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Dr. Madeline Hsu

Professor of History

Director, Center for Global Migration Studies

University of Maryland, College Park 

Abstract: Asian student migrations reveal most clearly the stark contradictions between the restrictive and selective priorities of immigration regulation. Over the past two centuries of intensification both of globalization and nation-state regulation of migration, the continued privileging of Asian student mobilities, employment, and settlements underscore that this category of migrants is multilaterally regarded as beneficial and meriting legal protections and support. Education and its pursuit produce persons with enhanced capacities for cross-cultural exchanges and negotiations and certified enhanced skills and expertise, whose circulations bolster international relationships and spread influence among societies partnered through student exchanges.  For these reasons, Asian educational migrants constitute revealing exceptions to the late nineteenth-century hardening of border security regimes around the world which prioritized racial difference and national origins for exclusion and greater restriction, particularly targeting Asian persons.  Abundant scholarship has explored the international emergence of ideologies and institutions for immigration restriction constructed with the goals of segregating Asians.   Equally foundational, however, has been the parallel and ongoing recruitment of Asian students as agents who may foster international influence but also for their eventual employment and resettlement as valued knowledge workers.  Status as educational migrants contravened the racialization of Asians as inassimilable, inferior others. Asian student migrations thus underscore the necessity of exploring migration and migration regulation along a fuller spectrum, not just of restriction of racialized undesirables, but also of recruitment of valued knowledge migrants who enjoy encouragement and legal protections and access to legal migration.