Producing international students: Migration management and the making of population categories

International student mobilities (ISM) is an important but increasingly complex and controversial topic. Politically, the contested nature of international student mobilities is driven by the confluence of immigration policies, increasing demand for global education, and new higher education funding imperatives. Academically, international student mobilities is a key field of study which intersects with three subdisciplines of geography: political, population and social. Our intervention reveals, for the first time, how current UK migration management policies are actively ‘producing’ the international student as a population category. We illustrate the effects of this production through its operationalisation into universities and everyday student lives. We achieve this by developing an analytical framework informed by theorisations of ‘dynamic nominalism’, which is complemented by data from semi-structured interviews and policy documents. Our findings uncover the existence of multiple populations within the international student category, exposing the inherent complexities, hierarchies of privilege and contradictions therein. Notably, we identify a conceptual and empirical distinction between those produced as ‘international students’ based on their visa, and those produced as ‘international students’ via their tuition fee status. The implications of this intervention are important for the contentious landscape of higher education and immigration policy because the paper challenges assumptions about, and raises ethical questions regarding the treatment of, the ‘international student’. Our analytical framework also has wider applicability beyond the subject of ISM, through its potential to aid geographers, and those in cognate disciplines, concerned with addressing fundamental questions about how and why categories are produced and the consequences of this production.