International student mobility constitutes a form of complex migration that cannot be understood through a single functional lens. Drawing on empirical contributions spanning Asia, Europe, and North America, this special issue demonstrates that cross-border student mobility operates simultaneously as an educational pathway, a labor recruitment channel, a migration management tool, and a humanitarian protection mechanism. This introduction highlights three dimensions of this complexity: the diverse and often competing objectives of stakeholders, including states, universities, employers, and students; the non-linear trajectories migrants navigate across status transitions; and the uneven distribution of opportunities that international education both reflects and reproduces.
This article examines the experiences of international students from Indonesia and Tanzania who studied in the UK and later returned home. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 40 participants, the study explores how students navigated academic life, precarious work, and family responsibilities. Despite receiving scholarships, many faced financial pressures that required them to take on low-wage jobs while balancing studies and caregiving. Using a narrative lens, the analysis highlights how immigration policies, institutional constraints and time poverty shaped their sense of studenthood and belonging. The findings call for a broader understanding of student migration as embedded in social and structural contexts.
This study explores how Vietnamese vocational students in Japan navigate the country's skill-based immigration system of attracting and retaining international students. Using the framework of the social construction of skill, the article analyzes how "skill" is bureaucratically defined for international students in Japan and how vocational students navigate the system to be qualified for post-study work visas. Drawing on qualitative interviews, it shows that vocational students in Japan use education to be institutionally qualified as workers, but experience obstacles in obtaining working permits after graduation.
This study sought to understand the relationship between skilled immigration policy objectives and employer hiring practices using an online survey of 706 private sector hiring managers across Canada. The findings show that recruitment and selection decisions are complex; decisions to hire skilled newcomers (or not) are more related to organizational norms, cultural distinctions and hiring manager competence, confidence, demographics and risk perceptions than they are to assessments of newcomers' skills. Regardless of whether a skilled immigrant candidate was recently hired, hiring manager assessments of immigrants' knowledge, skills and abilities were, on average, favorable. Given that governments prioritize skills in immigration policy, while employers' hiring decisions are much more strongly influenced by other factors, there is a clear misalignment between policy objectives and employer practices. To address this gap and advance social resilience, this study finds governments and employers must assume greater responsibility for the workforce integration of skilled immigrants.
In big data systems, migrants rarely appear as self-identified social actors. Instead, they are rendered through proxies such as social media traces, mobile phone records, or online behavioural signals. We introduce the concept of the migrant by proxy to examine how such indicators do more than approximate migration: they shape what migration becomes measurable, visible, and governable. Across discursive, behavioural, infrastructural, and demographic perspectives, we argue that proxies function as technical indicators, epistemic operators, and governance devices. While analytically valuable, they structurally exclude key populations and cannot capture migration as lived experience, requiring stronger standards for validation, triangulation, and accountability.
This study examines how international students form cosmopolitan or national identities through social networks and mobility capital. Based on interviews with 30 Polish and 30 Chinese students in London, findings show that those with early-acquired mobility capital build international networks and weaker national attachments, while those with limited capital favor co-national networks and stronger national identity. Structural forces such as diaspora size also shape outcomes. The study challenges essentialist cultural explanations and argues for understanding international students as heterogeneous sub-groups whose identity trajectories depend on both individual capital endowments and broader geopolitical contexts.
Drawing on two ethnographic studies - Indian students in the post-Soviet country Georgia and Nepalese students in Denmark - this article explores the relationship between geographical imaginaries, migration trajectories, and aspirations of social mobility. Situating the two cases in the wider literature on international student migration, the article highlights the varying motivations and experiences of these students, influenced by factors such as migratory pathways, immigration policies, and educational opportunities in the destination countries. Despite their differing contexts, both groups share middle-class aspirations and use their host countries as potential transit points for future migration or return to their home countries. A key commonality is that these emergent mobilities are expressed and shaped through inherently comparative imaginaries of particular places and between a present life 'here' and a future life 'there.' Comparing the relation between such geographical imaginaries and mobility aspirations among the two different student flows helps to reveal fundamental dynamics shaping contemporary student migration and the driving forces behind young people's decisions to pursue an education abroad.
Following Myanmar's 2021 military coup, many youth have turned to international study mobility as a means of survival and educational continuity. This article conceptualizes liminal space mobility to explain the tension between formal migration categories and the lived realities of Myanmar youth compelled to leave crisis contexts through educational pathways. Drawing on narrative data, the study shows how these students are displaced in nature yet move through systems designed for voluntary international students. Without access to protection frameworks, Myanmar youth navigate precarious conditions by employing strategies such as stepping-stone mobility across regional higher education systems.
