Fraught subjects: decolonial approaches to racialized international students as “settlers of colour in the making”

ABSTRACT

This paper contributes to migration studies, settler colonial studies and critical internationalization studies by mapping as connected two concurrent settler colonial preoccupations, reconciliation and internationalization. In Canada, as in other Western countries, international students are a crucial resource as they increasingly sustain post-secondary funding. At the same time, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015) has charged the educational sector to put reconciliation and decolonization at the heart of their mandate. Drawing on interviews with racialized international students in Ontario, Canada, this paper examines how racialized international students may have complex relationships to coloniality and be complicit in legitimating settler colonialism. We argue that the processes of reconciliation and internationalization must be understood as deeply interconnected especially because the obfuscation of coloniality is a key technology of settler rule.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration
• settler colonialism
• international students
• reconciliation
• Canada
• coloniality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Government of Canada provides a detailed list of study permit holders by country of citizenship from January 2015 to January 2023 (https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/90115b00-f9b8-49e8-afa3-b4cff8facaee/resource/b505b9bc-d375-4525-af39-afdf25639acf?inner_span=True). These figures clearly reveal that international students in Canada are largely racialized. Based on student permits issued in 2021, the top ten source countries for international students to Canada were India, China, France, Iran, Vietnam, Philippines, South Korea, United States, Nigeria and Mexico (CBIE 2022, 3). In 2022, approximately 40% of students were from India and 12% from China and of the remaining top source countries only 3% were from France and 2% from the United States. Additionally notable growth in top sending countries are also almost exclusively in non-western countries such as Nepal (+258%), Philippines (+112%), Peru (+115%) and Sri Lanka (+94%) (CBIE website facts and figures, https://cbie.ca/infographic/).

2 The total number of people we spoke with in interviews and focus groups was 45; we did not double-count when someone participated in both forums.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number: 430-2019-00798]. Ethics clearance was received by Brock University Social Science Research Ethics Board (File number: 19–023 – PARK).