It is undeniable that university life in the United States is implicated in the current moment of state violence, institutional repression, and worsening neoliberal austerity. What has been noteworthy is how, in this context, the foreign student has emerged as a significant figure. The broader targeting of the higher education sector by the right-wing Trump administration, the violent quelling of Palestinian solidarity protests on campuses, and the surge in nativistic resentment in light of President Trump’s own inconsistent positions on education- and labor-related migration all have involved a heightened, hostile attention to the presence of international students at American universities.  In the latest instantiation of this trend, the Trump administration issued a change to the “duration of status” rule that had permitted international students to remain in the country as long as they had maintained their enrolled status; with this revision, a fixed period of four years is now imposed, ultimately meaning that foreign students will be subject to additional federal immigration scrutiny during their time in the United States (See Department of Homeland Security, 2026).

How did the student-migrant subject appear in the political crosshairs of the battles raging on and against our campuses?  Why is this the case? Our answers cannot merely come from a presentist framing that only interprets the attacks on international students through critiques of the overtly fascist turn in U.S. national electoral politics. Rather, we must attend critically to the political and policy legacies that have long been part of the story of student migration in the U.S. and have helped foster this current moment of strife in which our international students are being aggressively targeted by a familiar politics of scapegoating.

For the past two decades or so, we have been witnessing an extraordinary rise in overseas students at U.S. institutions of higher education. A consequence of the global commodification of higher education, drawing students from overseas in large numbers has been accepted as a viable and easy option for revenue generation. Indeed, throwing open American campus doors to students from other parts of the world is now the primary strategy of what has come to be referred to as “internationalization,” the systematic efforts and policy agendas made by universities seeking to ensure their own survival and relevance in the era of neoliberal globalization. There are currently over a million students from overseas studying on American campuses. Notably, these students overwhelmingly arrive from the Asian region, with India and China serving as leading sources of foreign students for over 20 years. They contribute billions of dollars to the U.S. economy, serve as key sources of revenue and labor for the campus, and predominantly enroll in technical fields seen as pivotal to the “global knowledge economy” but ones that are otherwise chronically under-enrolled by domestic students.

In the academic world, the economic significance of foreign students’ enrollments is widely recognized today, often casually referred to behind closed doors as our campuses’ “cash cows.” This sentiment often smuggles in a range of assumptions, such as the notion that these students are elite, wealthy, and that their arrival on our campuses is not because they earned a place, but solely because of their economic value. These kinds of assumptions are problematic not only because of the ways they disregard the actual lived and quite varied experiences of this migrant population, but also how that disregard, then, contributes to rendering them vulnerable to the politically charged tussles transforming our institutions. The neglect I allude to here is partly explained by the tendency in U.S. scholarship to hold the international student as an analytically distinct, ahistorical, and apolitical category of transnational mobility, thus divorcing their experiences and stories from the socio-political and historical conditions forging their paths as migrants. I want to suggest that re-framing and attending ethnographically to the foreign student as a key migrant personhood would bring to the surface deeper, crucial insights on the interface of migration, race politics, and higher education in the era of late-stage capitalism.

In my critical ethnography, Indebted Mobilities (2024), I offer this kind of ethnographic reading of the migratory lives of non-elite, middle-class, Indian men pursuing an overseas education at a public university in the U.S. within the post-9/11, neoliberal landscape. The book argues that the transnational educational sphere is imagined as a site of masculine becoming among these men who are raised in a post-liberalized India, and whose arrival on an American campus is imbricated in the geographies of racial capitalism. These young people’s desiring for successful modern manhood, which they believe can be made possible through their migration for an American education, articulates with the racial and class formations that mark their movement across borders and locate them ambivalently on campus. The sensemaking that emerges from these articulations is configured not only through the narrative of US exceptionalism, which has been tethered to the history of Indian educational migration to the United States, but also through interrelated ideas of indebtedness.

Importantly, the vast majority of these migrant youth would not have been able to study overseas without having received significant amounts in student loans to finance the pursuit. Their transnational migration being directly linked to the accrual of student debt informed key aspects of their lives as student-migrants—being forced to live in subpar, segregated housing conditions on campus, working part-time jobs that were regularly low-wage, exploitative and at times, involved taking risks around their visa status,¹ and feeling immense pressure to stay and secure professional work in the U.S. after graduation in order to repay their loans.  

