Seeing the student
Migration governance in higher education institutions
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32674/012yyy21Keywords:
U.S. immigration policy, internationalization of higher education, historical perspectivesAbstract
This paper traces the histories of noncitizen student surveillance at U.S. higher education institutions (HEIs) and positions the U.S. university as both a bordering system and migration agency by discussing how universities grappled with the call to monitor students and how they began to manage different – and sometimes contradicting – narratives regarding the push for international education and military-industry relations in the 2000s. I chart how U.S. universities have embraced, although not without struggle, forms of electronic monitoring, first from the short-lived Coordinated Interagency Partnership Regulating International Students (CIPRIS) to the rollout of the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS). Understanding the history of student monitoring as it intersects with the monitoring of noncitizen and nonimmigrant subjects is crucial at a juncture where surveillance is constantly remade as the status quo and where the adoption of these technologies is not simply a top-down process that was absorbed without question but demands negotiation and renegotiation.
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