Time,space,and precarity: (Geo)political dimensions of international student life

Abstract

This study examines how international students in U.S. higher education intersecting forms of temporal and spatial precarity shaped by immigration enforcement and institutional policies. Drawing on critical discourse analysis of interviews with 20 international graduate students and public narratives surrounding recent visa revocations, the research explores how algorithmic enforcement systems and overlapping temporal constraints produce distinctive vulnerabilities, and what strategies students develop to maintain academic progress within these constraints. The analysis reveals that international students experience temporally compressed academic timelines governed by visa durations and degree completion deadlines, while simultaneously being subjected to heightened surveillance through systems like SEVIS monitoring. Despite these structural vulnerabilities, students demonstrate agency through digital community building, strategic confrontation, and transnational mentorship networks. The findings challenge dominant framing of international students as apolitical learners, instead positioning them as politically situated subjects navigating complex power structures. This study contributes to precarity scholarship by extending its analysis beyond labor markets to educational mobility, documenting a critical historical moment when immigration enforcement is being restructured through automation and AI.

Keywords

International students precarity digital bordering higher education immigration policy

Introduction

International students in the United States have long been framed as apolitical, temporary learners who travel abroad to seek knowledge before returning to their home countries (Hazen and Alberts, 2006; Robertson, 2013). Yet this framing obscures the shifting sociopolitical realities that increasingly define their academic lives. In today’s sociopolitical landscape where visa policies tighten and xenophobic rhetoric surges (Warde, 2024), international students occupy a uniquely vulnerable position at the intersection of time, space, and power (Pérez, 2015; Zhang-Wu, 2023). Rather than simply knowledge-seekers, international students have to constantly navigate immigration policies, technological surveillance, and academic pressures that render their presence in the U.S. fundamentally unstable (Crumley-Effinger et al., 2021; Gultekin, 2025).

The vulnerability became particularly evident in April 2025, when thousands of international students abruptly lost their legal status after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) conducted a mass algorithmic screening of SEVIS (Student and Exchange Visitor Information System) records. According to federal court testimony, DHS ran 1.3 million student names through FBI criminal databases with only 10–20 employees conducting review-a ratio of roughly 65,000 students per reviewer that made personal evaluation impossible (Cheney and Gerstein, 2025). Students then received terse notifications that their records had been terminated and that their employment authorizations had ended immediately. In effect, international students were made deportable overnight. This mass termination exemplifies how automated immigration enforcement converts academic spaces into sites of surveillance and potential exclusion (Blaj-Ward and Winter, 2019; Chang et al., 2021). In this regime, international students become surveilled subjects who are being constantly monitored and whose presence in the U.S. is governed by complex immigration policies (Brownie et al., 2023; Qiu et al., 2023).

This article examines how international students in U.S. higher education navigate intersecting forms of temporal and spatial precarity that emerge from their positioning at the nexus of educational systems and immigration regimes. Temporal precarity refers to the ways time is bureaucratically regulated—through visa durations, OPT¹ (Optional Practical Training) windows, and degree completion deadlines—that governs students’ presence in the U.S. (Masoumi, 2022; Sharma, 2014). Spatial precarity, by contrast, foregrounds the conditions of constrained mobility and heightened visibility within both physical and digital spaces (Ahmed, 2013; Tran, 2016). Specifically, students must report address changes within 10 days, obtain advance permission for domestic travel, and follow SEVIS monitoring that tracks their enrollment, employment, and physical location. Together, these dimensions illuminate international studenthood as a condition where academic progress and immigration compliance become inextricably linked.

Drawing on critical discourse analysis of interviews with 20 international students and public narratives surrounding recent visa revocations, the study addresses two research questions.

• How do algorithmic enforcement systems and overlapping temporal constraints produce distinctive forms of vulnerability for international students?

• What discursive and material strategies do international students develop to maintain academic progress and advocate for themselves within the constrained conditions?

The analysis reveals how immigration enforcement and academic institutions create compounding vulnerabilities that extend beyond individual challenges. Despite being integral members of academic institutions, international students are caught between the pursuit of education and the realities of geopolitical tensions (Bian, 2024; Qiu, 2025). However, within conditions of constraint, students demonstrate significant agency through digital community building and collective resistance. This article thus argues that international student life in the U.S. is shaped by entangled institutional and immigration policies. These findings also raise critical questions about accountability, inclusion, and care in an era of algorithmic governance and shifting global power relations.

This research contributes to multiple conversations. Theoretically, it extends precarity scholarship beyond labor markets to examine how immigration enforcement restructures educational experiences (Neilson and Rossiter, 2008). Empirically, it documents a critical historical moment when immigration enforcement and educational systems are being fundamentally restructured through automation and AI (Gonnot and Lanati, 2025; Hamdi et al., 2024). Practically, it reveals how students develop sophisticated strategies to navigate complex immigration systems while maintaining their academic trajectories. As governments and institutions increasingly rely on data-driven systems (Wang et al., 2023), the study calls for urgent attention to the unintended harms these systems pose to legally vulnerable populations and argues for more transparent, humane, and student-centered policy frameworks.