At the same time, drawing on late anthropologist David Graeber’s (2011) analysis of debt, the book contends that student debt, and the material conditions wrought by such debt, were intertwined with other affective and moral logics of indebtedness to mediate how these young people negotiated their desire to become modern “men of the world.” My middle-class interlocutors revealed how the webs of obligation attached to their migratory paths produced a cultural logic of indebtedness—a sort of inventory-taking of what they owed and what they were owed in return—that configured how these Indian youth registered their lives as migrants. This moral calculus, working in tandem with the impersonal and legal nature of the market-based obligation to immediately repay student loans after graduation, served a crucial disciplinary function that ultimately groomed these young people for the volatility of the global neoliberal economy.

As disillusionment and crisis pervade the ethos of U.S. higher education in the throes of neoliberal restructuring, the notion of the U.S. university as the place one can seize the promises of the so-called “American Dream” is arguably beginning to fade in the American popular imagination; peddling such promises to the aspirational middle-classes of the Global South, then, makes sense. Doing so is not only crucial for the economic vitality of campuses because of the revenue and labor student-migrants end up providing, but also because it ultimately draws in student populations whose growing presence helps ideologically sustain the exceptionalist logic inherent to the mission of U.S. higher education. The Indian middle-class migrant youth centered in my ethnographic work lamented to me about what they deemed the failures of India’s higher education system to provide the upward mobility, status, and success they were convinced were rightfully theirs;² they felt an American education, in contrast, was the authentically liberal, secular site where true meritocracy thrives, hard work is rewarded, opportunities are abundant, and the successful modern futures they believed they deserved are rendered possible. That they are chasing these possibilities by falling into severe financial debt because of their student loans (the repayment of which becomes mainly dependent on whether they can stay in the United States and secure stable work in pertinent fields) is indicative of how the violence of debt is increasingly a shared condition of student life that includes foreign student populations, and continues to be essential to sustaining the neoliberal university. And still, the pertinence of student-migrants arriving from the Asian region is hardly recognized or acknowledged in the student debt discourse in the United States.

Overall, Indebted Mobilities’ ethnographic centering of the Indian student-migrant as a key figure of South Asian transnationality illuminates how the production of indebted, racialized migrant-subjects is a vital feature of the educational circuits of neoliberal empire. This kind of ethnographic attention to the trajectories of student-migrants can offer something toward undoing a troubling erasure of the lived experiences of a migrant population that has become especially critical to the landscape of higher education today.

Pushing back against this erasure is something that matters not only because these young people have become integral to our classrooms and university community, but also because of the ways their presence on our campuses is implicated in the political tensions around immigration in the United States. When immigration debates traffic in reductive binaries of the good, appropriate, virtuous migrant striving for the promises of US exceptionalism, on the one hand, and the treacherous, criminal and illegal migrant exploiting an all-too-benevolent immigration system on the other, the student-migrant, understood to be migrating for educational opportunities they receive as part of a commodified exchange, is typically idealized as the former. The migrant youth arriving on student visas in large numbers from places like India are especially positioned to be seen as the desirable migrant because of how their paths resonate with long-existing tropes of Asians as more ambitious, hard-working, and more naturally or culturally inclined for educational and economic success. But in my work, I argue that in moments of political and economic crisis, such clear divisions between the innocuous and the risky migrant become blurred, and the student-migrant is revealed as a much more ambivalent figure. This ambivalent positioning thrusts the figure of the foreign student into the politically charged spotlight in various conjunctures of crisis and nationalist angst, marking this migrant subject as a racialized threat to the national order.

