When Mahmoud Khalil was arrested by immigration agents on March 8, 2025, the circumstances seemed at once extraordinary and eerily familiar. Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate and prominent participant in the campus movement for Palestinian liberation, was taken into federal custody despite being a lawful permanent resident. A month later, immigration agents arrested Mohsen Mahdawi, another Palestinian student involved in protests at Columbia, as he arrived for what he believed would be a citizenship interview. Their arrests were part of a broader campaign against noncitizen students—one that intensified under Donald Trump but drew on longstanding nationalist anxieties about the US university as a globalizing and diversifying institution. Across the country, students discovered that their visas had been revoked or their records terminated in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), sometimes with little explanation and frequently for encounters with law enforcement that had never resulted in convictions.
The Trump administration presented these actions as an effort to restore order to universities, punish antisemitism, and remove supposedly dangerous foreign students. Yet the speed with which the federal government identified, surveilled, and threatened students depended on an infrastructure that universities and the federal government had spent decades building together.
International students occupy a peculiar position within the contemporary university. Historically, colleges and universities have aggressively recruited students from abroad. They’ve relied on their tuition and labor, built laboratories around their research, and advertised their presence as evidence of institutional prestige and global reach. But the legal architecture that has permitted these students to enter and remain in the United States has also rendered them unusually governable by both the state and their educational institutions. Their ability to study, work, travel, and remain in the country depends on continuing compliance with rules administered jointly by universities and the immigration state. This contradiction is usually described as a problem of immigration status, but it is also a labor relation that conditions the campus for everyone who works there.
International students are workers. Graduate students teach, grade, conduct research, write code, staff clinics, and perform much of the intellectual labor on which research universities depend. More broadly, students pay tuition, perform unpaid and underpaid academic work, generate research that universities patent and commercialize, and move into labor markets through programs such as Optional Practical Training. Their circulation is embedded in how contemporary higher education accumulates money, prestige, knowledge, and human capital.
They enter these labor relations on differentiated terms. Students who are not citizens are subject to vulnerabilities that citizen workers do not share, vulnerabilities further structured by race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, nationality, and political identification. Employment is constrained by immigration law, while legal presence may depend on enrollment, institutional sponsorship, satisfactory academic progress, or particular forms of work. Leaving a program, losing an appointment, or falling out of institutional standing can threaten not only a paycheck, but also housing, professional continuity, and the legal basis for remaining in the country.
Nicholas De Genova’s work on migrant “illegality” provides a crucial framework for understanding these conditions.1 Deportability, he argues, means that disciplinary power operates not only through actual deportation but through the way the constant possibilities of deportation shape their lives.2 The state does not have to deport every deportable worker for deportability to organize wages, mobility, workplace conflict, political participation, and the capacity to refuse exploitation. Immigration law produces migrant vulnerability by making the right to remain contingent and revocable, and labor markets exploit the precarity that follows.
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