Theoretical framework: Temporal and spatial precarity

To understand the experiences of international students in U.S. higher education, this article draws upon and extends theories of precarity, temporality, and spatiality. While precarity has traditionally been theorized in relation to labor conditions (Standing, 2011), this framework applies the concept to educational mobility, arguing that international students experience distinctive forms of vulnerability due to their position at the intersection of educational systems and geopolitical dynamics.

Precarity, as Butler (2009, 2012) argues, is politically induced with certain populations rendered more vulnerable through institutional arrangements and social norms. For international students, this precarity manifests in what Hackl (2022) terms “conditional inclusion,” a status that grants access to institutions while simultaneously marking individuals as temporary, foreign, and subject to exceptional regulation. In this vein, precarity for international students goes beyond traditional understandings of student vulnerability such as academic challenges. Rather, precarity here emphasizes the structural conditions and policy architectures that place international students at risk and render their presence conditional and revocable (Kalleberg and Vallas, 2017; Neilson and Rossiter, 2005; Waite, 2009).

Temporality plays a crucial role in shaping international students’ lived experiences, particularly through temporary authorizations (e.g., semester schedules, program end dates, OPT windows). These temporal conditions create a sense instability (Sharma, 2014), as students’ ability to remain in the country is always subject to renewal, expiration, or abrupt termination. As Masoumi (2022) has shown in migration studies, state-controlled time becomes a technique of governance, producing anxiety through waiting, deferrals, and the threat of sudden removal. Time, here, is not a neutral backdrop but an active force that governs access and belonging.

Spatiality further complicates this experience. The mobility of international students is often marked by restrictions and surveillance (Tran, 2016). International students must register addresses, limit travel, and occupy physical and digital spaces under compliance. As Ahmed (2013) noted, university campuses are spaces where some bodies “arrive” more easily than others, and where international students must work to claim space that is ostensibly offered but not structurally accessible. As such, the movement of international students is not only physical but also legal and symbolic, mediated by state-imposed spatial boundaries.

Taken together, these dimensions of precarity, temporality, and spatiality theorize international studenthood as a lived condition structured by intersecting regimes of power, politics, and society. This framing also makes shift away from individual adjustment narratives toward a more structural and political understanding of the international student experience.

Literature review

International students have long been positioned as contributors to the academic, cultural, and economic life of U.S. higher education (Bound et al., 2021). While often celebrated in public discourse for their diversity and academic achievement, international students also navigate complex layers of adjustment, including language barriers (Chiang, 2016), cultural adaptations (Zou and Fu, 2025), and institutional challenges (Zang et al., 2024). This body of work provides valuable insights into international students’ experience, but they tended to frame international students through a lens of acculturation and deficit without sufficiently attending to structural precarity shaping their lives (Marginson, 2012).

In recent years, scholars have begun to foreground the politics of international studenthood, highlighting how students are subject to shifting visa regimes, labor restrictions, and discourses of national security (Allen and Bista, 2022; Lomer, 2018; Ritter and Roth, 2021). For example, Stein and Andreotti (2016) critique the neoliberalization of higher education, which treats international students as both consumers and symbolic capital, even as it often fails to protect their rights or address their vulnerability. Such contradictions are particularly evident in moments of crisis, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic, when abrupt policy changes threatened to deport students enrolled in online courses (Fu et al., 2023).

Alongside immigration policy, the use of technology in migration governance has created new forms of surveillance and exclusion (Molnar, 2024). Scholars in migration and surveillance studies have documented how biometric data, visa tracking systems, and algorithmic decision-making tools function as tools of state control, producing what scholars call “digital bordering” (Ajana, 2013; Lomnar, 2018). These systems do not operate neutrally; they are embedded with racialized and classed assumptions about risk and legality, and they often lack transparency or mechanisms for appeal (Skinner, 2020; Torrance et al., 2025)

For international students, systems like SEVIS (Student and Exchange Visitor Information System) position them as constantly monitored and datafied subjects, required to maintain legal visibility while afforded little institutional power. This techno-legal infrastructure reinforces what De Genova (2002) describes as the “legal production of migrant illegality” (p. 429), a condition in which noncitizens are rendered deportable not by criminal acts, but by administrative constructions of noncompliance. Yet the emotional and material impacts of such systems, particularly on international students’ sense of belonging and livability, remain underexamined in both education and policy research.