One such significant conjuncture was the inception of the “War on Terror” following the September 11, 2001 attacks, which had enduring consequences for the foreign student presence on American campuses. The War on Terror not only heralded an era of endless, devastating military invasions and occupations abroad; it also involved a massive restructuring of national state agencies that enabled the consolidation of mass surveillance and deepened the link between transnational migration and the U.S. carceral state. As a feature of this restructuring, restrictive, stringent measures to track and surveil foreign students on campuses and in the U.S. were an important development. The justification for this scrutiny of the figure of the educational migrant was tied to the discovery that some of the 9/11 hijackers had been issued student visas or had used educational reasons to gain entry in the U.S., thus suggesting how the student visa system was inefficient, ineffective, and putting the nation in danger. In the context of post-9/11 racial profiling and racially motivated acts of violence, student-migrants who could be constructed racially as potential terrorist-threats (including Arabs, Muslims, South Asians, and other so-called “Muslim-looking” individuals) were marked as ambivalent, suspicious figures on our campuses, drawing institutions of higher education into the nationalist narratives of border security. For the student-migrants discussed in Indebted Mobilities, the post-9/11 surveillance state was crucial to their moral calculus and racialized becoming in the era of neoliberal globalization, illuminating how the circuits of educational migration specifically linking South Asia and the United States are caught up in the exigencies and contradictions of nation- and empire-building projects and pointing to the need to read these young people’s ambivalent positioning through the nexus of geopolitical interests, conjunctural crisis, and racial politics.

The politicized targeting of foreign students and their place in the tussles around the future of U.S. higher education we are witnessing in the current moment should be situated in relation to some of the considerations I have noted above. For one, the framing of international students as mere economic subjects essential to revenue-generation schemes, which contributes to a problematic disregard of the actual differences that exist within the transnational class formations of this migrant population, easily dovetails with the nativistic scapegoating of overseas students in the face of broader economic and political turmoil in the U.S.

Most recently, President Donald Trump’s own vacillating on whether or not to severely restrict the issuance of F-1 (student) and H-1B (work) visas (Gooding, 2025; Licon and Tang, 2025), two categories that are often perceived as synonymous with a larger arrival of Asian foreign nationals, led to a backlash within his own base that revealed the xenophobic resentment of international students. During a televised interview with Fox News, Trump made a stunning reversal in his earlier stance on the issue, arguing that not only would restricting international student enrollments spell disaster financially for universities across the country, but that the U.S. simply did not have the home-grown talent necessary to strengthen the U.S. economy (Trump, 2025). Online discourse condemned the change in Trump’s position as a grave betrayal of his promises to put “America First,” insisting that it both impacts the availability of jobs for Americans, as well as encourages a saturated foreign presence on American campuses where “talent” is meant to get nurtured. The online exchange around the Trump interview also reflected the widespread misinformation that exists about the relationship between the foreign student and the campus economy. Namely, there appeared to be not only an overall rage that these “foreigners” were taking up seats in university classrooms, but that they also must be taking scholarships and other funding opportunities away from American students who are increasingly unable to afford a college education (Stonetoss, 2025), reflecting the widely held assumption that these students are highly privileged foreigners displacing the U.S.’s own more deserving citizens.

Indicative of how racialized migrants are often scapegoated in times of political and economic crisis of U.S. global hegemonic power, the Asian foreign student has come to play the bogeyman in white nationalist anxieties linking immigration, the US economy, and higher learning. Such nativistic resentment is consistent with the broader right-wing attacks on higher education that have escalated recently. Higher education as the main target for the culture wars that have ensued has had a strong ally and enforcer in the second Trump administration, which has been using executive actions to bend institutional decision-making to the will of the administration’s agenda. This has included the threat (and in some cases, the actual implementation) of massive federal funding cuts. Importantly, the right-wing government’s show of force has helped serve as a cover for universities to carry out acts of austerity and repression that could be argued were in their institutional interest all along. For one, campuses have gradually been turning their attention to redefining policies in ways that weaken the conditions for academic freedom and campus dissent, something that has been amplified in the wake of the egregious, violent crackdown on the 2024 Palestinian solidarity encampments and protests (Blinder, 2025; Charbonneau, 2026; Greenfield, 2026). For another, institutions of higher education have been using the broader political tensions caused by the Trump administration to move forward with slashing academic programming and curricula that apparently don’t meet the muster of economic value; unsurprisingly, many of the programs that are impacted tend to have a humanistic and critical edge to them (Otterman, 2026; Robbin and Gomez, 2025).

These developments serve as the backdrop for the recent targeting of foreign students.  Existing at the intersection of the Right’s attacks on liberal campuses and on immigration, student-migrants are a valuable target but one that is marked in contradictory ways because of their economic import. In fact, the shifts in Trump’s rhetoric—from the promise to return to an isolationist and unapologetically White America to the realization of and allusion to how U.S. economic, political, and military might are dependent on [racialized] foreign talent and labor—are not simply the inexplicable whims of a megalomaniac madman; it is a central tension in the history of U.S. migration policy. The xenophobia directed at the Asian foreign student is a familiar reaction to the long-standing contradictions and angst that underlie the liberal capitalist logic of the U.S. nation-building project. Whatis noteworthy is that as the rhetorical and policy maneuvers that surface to manage these contradictions are worked out on student-migrants, it reveals how the university is a pertinent node in the U.S. migration policy regime; indeed, the university being entangled in and understood as a site of broader nativistic battles today is not all that unexpected or unprecedented.

