New directions in studying policies of international student mobility and migration

ABSTRACT

Many host-countries have liberalised migration policies to facilitate the transition of international students to the local labour market as they are seen as economic agents who increase global competitiveness and integrate easily. However, how migration and educational policies at the regional and national levels emerge, are negotiated and become implemented, and how they contradict other policies, remains little-known. This special issue aims to address that gap. This introductory paper offers an analytical framework for studying policies of international student mobility that addresses four critical dimensions: discourses, contexts, agents and temporalities before offering some key avenues for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• International student migration
• international student mobility
• migration policy
• policy-making
• Europe
• Australia

Acknowledgements

This special issue is the result of the international meetings organised in Prague (Czech Republic) and Neuchatel (Switzerland) in 2016 by the IMISCOE Research Cluster on International Student Migration and Mobility. We would like to thank Allan Findlay for his valuable comments on this paper. All errors and omissions remain our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Yvonne Riaño http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3463-6977

Christof Van Mol http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9275-101X

Parvati Raghuram http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1841-5613

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swiss National Center of Competence in Research ‘nccr – on the move’, which is financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). The paper was also supported by the IMISCOE Research Cluster on International Student Migration and Mobility.