Abstract
The world’s three million cross-border international students are located in a ‘gray zone’ of regulation with incomplete human rights, security and capabilities. Like other mobile persons such as short-term business and labour entrants, and refugees, students located on foreign soil do not enjoy the same protections and entitlements as do citizens. International students are affected by two different national regulatory regimes, in the nations of citizenship and of education. But they are fully covered by neither. Their position is vulnerable and uncertain, mediated by non-citizen status and the related facts of cultural difference, information asymmetry and communication difficulties. Referring to research on international education in Australia, which has the world’s fifth largest international student population, the article focuses on the manner in which the subordinated outsider status of international students magnifies the problems they face. It considers what might be done to enable them to access comprehensive protections, empowerment and human rights as defined in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
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Notes
For more discussion see Marginson et al. (2010b, Chapter 4).
See the discussion in among others Marginson and Sawir (2011).
Perhaps nations are always more comfortable with global mobility where global subjects are modelled in economic terms, whether as subjects of trade and commerce or as economically desired migrants. This is not because economic life is more intrinsically global than cultural flows. The opposite is the case. In many respects political economy is still nationally bordered. Perhaps—paradoxically—politics more readily understands globalization as an economic phenomenon and global actors in the context of economic bargains, because politics itself (which remains largely nation-centred) finds this easier to manage than global flows of images, information, ideas and knowledge.
‘Overseas students differ from domestic students in that they are subject to migration controls and face different needs for consumer protection’ (DEEWR 2007a, Section 6.1).
In this instance the term ‘welfare’ refers to care of students by the educational institution, rather than government social security programs.
For a review of the literature see Marginson and Sawir (2011).
The institutions were the Universities of Ballarat, Melbourne, New South Wales and Sydney; and RMIT, Swinburne, Victoria, Deakin, and Central Queensland (Rockhampton and Melbourne campuses) Universities. All interviews were conducted with permission of the universities concerned and the project received ethics clearance at Monash University where all of the researchers were then based.
Personal communication from Amy Lamoin, Australian Human Rights Commission, July 2010.
For example Volet and Tan-Quigley (1999) emphasize the structural fact of outsider status, while Asmar (2005) focuses on cultural identity and identifies common factors in the experiences of local and international student Muslims, and Hanassah and Tidwell (2002) also highlight cultural identity as the primary differentiating factor. See the discussion in Marginson et al. (2010b, Chapters 12–15).
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Marginson, S. Including the other: regulation of the human rights of mobile students in a nation-bound world. High Educ 63, 497–512 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-011-9454-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-011-9454-7