Unfamiliarities, Uncertainties, and Ambivalent Long-Term Intentions: Conceptualizing International Student-Migrant Settlement and Integration

International students (IS) are increasingly positioned as “ideal” economic immigrants for their supposedly limited settlement and integration needs, resulting in a growing number of education-migration, or edugration, immigration pathways. However, the settlement and integration experiences student-migrants undergo during edugration are undertheorized. Using collaborative autoethnography (CAE), we examine five graduate student-migrants’ edugration experiences in Canada. Our interest is not whether student-migrants are sufficiently integrated or settled through the eyes of the state, but rather the experiential impacts of edugration; in other words, we examine not the process of assimilation but the experience of being positioned as “easily” assimilated subjects. Our findings suggest three distinct experiential categories produced by edugration: unfamiliarity, uncertainty, and ambivalence. Together, these experiences form a unique settlement and integration experience due to extended periods of temporariness. Through this conceptualization, we argue that the recruitment of IS through multi-step migration pathways like edugration presents ethical questions for both the state and higher education. While we support strategic calls for more coordinated, cross-sectoral efforts to improve the lived experiences of student-migrants, we caution against justifying these calls based on neoliberal, econometric, or (neo)colonial rationales regarding (1) the value of IS as human capital, and (2) assimilationist notions of settlement and integration. We instead encourage more critical, nuanced discussions of student-migrant experiences which actively resist such logics.