In parallel, scholars have increasingly examined the emotional toll international students experience as they navigate academic and social systems not designed for them (Kimario et al., 2025; Jiang et al., 2023). Often trained to endure in silence and perform competence, many international students internalize expectations of resilience while hiding fear and distress. While there is growing attention to international students’ mental health needs (Forbes-Mewett and Sawyer, 2016), less has been said about how policies and institutional silence exacerbate psychological distress. Immigration terms like legal precarity and deportability are rarely applied to international students, despite the reality that visa-holding students can lose their legal presence overnight due to administrative decisions. Like Castañeda (2019) reminded us, legality is constructed and enforced through discursive and bureaucratic practices, often disproportionately targeting racialized and mobile populations.

As such, this study contributes to the literature by critically analyzing how international students experience the intersection of temporal and spatial precarity, and how they respond to it. By re-centering international students as political subjects whose lives are entangled in global power structures, this study calls for a more critical and justice-oriented approach to international higher education.

Methodology

This study draws on a qualitative approach combining in-depth interviews with analysis of publicly available narratives to examine international students’ experiences of temporal and spatial precarity. This research design was shaped by ethical considerations regarding participant vulnerability and the sensitive nature of immigration status in the current sociopolitical climate (Dempsey et al., 2016).

Semi-structured interviews

The study was conducted at a large research-focused institution in the Southeastern United States and received approval from the university’s Institutional Review Board (IRB). Participants were recruited through the institutional International Student Life listserv. Although both graduate and undergraduate students initially responded, undergraduate representation was minimal. Given the distinct challenges faced by graduate students, such as navigating research expectations and extended visa timelines, the study focused exclusively on this group. In total, 20 international graduate students took part in semi-structured interviews lasting 45–60 minutes. They represented a range of cultural and national backgrounds (e.g., Chinese, Burmese, Ghanaian, Kenyan, Brazilian, and Nigerian) and pursued graduate studies across diverse fields including engineering, computer science, education, and music (see Table 1). This focus reflects the heightened academic and legal precarity that international graduate students uniquely experience.

Table 1.

Student Information Chart.

Student pseudonyms	Current major	Degree-seeking	Nationality
Wendy	Music education	PhD	Kenyan
Ashley	Education	PhD	Brazilian
Yosef	Pharmaceutical science	PhD	Chinese
Matty	Social work	Master’s	Nigerian
Josh	History	PhD	Brazilian
Kevin	Literacy education	PhD	Vietnamese
Yuna	Literacy education	PhD	Chinese
Ricky	Math education	PhD	Brazilian
William	Public health	Master’s	Burmese
Sarah	Student Affairs admin	Master’s	Brazilian
Jennifer	English literature	PhD	Indian
Brandon	Electrical and computer engineering	PhD	Chinese
Daniel	Workforce education/tech	PhD	Kenyan
Lindy	Biomedical sciences	PhD	Nigerian
Mariah	Quantitative methods	PhD	Kenyan
Polly	Marine science	PhD	Ghanaian
Yolanda	Genetics	PhD	Chinese
Zamira	Computer science	PhD	Chinese
Max	Marine science	PhD	Nigerian
Jane	Pharmaceutical/Biomedical science	PharmD	Chinese

The interviews explored participants’ research activities, academic trajectories, and everyday lived experiences as international graduate students. To minimize risk and respect participants’ agency, questions were intentionally designed to focus on routine aspects of academic and social life rather than explicitly on visa status or immigration challenges. This indirect approach enabled participants to decide if and how they wished to share sensitive aspects of their experiences. All interviews were conducted either in private spaces on campus or via the videoconferencing platform Zoom, depending on participant preference. With informed consent, interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim, and all identifying information was removed during transcription.

Public narratives

Given the heightened sociopolitical context surrounding international students’ legal status, particularly following recent instances of mass visa terminations and increased scrutiny of students from specific countries, I made an intentional ethical choice to limit direct inquiry into students’ current visa situations (Corbin and Morse, 2003; Dempsey et al., 2016). I am acutely aware of the vulnerability many international students face when discussing their legal status, especially in light of fears of surveillance or potential jeopardy to their immigration standing. For this reason, I complemented interview data with publicly available sources, such as news reports, institutional statements, and open letters and petitions that document international students’ experiences during times of visa disruptions. My search included mainstream media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and Inside Higher Ed., as well as education-focused news sources and advocacy organizations like NAFSA and the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration. I used search terms such as “international student visa ban,” “F-1 visa revocation,” “SEVIS termination,” and “international students during COVID-19” to identify relevant stories published between 2020 and 2025. This triangulation allows me to contextualize the interview findings within a broader sociopolitical landscape while protecting participants potentially too vulnerable to participate in formal research interviews (Heale and Forbes, 2013).

In total, I reviewed and collected over 40 relevant articles, reports, and public statements. From these, I selected 15 key texts that directly illustrated the lived consequences of policy changes for international students, highlighting themes such as fear of deportation, academic interruption, loss of legal status, and emotional distress. These sources served not simply as background information but as data in their own right. I analyzed them in dialogue with student interviews to provide a richer understanding of how international student experiences are shaped by the broader political landscape.