To this point, another key consideration is how the consolidation of the post-9/11 surveillance apparatus directly set the stage for the current moment of political targeting and repression of international students and their political activities. As suggested, the ambivalent positioning of racialized student-migrants, at times, constructs them as a threat to state interests; this is especially true when their political alignments unfold in ways that are unexpected and deemed inappropriate. Throughout the history of educational migration to the United States, students from other parts of the world, particularly from the Global South, have gotten involved in the cultures of dissent that have been partly nurtured on American campuses, participating in anti-colonial struggles and internationalist social movements that challenged the repressive and imperialist campaigns of the U.S. and other nations (Shannon, 2017; Thomas, 2019). Overseas students’ involvement in such acts of resistance meant risking their educational standing, migration status, and their bodies. Most recently, foreign students took these kinds of risks protesting alongside American students as part of the global Palestinian solidarity movement. In 2024, thousands of students got involved in the pro-Palestine encampments that spread across campuses to demand a halt to U.S. complicity in the genocidal violence and ethnic cleansing campaigns driven by Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism. In response, under both the Biden and the Trump administrations, and facilitated by university leadership, this student resistance was criminalized using the full force of state violence. The migration status of foreign students who were involved in the protests made them an especially easy, vulnerable target. The 2025 detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a former international student, is a telling instance of how the U.S. migration policy regime is mobilized, even in contradictory ways, to ensnare the disruptive, dissenting foreign student. While Khalil was initially admitted on a student visa to study at Columbia University, he had already been granted permanent residency or “green card” status by the time ICE agents arrived at his doorstep claiming to have revoked his student visa (Svrluga, 2025). When informed of this status change, the agents detained him anyway. Now, Khalil is fighting in the courts to keep his green card and prevent his deportation from the United States (Bustillo and Johnson, 2026). Such cases exemplify how ICE is systematically using immigration law and the extensive powers sanctioned by post-9/11 surveillance measures to intervene by identifying, threatening, detaining, or deporting student-migrants who dared to engage in acts of protest on U.S. university campuses (Jeyaretnam, 2025). 

The transnational lives of student-migrants entangled in the migratory circuits of racial capitalism are, and always have been, implicated in the geopolitical struggles and crises of critical political and historical conjunctures. Ethnographic analyses that uncover the particular material and affective conditions of these migrant subjects’ everyday lives produced within such conjunctures can contribute to deepening our understanding of those implications and help unsettle the distorted assumptions made about their presence on our campus that are directly rendering them vulnerable to state-sanctioned scapegoating and violences.

To end, I would like to return to the idea of debt. What if, as I ask in Indebted Mobilities, we were to collectively re-think a notion of indebtedness—of what is owed in this life—that is not driven by a market logic? Graeber, in his own work, pointed to the various kinds of already-existing, mundane practices of obligation to and care for one another embedded in everyday life that are not processed through a paradigm of exchange. Meanwhile, in The Undercommons, Harney and Moten (2013) reflect on the promise of “bad debt”—a refuge of mutual, social dwelling in which we may perpetually owe, but payment is never possible. It is here, Harney and Moten insist, where true study and solidarity can meaningfully thrive. As they write, “Justice is only possible where debt never obliges, never demands, never equals credit, payment, payback. Justice is possible only where it is never expected, in the refuge of bad debt, in the fugitive public of strangers and not of communities, of undercommons and not neighborhoods, among those who have been there all along from somewhere” (p. 26).

The 2024 Palestinian solidarity protests ignited on our campuses, which also included the courageous involvement of student-migrants, offer an invaluable example of thinking indebtedness differently as Graeber, Moten, and Harney move us to do. Students from across campuses and legal status stepping out of the bounds of the institutional classroom and into makeshift encampments, raising their voices, sharing food and knowledge, taking turns resting and protecting one another, and putting their bodies on the line in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle gesture to a praxis of being in each other’s (bad) debt that was not dictated by a market logic, but through other, already-existing and re-imagined ways of owing each other and our collective futures.  