Southeast Asian students are increasingly choosing destinations in East Asia for international education, mirroring the region's persistent cross-border labor migration. In response, Taiwan introduced International Programs of Industry-Academia Collaboration (IPIAC) in 2017, a degree scheme that enables students to gain work experience, earn income, and obtain a degree. While this government-led initiative appears to create a win-win situation for students, many students ultimately find themselves trapped in debt, overwork, and education that fails to meet promised standards. This study draws on student interviews and document analysis to examine how studying in Taiwan nonetheless remains as aspirational pathway to future opportunities for certain international students. Moreover, it demonstrates how this aspiration is transformed into a process of dual commodification: students serve as both fee-paying, subsidy-generating sources of revenue for IPIAC universities and as a stable supply of low-wage labor for collaborating firms. The study elucidates how universities, collaborating firms, and intermediaries collectively position IPIAC students as commodities within both higher education and labor markets. Similar state-led models integrating study and work are evident in Japan and South Korea, where demographic pressures intersect with labor shortages. By situating the IPIAC within these regional trends, this research contributes to scholarship on international student mobility in East Asia and deepens our understanding of the production of precarious labor.
Germany is actively recruiting and retaining international students. Drawing on 123 interviews with non-EU students, this study examines why students choose Germany and how their post-study mobility decisions unfold. Affordability, the expansion of international programmes, and improved information access have made Germany highly attractive, making international education accessible to a broad range of students. Yet students' pathways diversify: some return, some remain, and others move onward. By developing typologies of mobility, this study shows how individual aspirations, educational and social experiences, and structural conditions shape decisions, with Germany's accessible education serving as a platform for more flexible mobility.
This qualitative, interview-based study analyzes staying aspirations of two groups of Chinese top-level international students (a pre-1989 and a post-1989 cohort) in Japan and Singapore. Graduates experience immobility and "stuckness" in their migratory trajectories for a variety of reasons outlined in the paper. In line with de Haas' aspirations-capabilities model, the paper traces the agency of graduates in their locational decisions and their strategies to address stuckness. Policy regimes in receiving and sending countries, changing societies, and altered economies affect real and perceived opportunity structures, while locational aspiration formation also depends on changing priorities over the life course.
The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine disrupted traditional labor-migration patterns in Central and Eastern Europe. Using Eurostat first-residence permit data for the Visegrad Four countries (2015-2024), we analyze how V4 labor markets responded to the sudden decline in non-EU Eastern European employment migration. Our difference-in-differences analysis reveals a divergence in employment permit patterns following the Eastern supply disruption, with Asian origin countries recording approximately 21,000 more permits annually than Eastern origin countries relative to pre-2022 trends, representing a 306% increase in Asian permit levels from pre-2022 baseline. While this may reflect genuine labor substitution, the pattern could also arise from measurement artifacts as Ukrainians shifted from employment permits to temporary protection employment channels, which are excluded from Eurostat residence permit statistics.
This study explores Syrian refugee children's sports experiences in Istanbul's municipal centers, proposing a contextual integration framework (CIF) that incorporates Turkey's temporary-protection status and urban dynamics. A qualitative case study with 20 children (ages 11-20) and five coaches used semistructured interviews and surveys, analyzed via reflexive thematic analysis with member checking. Five themes emerged: familial capital as enabler/constraint; sports as identity sites; coach mediation; linguistic/social bridging; and structural barriers. Findings highlight urban opportunities amid vulnerabilities, recommending multilevel interventions, family engagement, trauma-informed coaching, and policy reforms addressing economic precarity.
Legal immigration decisions in the current political climate are a quagmire. Rising tensions and changing policies around immigration in Canada have created an environment of heightened uncertainty and information gaps. Immigrant influencers represent a mechanism to overcome some challenges faced by potential migrants; however, they remain under-researched. This paper describes the professionalization journey of immigrant influencers in Canada. Using an interpretative phenomenological approach, twenty-one semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with Canada-based Latin American immigrant social media influencers. Their cultural rationales and outlooks provide evidence to construct a professional marketing journey. Implications, institutional impacts and future research are discussed.
Refugee women can encounter a range of challenges in their new countries, including limited access to health services, education, and employment opportunities, factors that significantly shape and limit everyday lives and opportunities for social participation. This study aims to understand health and social participation in everyday life through dialogue with refugee women and the local organizations addressing applying an intersectional lens. Grounded in an intersectional framework, the study utilized a modified story dialogical method for the workshops. The findings are organized into three key themes: a) Importance of trust and solidarity in the women's everyday, b) Experiencing othering - the pain of not being welcomed and c) "Stand-by mode". The findings underscore how multiple intersectional dimensions, including legal status, socioeconomic position, ethnicity, and migration trajectories, interplay to determine whether participation in and access to health, work, and education are possible or not. Solidarity practices, emerge as strategies for navigating and resisting structural and systemic barriers.