Positionality statement

As a former international student and a transnational scholar, I approach this study with a deeply personal connection. I write from the lived experience of navigating academic and social systems, visa regulations, and cultural expectations in a country where my presence has always felt conditional (Fu and Blissett, 2025). My academic journey has been shaped by both privilege and precarity-access to research opportunities and institutional resources alongside the constant undercurrent of immigration anxieties and cultural dislocation (Fu and King, 2021). Therefore, I do not claim neutrality in this work. Rather, I approach it through a lens of critical care and solidarity. I believe that international students are full human beings entangled in the structural conditions of precarity. My goal in this study is to honor the emotional complexity, political entanglements, and everyday negotiations that characterize international studenthood (Zou and Fu, 2025), making space for new forms of justice and care in global higher education.

Data analysis

This study employs Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as the primary analytical framework to examine how international graduate students’ experiences are discursively constructed, negotiated, and situated within broader sociopolitical power relations. CDA is particularly well-suited for this inquiry, as it emphasizes the relationship between language, power, and ideology (Fairclough, 2003; Van Dijk, 1993). By attending to both students’ narratives and the discursive representations circulating in public domains, CDA enables an analysis that foregrounds individual agency while critically engaging with the structural forces that shape international students’ lives.

I draw on Fairclough’s (2003) three-dimensional model of CDA, which involves analyzing (1) the textual features of discourse, (2) discursive practices, and (3) the wider sociopolitical structures in which discourses are embedded. Through this lens, international students are understood not only as narrators of their lived experiences but also as discursive subjects whose identities and vulnerabilities are shaped by immigration laws, institutional practices, and dominant narratives. In parallel, I analyzed media texts and institutional communications to examine how international students are positioned in public discourse. While these public accounts are not equivalent to lived experience, they provide an important intertextual backdrop that influences how students perceive their own conditions of precarity.

The analysis proceeded in iterative phases. First, I closely read and coded interview transcripts using both inductive and theory-informed codes (e.g., temporal precarity, coping practices, conditional belonging). In line with ethical considerations, I intentionally avoided asking students directly about their visa status. This approach minimized risk and gave participants control over whether and how to disclose sensitive details. However, it needs to be acknowledged that because the study does not include systematic, first-person accounts of visa processes, the decision constrains the extent to which findings can make claims about immigration status itself. To address this gap, I treated public texts (e.g., news reports, court transcripts, and policy statements) as a complementary data source.

Public texts were coded through the same process as interview transcripts but were analyzed separately before being brought into dialogue with student narratives. This approach allowed me to identify discursive overlaps, divergences, and tensions between institutional/political portrayals and students’ meaning making. Particular attention was given to language that signaled power asymmetries, invoked national security or compliance discourses, or reflected students’ efforts to reframe marginalizing narratives.

Finally, I synthesized these analyses into broader themes related to temporal and spatial precarity, with attention to how emerging technologies and AI systems are reconfiguring these dimensions of experience. This multi-layered CDA approach highlights both the lived accounts of international graduate students and the wider discursive structures that shape, constrain, and sometimes conflict with those accounts.

Findings

Temporal pressure and academic precarity

One of the central themes that emerged from the interviews was a form of temporary precarity, where immigration requirements and academic pressures converge. Unlike domestic students who may face similar publishing expectations or degree timelines, international students must synchronize multiple temporal regimes (i.e., academic, professional, and legal) where misalignment in any dimension can impact their status. Brandon explained this intersection clearly:

My studies and the progress of my life are all affected by immigration applications, things like OPT, graduation, and all kinds of status-related applications. My entire timeline is tied to these processes, so the impact on me is that they directly shape every aspect of my life.

This statement illustrates how time itself becomes a mechanism of governance for international students. The phrase “my entire timeline” constructs time as singular and totalizing, while “directly shape every aspect” eliminates any dimension of life untouched by immigration control. In this way, time is not simply a neutral backdrop against which students pursue their education. Rather, it is experienced as a tightly regulated structure that disciplines their academic, professional, and personal decisions.

Participants described how the need to align academic progress with legal status produced logistical challenges and a particular form of vulnerability. Yosef’s experience illustrates the uncertainty that arises when academic timelines collide with rigid immigration constraints:

When I entered the program, I was given 5 years to complete my studies. Since my I-20 had an expiration date, I visited the International Student Office every year, and they were able to renew my I-20 on time. However, there was also a limit: they could only extend my I-20 for up to two additional years, meaning the maximum duration allowed was 7 years in total. This year marks my seventh year in the program, and I started to worry about what would happen if I needed more time. I reached out to my department’s administrative office for clarification, but their response was vague. It seemed that the department’s administrative system, the university’s International Student Office, and the U.S. immigration authorities operate somewhat independently from one another, and even they were unsure how future extensions would work. In the end, I was advised to finish my degree within 7 years if possible, since no one could confirm what would happen if I went beyond that.

