Understanding Student Migration

This book started with the question of how Indian students experience the process of migration through studying abroad. It aimed at treating this process as a new form of migration, one with which, thus far, literature has not been very concerned. True, issues such as the braindrain and that of non-return had been discussed, but with the commercialization of education and the explosive numbers of full-fee paying students going overseas, the issue of migration seemed largely off the table. Yet there should be no doubt that the two are intricately linked in the case of Australia. Studying student-migration through the lenses of either migration or transnationalism studies poses serious difficulties, though. It seems especially difficult to locate agency in studies of transnationalism. In particular, this is problematic when trying to understand ‘transnationalism’ as entailing individual processes of transnationalization, processes which people do not just ‘undergo’ but also have ideas and expectations about what the process will eventually lead to. How people imagine their lives abroad and how such imaginations change over time are questions that these studies do not really have answers for. In the case of Indian students in Australia, one could argue that we are dealing ‘starting’ transnationals who imagine themselves one day living the kind of lifestyles that the study of transnationalism describes. At the same time, though, perhaps it is too easy to think that they see this as an end-goal; ‘ultimate arrival’ does not just work the way horizons keep receding; the fixity-to-place it assumes is simply not something that these starting transnationals strive for.