This paper maps and questions the discursive limits of current debates about student migration in postcolonial global context and the challenges this poses on the definition and self-fashioning of the university as autonomous, inclusive and open to new kinds of students  (Derrida, 2002). The standpoint for the mapping and questioning of discourses and the genealogical critique of the institution of the university is from the positionality of those whose lives have been mostly affected by intersecting axes of migration and race, namely, migrant students’ precarious lives. It is argued that despite their seeming discontinuity, the discourse of unconditional endorsement of global student mobility, on the one hand, and the harsh critique on institutional/educational policies and practices, on the other hand, both participate and interlock in rendering invisible or inconsequential the kinds of racialization and securitization they produce or reproduce (Stein & Andreotti, 2017)

Student mobility across state borders is not a new phenomenon. What transforms, and not just increases, student mobility is large-scale processes that invested in the attractiveness of European higher education and repositioned it within, (a) the global economy of educational and psychic life of power (Butler, 1997) in a precarious world, and (b) the globalization of scapes of (post)modernity (Appadurai, 1990) within and across which student migration takes place.

Attracting the most talented foreign students has been perceived by receiving countries as beneficial for both the governments and educational institutions. However, beneficial aspects have not been accepted without cautioning voices. The scholarly conversation about the risks involved in the growing numbers of migrant students is usually bound by concerns about the commodification of higher education and the decline and compromise of the quality of the education provided. On the one hand, those against the entrepreneurial character of higher education express their concerns about the weakening role of higher education as a public good and the undermining of its democratic character (Brown, 2015; Giroux, 2003). On the other hand, even those who, despite and beyond market rationalities, acknowledge the positive effects of student mobility and higher education internationalization for students, institutions and societies, they stressed from early on that this would backfire and warned of “unintended consequences” and “worrisome trends” (Knight, 2012). Cautionary discourse revolves around “diploma mills” and “sham students”. Diploma mills, as a by-product of the growing demand for university degrees and implicitly associated with less privileged and mostly migrant students, are considered a threat that needs to be combated. What is at risk is not only the quality of education but also the excellence and earned entitlement of those “who have worked hard for years to obtain their degrees” (Odou & Ogar, 2022). This seeming deregulation of quality and equality (among the excellent) is alleviated through new lines and borders, such as the line between highly appreciated ‘genuine’ students, and unwelcomed ‘bogus’ students. The latter are perceived to abuse student visa in order to secure entrance to and residency in the country of studies, sidestepping the reach of immigration policies and compromising the very integrity of the universities (Brooks, 2018).

As argued in the paper, academic discourse on migrant students, despite its discontinuities and even fundamentally opposing views on the marketization of higher education, reenacts the colonial zero-point perspective to the world (Mignolo, 2010) and reproduces an elitist conception of the institution of the university. Failing to consider the racialization and precarization of migrant students through migration control apparatuses, but also the politics and epistemologies of resilience migrant students develop, we fail to grasp the complexities and the im/possibilities embedded in the ways migrant students navigate through and transform the landscapes of European higher education.

The paper uses critical discourse analysis to bring in juxtaposition the discourses of academic articles and the narratives of migrant students. The qualitative data analyzed and discussed in the paper were collected through interviews with migrant students in higher education institutions in Cyprus. The migrant students who participated in the research come from Nigeria, Uganda, Nepal and India, and they study in either public or private higher education institutions. The paper adopts a decolonial methodological framework that is complicit with the recognition that racial and colonial violence provided the material and conceptual conditions of possibility for modern higher education institutions and the need to disrupt the epistemological, structural and normative colonial legacies (Andreotti, Stein, Ahenakew, & Hunt, 2015). The analysis is also informed methodologically by Foucault’s critical problematization, a method of critical inquiry that evades high theory and turns to specificities and complexities rather than totalities and universalities (Koopman, 2018). This is of particular importance as it enables a way of thinking that does not slip into the impasses of predetermined dichotomies and inevitable contradictions (e.g., ‘bogus’ Vs. ‘genuine’ student). Instead, it offers a view ‘from below” (Haraway, 1988), from “all the in-between spaces” (Halberstam, 2011) that leave space for alternative possibilities of living, being and knowing.

The analysis highlights the limits of academic discourses around global student mobilities. It is suggested that a view from below, from the marginalized, from those who are a priori considered “bogus” until they prove otherwise, but they still remain attached to life and to their object of desire (Berlant, 2011), could provide different frames from which we would be able to attend to the University as a place of vulnerability but also as a place of hope and potentiality.

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