Yosef’s narrative highlights the lack of coherent guidance available to international students navigating complex legal-academic intersections. The ambiguity surrounding potential extensions left students to bear the responsibility and potential consequences. For instance, the passive construction “I was advised” combined with the hedge “if possible” demonstrates how institutions shift risk management onto students while avoiding liability. The student’s reliance on indirect language (e.g., “it seemed,” “even they were unsure,” and “if possible”) reveals not only a lack of institutional clarity, but also the emotional toll of navigating a system where no firm answers are guaranteed.

The temporal vulnerabilities experienced by international students are also discursively constructed and legitimized through governmental discourse and policy announcements. For instance, on August 27, 2025, the DHS proposed a new regulation to limit the amount of time that foreign students, professors, physicians, and other visa holders are allowed to remain in the United States (Department of Homeland Security, 2025). In the press release, a DHS spokesperson is quoted as saying:

This new proposed rule would end that abuse once and for all by limiting the amount of time certain visa holders are allowed to remain in the U.S., easing the burden on the federal government to properly oversee foreign students and their history.

Lexical choices such as “abuse” and “burden” construct international students as surveillance subjects and potential abusers of the system. The phrase “end that abuse once and for all” draws on a punitive, zero-tolerance rhetoric that recasts visa extensions, common for doctoral students whose research extends beyond initial timelines, into evidence of system exploitation. Similarly, the assertion that the rule will allow the government to “properly oversee” foreign students suggests that current oversight is inadequate, thereby justifying intensified surveillance without providing evidence of systemic abuse.

The announcement further constructs a moralized binary through nationalist discourse. It states, “Foreign students have taken advantage of U.S. generosity and have become ‘forever’ students, perpetually enrolled in higher education courses to remain in the U.S.” (Department of Homeland Security, 2025). The statement establishes a moralized binary of the generous host (U.S.) and the exploitative guest (foreign students). In labeling extended enrollment as taking advantage, the announcement leverages loaded language and nationalist logics to construct international students as abusers of the system and justify increased surveillance and control. The production of this discourse occurs within a broader political context of heightened surveillance and restricted immigration agenda. Through these discursive strategies, the policy announcement actively legitimizes the heightened surveillance and deepens the discourse of temporal and legal precarity for international students.

Technological surveillance and emotional toll

Another theme in this study concerns the role of technology as a mechanism of surveillance and immigration enforcement. While international students often engage with emerging technologies in their research, they are simultaneously subjected to those same tools in ways that threaten their legal status and presence in the U.S. This contradiction was sharply exposed in the April 2025 mass SEVIS terminations, where algorithmic enforcement replaced individualized assessment. As detailed in a federal court hearing, a flagged list of thousands was generated through a bulk data sweep with minimal human oversight, relying solely on name matches. The result was the abrupt removal of legal status for students with no deeper contextual verification.

This process illustrates the discursive and material power of automation. Framed as technically efficient, automated enforcement systems collapse nuanced, context-dependent evaluations into accelerated mass data screening. As Judge Ana Reyes noted in the hearing, “All of this could have been avoided if individuals had taken a beat… but that’s not happening.” The discourse of efficiency justifies opacity and accelerates enforcement, recasting international students as data points to be managed algorithmically. In an email sent to the affected students, it says:

I am terribly sorry to inform you that this morning, your record was marked as ‘terminated’… Please note that all employment authorization, including OPT, ends immediately… Unauthorized employment will make you ineligible for immigration reinstatement, so please cease any employment immediately.

Though this message may appear as a neutral administrative update, its linguistic features reveal a deeply stratified power dynamic that both reflects and reinforces the precarious positioning of international students in the U.S. The opening phrase, “I am terribly sorry to inform you,” presents a performative apology that attempts to humanize what is, in fact, a deeply dehumanizing announcement. Yet this affective gesture is immediately undermined by the legalistic tone that follows. The shift from softening language to abrupt mandates (“ends immediately,” “cease any employment immediately”) creates a jarring rhetorical contrast, signaling the underlying tension between institutional empathy and structural enforcement. Moreover, the message relies heavily on the passive voice “your record was marked as ‘terminated’” which obscures the agent responsible for the termination. This grammatical construction depersonalizes accountability and renders the decision as a bureaucratic inevitability. In doing so, it erases the human labor and discretion involved in terminating a student’s legal presence and makes a discursive move that disempowers students from seeking redress or clarification. Embedded in this message is also a form of temporal urgency. Words like “this morning” and “immediately” compress the student’s response time and mirrors the broader temporal precarity international students experience.

