Foreigners to Diversity: East Asian International Students, Race, and the Global Geographies of U.S. Higher Education

Abstract

This dissertation argues that the racial subjectivities of East Asian international students from the 2010s to the 2020s have been shaped by budgetary logics in U.S. public higher education. It explores the debates in the 2010s about non-resident student enrollment, focusing on the University of California system, and international students’ implication in the Stop Asian Hate and higher education labor movements in the 2020s. It then examines how racial formations that emerged from these two decades were lived at the campus scale from the perspective of international student life. In this investigation, “diversity”—or the contemporary cultural paradigm through which race knowledges have been mediated in everyday university life—serves as a tool for tracking the heterogenous race politics practiced in U.S. higher education. Engaging with institutional diversity was important for this project to bring light to the historical amnesia diversity promotes in international students’ perceptions and experiences of race and racism in the U.S. Since the 1980s, but much more pronounced following the Great Recession of 2008, U.S. universities responded to public disinvestment from higher education by turning to the global student market to rake up tuition revenue. This strategy of accumulation has been enabled by the global geographies of “new” U.S. imperialism and exploits the immigration apparatus as a technology for manipulating the flow of labor and capital. Thus, from “cash cows” milked for tuition to victims of anti-Asian violence with the Covid-19 outbreak, East Asian international students’ experiences of racialization in the U.S. are embedded within the global reach of U.S. higher education to reproduce its financial future. However, the feasibility of this revenue stream was thrown into question in the 2020s with the unabashed white nationalist agenda of the Trump administration, as a part of its broader assault against public higher education in its current form. Among international students and their allies and advocates, these recent attacks simply reaffirmed the chronic challenges international students faced at the neoliberal university. By documenting these reactions, this dissertation offers insights about opportunities for solidarity that this acute moment presents to assemble a movement for a university worth fighting for.