University Students as Migrants: A New History of Educational Mobility in Western Europe, 1960s-1980s

This project connects student mobility to changing migration policies and discourses in Western Europe: it scrutinises how student mobility has developed and changed in the context of local, national and European migration policies. Through this focus, the project makes an original contribution to the literature on immigration in and to Western Europe during the period from the 1960s to the 1980s. It offers fresh insights into the development and transformation of selective migration regimes and the ways their target constituencies experienced them. From the nineteenth century, mobile students constituted a distinct category of migrants because of their ambivalent status. On the one hand, their academic and social backgrounds meant that they were often perceived as cultural ambassadors, educational elites and leaders-in-the-making, rather than as objects of migration policy. Policymakers in both sender and recipient countries treated them as vessels for knowledge transfer, modernisation processes or projections of 'soft power' - considerations that also underpinned the creation of various international scholarship schemes. However, from the 1960s onwards, these favourable perceptions contrasted with tightening migration policies in Western Europe, resulting in selective migration regimes and categorisations for legal, illegal, welcome and unwanted migration. This is the broader subject area to which the project makes a distinct contribution. It explores the transformation of these complex policies over three decades and, for the first time, inserts educational mobility into the picture. It investigates the relationship between restrictive migration policies in Western Europe and schemes that facilitated the transnational mobility of students. Moreover, it shows how such mobility intersected with other forms of migration (such as flight, exile and labour migration) and what this meant for the mobile students who often faced many of the issues that were central to migrant experiences more broadly, from the navigation of visa bureaucracies to personal encounters with racism, xenophobia and discrimination. By integrating Belgium, France, West Germany and the United Kingdom into one analytical framework, the project embeds educational mobility into the history of migration to and within Western Europe. It identifies key features of such mobility and, in doing so, also sets it in relation to comparable or contrasting mobilities to North America and to the state-socialist countries in Eastern Europe. Drawing on sources from national archives, international institutions, universities and non-governmental organisations, the project combines comparative, international and transnational perspectives. By tracing the shifting policies towards, and experiences of, international students to and in Europe across three decades, the project connects phenomena that so far have been treated separately in the academic literature. Moreover, it shows how the politics of student mobility translated broader geopolitical constellations - including Cold War politics, decolonisation, European integration and the changing frameworks for international cooperation - into mobility patterns in ways that have not yet been fully acknowledged. This collaborative project will result in a co-authored monograph on the history of student mobility in Western Europe, journal publications as well as knowledge exchange activities with the European Students' Union and the Global Student Forum. As a whole, the project makes a pioneering contribution to our understanding of migration regimes, the categorisations of mobility and the genealogy of discourses about migration. Thus, the project will identify educational mobility as a phenomenon that both reflected and shaped such processes.