These techno-immigration systems weaponize digital infrastructure to produce international students as always potentially deportable. Yosef described how this incident revealed a chilling structural reality:

The instability of our academic situation here is very evident… I realized how limited a university’s power is when facing the political forces of this country. My school cannot fully protect me; international students have to rely on legal means ourselves to negotiate with the government and fight for our rights.

Yosef’s reflection reveals the discursive construction of precarity under techno-immigration regimes. Through the lexical choice of “instability,” Yosef names a systemic condition shaped by legal, political, and technological forces beyond students’ control. The recognition that “a university’s power is limited when facing the political forces of this country” highlights a key ideological rupture. While institutions often frame themselves as advocates for international students, this statement repositions them as structurally subordinate to immigration enforcement apparatuses. The university, in this narrative, cannot function as a sanctuary when state power operates through opaque and increasingly digitized mechanisms.

From this vantage point, international students are not only managing academic performance but also negotiating their political and digital legibility. Their presence becomes precariously entangled with various forms of surveillance (e.g., email servers, visa databases, employment tracking, and algorithmic name-matching) that can instantaneously render them noncompliant or in violation. This produces a profound form of spatial precarity. That is, students remain hyper-visible to the state through layered tracking systems while simultaneously invisible as rights-bearing individuals. As immigration attorney Jath Shao stated, “Using tech to achieve immigration enforcement goals seems like a bad science fiction movie, but it’s the situation we are living in now.” In this context, visibility becomes a liability rather than a safeguard, and the university’s role as a protective space is structurally undermined.

The psychological toll of this techno-surveillance regime is acute. In a federal lawsuit filed by four students at the University of Iowa, attorneys documented the “mental and financial suffering” caused by sudden visa terminations. One student reported sleeplessness and difficulty breathing; another required increased psychiatric medication. One undergraduate became so fearful of detention that he stopped leaving his apartment altogether. These bodily responses reflect how legal precarity becomes an embodied condition. International students experience immigration enforcement not just as a policy event but as a rupture in their everyday lives—infusing routine activities like eating, sleeping, or walking outdoors with fear.

Finally, this incident produced a ripple effect of fear among the broader international student community. Sarah reflected, “I am so scared. It’s not obvious to me for what reason I could have been targeted. And that’s sort of the scariest part because you don’t know what you did.” This statement powerfully captures how the opacity of techno-immigration enforcement generates pervasive uncertainty. The repetition of “scared” and the emphasis on not knowing “what you did” reveal the psychological toll of being subjected to algorithmic surveillance. The student’s fear is not rooted in confirmed wrongdoing but in the arbitrariness of targeting, an anxiety exacerbated by the absence of explanation. This dynamic underscores the entanglement of emotional, temporal, and spatial precarity in the lived experiences of international students.

Strategic responses to precarity

Facing intensified technological pressures and legal precarity, international students develop strategic practices that transform individual vulnerability into collective agency. My analysis shows three primary resistance strategies that include digital community building, direct institutional confrontation, and transnational mentorship networks. International students cultivate online communities through social media platforms, especially home-country social media. For Chinese students, WeChat emerges as a vital space for practical support and cultural continuity. As Jane explained:

I think for international students, WeChat groups really do provide a stronger sense of belonging. During occasions like the Lunar New Year or the Mid-Autumn Festival, people often use these groups to coordinate and see if there are any activities to join. The Chinese Students Association has also organized events through Chinese social media to help everyone feel more connected and supported.

The specific naming of cultural holidays marks these digital spaces as sites of cultural preservation that institutional diversity initiatives cannot replicate. The verb “coordinate” signals student agency that these students are active organizers rather than passive recipients of support. In addition to cultural celebration, these platforms offer community knowledge that differs from institutional resources. As Brandon noted:

The university shares mainly instructional content. It tells me how to fill out forms and what steps to take. Social media features more personal cases and individual experiences. It tends to be more detailed, specific, and personal. We can learn from various cases shared there.

This discourse frames institutional resources as procedural while positioning social media as spaces of shared lived experience. The pronoun shift to “we can learn” signals collective subjectivity grounded in mutual aid and contextualized knowledge. However, students also recognize these platforms’ limitations. Yosef observed:

When looking at cases shared on social media, such as how people sought help after their SEVIS was terminated, people only tend to post when they run into problems. Others with smoother experiences usually don’t share their stories. So it can create anxiety, as if these cases are happening all around us. But if we look at the entire population, the percentage is actually quite small.

This reflection reveals how digital witnessing amplify fear while obscuring broader trends. Yet these shared narratives provide crucial if imperfect knowledge and preparation within opaque institutional systems. Several participants described direct institutional confrontation as both empowering strategy and individual burden. Brandon’s approach exemplifies this tension:

In general, I try to respond proactively by directly confronting these challenges and continuing to push back against unjust situations, whether through emails or by directly raising questions. This one-sided communication is often the only way to express my concerns. If I encounter more serious problems, I have to seek legal assistance, which means taking the initiative to find a lawyer myself.

