Problematising strategic internationalisation: tensions and conflicts between international student recruitment and integration policy in Ireland

ABSTRACT

Internationalisation of higher education in Ireland has been identified as a pathway to economic recovery through encouraging student mobility and attracting highly skilled human capital. International students constitute one element of recent Irish immigration trends, presenting new challenges for a society in which diversity is a relatively recent phenomenon. In this light, here I explore the contradictions and tensions that arise from the drive to recruit international students with the need to embed policies that enshrine the integration of migrants more broadly. As highly skilled migrants, international students are often perceived as ‘the best and the brightest’, who exhibit high levels of social and human capital. However, they occupy a contradictory position within a hierarchy that values the economic investment they make in Irish education, but categorises them into a fixed identity that does not recognise the diversity of needs to better facilitate their social inclusion. Analysing both government migration policies and university recruitment strategies reveals how policies at different scales shape hierarchies of desirability, wherein students are appraised for revenue generation but subject to surveillance, racialisation, increasing restrictions and divisive rhetoric depending on their status as non-EU students. To address this imbalance requires the implementation of holistic internationalisation strategies and migration policies.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• student mobility
• social inclusion
• Ireland
• internationalisation
• integration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 University College Cork; University of Limerick; Trinity College Dublin; University College Dublin; National University of Ireland Galway; and NUI Maynooth.

2 ICOS advocates for the rights of international students and makes recommendations for internationalisation policies; it is not state-funded.

3 These are short-term exchange programmes which typically involve three months to a year of study abroad.

4 Students were asked to rate how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the statement ‘I want to integrate into Irish society”.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was supported by the IMISCOE Research Cluster on International Student Migration and Mobility and the Swiss National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) – on the move.