For those of us engaged in the endeavor of higher education but in ways that are mired in the complicities of the institutional violence of American campuses, what are we moved to reconsider through such notions of indebtedness? For instance, what do we, as scholars and educators, owe the people of the Global South that have been and continue to be at the receiving ends of U.S.-led political, economic, and military destruction, which is fundamentally facilitated by our institutions? What do we owe the people of Palestine? Of Yemen? Of Venezuela? Of Iran? What is owed to the poor and disenfranchised in our universities’ own surrounding communities? In a time of aggressive austerity and growing repression on our campuses, such questions are tied to a probing of whether we can regard spaces of higher learning as having value beyond being, first and foremost, an economic good. Can we reimagine higher learning through a consideration of what we owe one another that will allow us to study and create and exist together differently than the violences of late-stage capitalism allow? 

As the global neoliberal project of higher education today brings students from other parts of the world to our campuses, some arriving in substantial numbers from places like India and China, we need to include student-migrants in this re-envisioning. They are critical to the conditions of being in our institutions. Yet, neglecting to consider this significance in more robust ways not only contributes to our own pedagogical inadequacies in the classroom; it also renders these students vulnerable to the political volatility rocking the very foundation of U.S. higher education today. Attending to their experiences with restrictive migration policies, racial exclusion, surveillance, exploitative labor conditions, and the shackles of student debt and precarious futures offer nodes of connection that could help draw these young people, who overwhelmingly fill seats in technical fields that are the engine of US hegemonic power, into collective acts of political study, protest, mutual care, and solidarity in times of ever-expanding austerity, repression, and imperialism. In a sense, student-migrants’ arrival to and presence at our institutions are often perceived as embodying the human face of the “global” on our campuses. I believe, then, that the acts of risk-taking and internationalist solidarity that some of the student-migrants enacted in the most recent protests for Palestine, a legacy of resistance they continue from their predecessors, are a glimpse into what a more just notion of globality is made possible through them—one that looks and acts across the violent borders of this world and reimagines what we owe one another.

References

Blinder, A. (2025, April 9). How Universities are Responding to Trump. New York Times.https://www.nytimes.com/article/trump-university-college.html

Bustillo, X., & C. Johnson. (2026). He was Detained for 104 Days. A Year Later, He’s Still Fighting for the Right to Free Speech. NPR.  https://www.npr.org/2026/03/10/nx-s1-5716101/mahmoud-khalil-legal-fight

Charbonneau, L. (2026, March 18). Academic Freedom in US Under Threat: Book Bans, Distorted Curricula and Crackdowns on College Campus Protests. Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/03/18/academic-freedom-in-the-us-under-threat

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Graeber, D. (2011). Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House.

Greenfield, N. (2026, January 16). Catastrophic Year for US Academic Freedom and Autonomy. University World News. https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20260116140044901

Harney, S., & F. Moten, F. (2013). The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Minor Compositions.

Jeyaretnam, M. (2025, April 1). These are the Students Targeted by Trump’s Immigration Enforcement Over Campus Activism. Time. https://time.com/7272060/international-students-targeted-trump-ice-detention-deport-campus-palestinian-activism/

Licon, A.G., & D. Tang. (2025, August 26). Trump Saying 600,000 Chinese Students Could Come to the US Draws MAGA Backlash. The Associated Press.  https://apnews.com/article/chinese-student-visas-trump-maga-dce4e064ea61a4df090865668ca48cde

Otterman, S. (2026, April 3). Syracuse Drops 84 Majors Including Classics, Ceramics and Italian. The New York Times.https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/01/nyregion/syracuse-university-degrees-eliminated.html

Robbin, A., & S. Gomez (2025, November 26). University to Cut or Pause 23 Programs Next Fall Amid Restructuring. New School Free Press. https://www.newschoolfreepress.com/2025/11/26/university-to-cut-or-pause-25-programs-next-fall-amid-restructuring/

Susan Thomas is the author of Indebted Mobilities: Indian Youth, Migration, and the Internationalizing University. University of Chicago Press, 2024. She is Associate Professor of Cultural Foundations of Education and a Senior Research Associate with the South Asia Center at Syracuse University.