The account reveals multiple analytical layers. “Respond proactively” and “directly raising questions” position the student as assertive rather than passive. However, “one-sided communication” exposes the power asymmetry inherent in these interactions. The phrase “taking the initiative to find a lawyer myself” emphasizes the individualization of what should be institutional responsibility. Through critical discourse analysis, this statement reveals how students internalize neoliberal logics of self-reliance while simultaneously critiquing systemic failures. Significantly, Brandon frames these experiences as “injustices” rather than “challenges,” which represents critical consciousness refusing to normalize structural violence.

Despite facing systematic challenges, many international students express ambivalence about collective protest, revealing how precarity shapes political consciousness. Yosef said:

I can understand people protest to express their emotions and advocate for their legal rights, drawing public attention to the issue. But personally, I feel the negative consequences outweigh the benefits... once that moment passes and other events take over, the significance becomes questionable.

Even though I know most people engage peacefully and follow legal regulations, there will always be a minority who incite violence... In the process of police intervention, there’s risk of getting hurt or wrongfully detained.

This discourse enacts rationalized risk assessment steeped in legal precarity. Phrases like “negative consequences outweigh the benefits” foreground cost-benefit logic, while concerns about “wrongful detention” reflect structural vulnerability of international students. The emphasis on “peaceful” and “legal” resistance signals internalization of institutional expectations around docile citizenship that must align with bureaucratic norms rather than public dissent.

Within these constrained spaces, international students draw strength from faculty mentors with similar migration experiences. Jennifer shared, “There is actually one professor in my department who is also from India… He was urging me to be very proactive. He was like, you’re an international student, so you have to make an effort.” Similarly, Polly reflected on their advisor’s material support, “My PI is also international—he came from Switzerland. He has this international experience, so it’s smooth because when I came here, he even paid for my flight ticket.” These narratives illuminate how shared migration histories foster empathetic mentorship. The advisor’s payment for a student’s flight it represents a form of meaningful; support to accommodate international students’ material realities. Yet students voice critical awareness of these dynamics’ limitations. For instance, Yolanda said:

If your advisor is also an international scholar with a transnational background, they might share their experiences with you... But to be honest, I’m only talking about the positive scenarios here. Most of them, if they came to the U.S. as international students, it was 20 or 30 years ago. Their experience may not apply to today’s context. If you go to them for support, the issues they struggled with were often very different.

The hedge “to be honest” signals a shift from hopeful possibility to sobering reality. The temporal distancing “it was 20 or 30 years ago” underscores a disconnect between past and present geopolitical, legal, and institutional contexts. Spatially, too, the experiences of former international students are situated in different sociopolitical and academic spaces, making their insights less transferable to students today. Through this framing, Yolanda implicitly critiques the idea that transnational identity alone guarantees relational understanding.

Discussion and conclusion

Rethinking international studenthood through precarity and power

This study illuminates how international students navigate temporal and spatial precarity in the context of increasingly digitized and securitized U.S. higher education. Through critical discourse analysis of interviews and public media texts, my analysis illuminates how the lived experience of international students is shaped by entanglements of geopolitical shifts, intensified surveillance, and technological development. These findings challenge dominant discourses that frame international students as apolitical learners or economic assets (Rose-Redwood and Rose-Redwood, 2017; Vickers and Bekhradnia, 2007). Instead, the study foregrounds their subjectivity as politically situated and structurally vulnerable within intersecting regimes of power.

Building on the theory of precarity (Butler, 2009, 2012), the study shows that temporal constraints such as visa limits and publishing pressures deeply shape international students’ sense of security and progress. In my study, participants described how time itself becomes compressed and weaponized. Specifically, legal documents must be processed within narrowly defined windows; and degrees must be completed within a certain timeframe. Delays in any of these temporal checkpoints can trigger consequences far beyond academic delays, including the loss of legal status. For international students, this temporal precarity produces a distinctive form of anxiety (Khoshlessan and Das, 2019; Szabo et al., 2016). Students are required to demonstrate “satisfactory progress” not just for their academic programs, but to meet the compliance thresholds of immigration systems. In this way, time itself becomes weaponized and turns into a modality of governance.

Likewise, spatiality is governed through both physical restriction and digital surveillance. The finding regarding technological surveillance and visa revocations illustrate the emergence of “digital bordering” (Ajana, 2013) in immigration enforcement. Moreover, integrating AI into immigration enforcement creates new modalities of exclusion that operate alongside the formal immigration policy (Kabir et al., 2023). The case of mass visa revocations illustrates how algorithmic sorting reinforces the “legal production of migrant illegality,” where administrations rule deportability through opaque technical assessments (De Genova, 2002). Such process fundamentally reconfigures the educational space for international students, transforming what should be sites of learning into zones of surveillance and potential exclusion. The result is a heightened sense of hypervisibility paired with institutional invisibility where international students are monitored, but not truly seen or supported. This dual condition of being monitored but not cared for deepens international students’ sense of marginalization and exposes the structural contradictions at the heart of globalized higher education (Coffey et al., 2021; Enriquez, 2011).

