Twenty-fourth International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations

Abstract

This paper draws on interviews with 45 racialized international students and 10 university employees who provide services to international students at a comprehensive university in Ontario, Canada, and examines the student’s experiences with discrimination and violence. While international students are often stereotyped as inordinately wealthy members of the global elite, many racialized international students in Canada are precarious and exploited students and workers. A growing body of scholarship on international student victimization reveals that racialized international students in the West are disproportionately vulnerable to discrimination and violence on and off university and college campuses, and in public and private spaces. This harm may be committed by landlords, employers, strangers, fellow international students, non-international student classmates, professors, and administrators and by members of their ethnic communities. Factors for this include visa and immigration requirements, unregulated homestay programs, unregulated tuition fees, and the intersections of racism, sexism, xenophobia and Islamophobia. Our research documents some of these harms and argues that this discrimination and violence is connected to the violence of settler colonialism. Drawing on critical race and decolonial perspectives on internationalization we focus on how coloniality produces the patterned migration of disenfranchised people from the Global South who are pushed to migrate to settler colonial countries that historically and in the contemporary context require a large pool of exploitable labour. We highlight how the settler colonial state – through the governing of higher education – advances and normalizes discrimination and the impact of these systems on racialized international students.