretically removing race-based exclusion and ensuring only high human capital individuals would become immigrants) and created categories of migrants, including migrant workers and international students. These migrants were invited to enter Canada but only temporarily, to serve short-term Canadian interests rather than to build a life as permanent residents. The creation of international students as a category of migrant was not only a formal, political process; it was an ideological process as well, that marked those students as outsiders who had no right to Canadian education. As a result, charging them dramatically higher tuition fees was not only reasonable, but seemed just—after all, in the eyes of many Canadians, they did not deserve the same rights as citizens since they were by definition foreigners being granted special access to Canada. Even though pathways to immigration have been created for international students in the subsequent decades, this attitude largely remains in place. This makes international students both susceptible to the revenue-seeking recruitment of postsecondary institutions and an easy scapegoat for politicians who want to blame social ills on a group who are both politically marginalized and seen as other. While their migrant status made it possible to charge international students differential fees, it was other changes that made institutions financially dependent on their tuition. Contemporaneous to changes to migration policies was the rise of neoliberalism, or …