The emotional toll of this precarity is also central to international studenthood. The study highlights how administrative opacity and surveillance infrastructures produce emotional and psychological trauma. Bureaucratic language like “terminated” or “revoked” conceals the intimate consequences of sudden status loss, creating epistemic violence essentially dehumanize individuals. During times of precarity, students experience deep feelings of anxiety, social withdrawal, and despair. While faculty with shared transnational experiences can offer critical mentorship, these relationships are the exception rather than the norm. The mentorship is further limited by generational or contextual disconnects. As Yolanda noted, “They came 20 or 30 years ago. Their experience may not apply today.” This illustrates a form of temporal disjuncture within the international student community itself, where past pathways are no longer instructive for navigating present-day precarity. These findings point to a need for restructuring institutional responsibility. Rather than keeping culturally informed mentorship rare cases, institutions must proactively and structurally facilitate connections between students and mentors as part of a broader institutional commitment to inclusion and equity. Faculty members should have access to sustained, reflective professional development in cultural humility and proactive advising strategies (Wanti et al., 2022). When faculty and staff are prepared to engage with international students in informed and consistent ways, the university becomes a space of care, recognition, and belonging (Shakir and Siddiquee, 2024).

Yet amid these constraints, my findings challenge dominant narratives that position international students as passive victims. Under circumstances of temporal and spatial precarity, international students engaged in everyday acts of resistance and agency. From seeking help from legal channels to carefully avoiding protest as a strategy of self-protection, students navigated power in complex and contextually specific ways. These practices resist the dominant narratives of victimhood and passivity often imposed on international students. Instead, they demonstrate that under intensified constraints, students strategically exercised agency through legal resistance and community building. These practices (e.g., legal, relational, and emotional) highlight the need to reconceptualize international students as critical stakeholders in the design, governance, and ethical direction of higher education (Moscovitz and Sabzalieva, 2023). Their everyday negotiations with institutional and immigration structures yield a deep, experiential knowledge of systemic gaps and policy limitations. As such, international students bring invaluable insight to discussions around inclusion and academic equity (Mok et al., 2024). Listening to international students is not only a matter of improving outcomes; it is a matter of recognizing them as partners in building more responsive, equitable, and humanizing institutions.

Limitations and future research

Several limitations shape this study’s scope and findings. The focus on graduate students, while justified by their heightened exposure to temporal and legal precarity, may not capture the full range of international student experiences across educational levels and institutional contexts. Undergraduate students may experience different configurations of temporal pressures and institutional support. Future research should expand beyond graduate education to capture a fuller spectrum of international studenthood across educational levels.

Further, while the study includes participants from diverse national, racial, and disciplinary backgrounds, it does not systematically analyze how intersecting social identities such as gender, race, nationality, or field of study, may shape international students’ experiences of precarity and resistance. Additionally, the differential experiences between undergraduate and graduate students, or between those in STEM versus humanities fields, were not deeply explored. Attending to these intersectional dimensions will be crucial in future research to avoid overgeneralization and to surface the multiple axes of privilege and marginalization that structure international student life.

Finally, the findings reflect a particular geopolitical moment marked by rapidly shifting immigration policies. These dynamics continue to evolve, especially given artificial intelligence are rapidly developing into more sophisticated systems. Longitudinal studies across time could deepen understanding of how international student precarity is shaped policy shifts, geopolitical tensions, and technological developments.

The narratives shared in this study compel us to ask difficult but necessary question: What kind of higher education system do we uphold when visa compliance becomes more urgent than care? What values are reflected when algorithmic suspicion overrides human relationships? What forms of harm are perpetuated when we celebrate global diversity without addressing global inequality? The answers lie not in technical fixes or short-term interventions, but in a reorientation of institutional priorities and ethical commitments. Institutions must move from a logic of gatekeeping to one of solidarity and structural accountability. This means rethinking institutional architectures to center international students’ needs as integral to the design of equitable academic spaces. It means embedding culturally responsive mentoring and trauma-informed advising into the university’s ethical commitments. And it means recognizing emotional and intellectual labor of international students as essential to enact an equity and inclusion orientated future (Wang and Fu, 2025). Ultimately, my goal of the study is not merely to help international students survive precarious conditions, but to reimagine global higher education as a space of dignified presence and collective care. Their presence reveals the fault lines in our systems, and their narratives light the way toward more humane, relational, and just forms of global education.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Shuang Fu

Note

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