Our Duty of Care to Refugees and At-Risk Migrants

In the international education context, the “standard of care” often refers to the professional, ethical, and legal obligations we as international educators have to our students. Professionally, we stay up to date on standards of practice. Ethically, we follow NAFSA’s eight values for ethical practice. Legally, we are responsible for ensuring that reasonable steps have been taken to reduce the risk of harm. But our duty of care applies only to enrolled students.

Today, we hear a more urgent calling than we have in past decades to engage with our many internationally mobile community members, which now increasingly include refugees and at-risk migrants. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the number of globally displaced and refugee populations—68.5 million and 25.4 million, respectively—is higher today than at any time since World War II. The United Nations reports that current-day refugees flee their homes to escape persecution, and many at-risk migrants leave their countries desperate to secure safety for their family.

This crisis confronts many sectors of society, including all levels of education. As international educators, however, we stand uniquely qualified to find innovative ways to build bridges into our communities for those refugees and migrants who need our help.

We need to reconceptualize how we interpret in loco parentis and see it as a calling that incorporates the increasing numbers of nontraditional students who seek to be part of our campus communities. As we consider our professional and ethical practices, we can no longer limit our standard of care only to our students who are at home and studying abroad.

A More Diverse Tapestry

As debates about accepting refugees and at-risk immigrants intensify, it is a time for us to look forward and backward. We can look back at overwhelming research evidence in reports like the 2017 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine study, The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration, to understand how migrants have historically made substantive contributions economically and socially.

In the United States, historically significant immigrants who brought prominence and intellectual advancement to the country that took them in include Albert Einstein from Germany, Joseph Pulitzer from Hungary, and John Muir from Scotland. These examples are hardly eclipsed today by influential immigrant scholars who are still enriching our culture. Since 2000, 33 of the 85 Nobel Prize winners from the United States have been immigrants, according to Forbes magazine.

We can learn from these positive examples and also look forward to the future of our academic and broader communities and the contributions newcomers can weave into the fabric of our existing cultures, thereby making our overall tapestry that much richer. 

For example, Jin K. Park, a Harvard student with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status, earned the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship in 2018. Much of the DACA program is filled with success stories of young students who were raised in the United States and are now likely achieving milestones unimagined by the parents who brought them here. The same is true of the experiences of refugees and at-risk migrants.

Different International Learning Experiences

As international educators, we pay attention to academic mobility patterns to stay ahead of trends regarding where our students come from and where they would like to study. These patterns also inform our understanding of the international mobility of people in general.

There are three main forms of international mobility we need to account for today: mobility for enlightenment, which applies to traditional study abroad students; mobility for opportunity, or economic migrants and full degree seeking students; and mobility for survival, the forcibly displaced refugees and migrants who have little choice but to take up their education elsewhere.

By nature of being in another culture, all three of these populations are engaging in some form of international learning. However, they are doing it for different reasons, with different motivations, and likely with different outcomes. International educators need to recognize these differences and provide the corresponding support to ensure these students’ progress.

Historically, the study of international education has been mostly related to fostering and studying the mobility patterns, motivations, and outcomes of the first group, and to a lesser degree, the second group—those who engage in mobility for enlightenment and those who engage for degree advancement. 

Yet, there is much to learn about the third group, those who engage in mobility for survival, and how these students experience international learning.

But with the global refugee crisis, international educators, particularly those in the United States and other Western countries, need to be prepared to serve those students seeking to enter educational systems for reasons related to mobility for survival. How can we all become better equipped to accommodate those who have left their home to survive, starting from zero in their new host country?

As international educators, we are particularly attuned to students returning from their sojourns abroad as potentially transformed thinkers, as well as to international students who bring to our campuses different ways of thinking and working. We are already primed to develop new pathways and opportunities currently missing in our existing institutional structures. Doing so may include shifting financing and funding priorities in previously untried ways; broadening student services to account for new academic, health, and psychosocial supports needed; and sensitizing domestic students, faculty, and staff to the challenges and benefits that come with interacting openly with these newcomers.

The diversity of knowledge and perspectives of these new community members can make our institutions stronger. They bring new ideas and capacity for problem-solving, they engage in innovative activities, and their stories help us cultivate empathy and understanding. We have so much to gain by integrating these newcomers and very little to lose.

Frameworks for Duty of Care

There are two excellent frameworks that institutions can consider in evaluating and expanding the duty of care to become more inclusive of refugees and at-risk migrants. The first is the framework developed in Campus Crisis Management (2007).

This framework acknowledges that new refugee and migrant populations undoubtedly bring with them challenges informed by their traumatic background experiences and a lack of familiarity with the institution’s norms and expectations. These create additional pressures on institutions to provide new support structures, services, and mechanisms that administrators may not have expected or prepared for in advance. Supporting these new populations requires administrators and students to respond with new services, but they can also make institutions stronger than they were before.

The second framework is proposed by Ruben Elias Canedo Sanchez and Meng L. So in a 2015 Harvard Education Review article. Their coding structure uses colored lights to evaluate institutional policies and programs to understand how to improve equity of access to resources for undocumented students. Green lights are programs, resources, and processes for which access is not dependent on immigration status, allowing undocumented students easy access. Yellow lights are where it is unclear about whether immigration status is a factor for access. Red lights indicate aspects of the university that require immigration status.

By identifying yellow and red lights, Canedo and So engaged campus leaders to identify ways to change to green lights. They examined and negotiated key access barriers, including resolving financial issues related to housing, hiring undocumented students on campus, and providing more training for staff to become allies for undocumented students. This approach helps build holistic strategies to support undocumented student success and promotes an asset-based approach of identifying the contributions and talents undocumented students bring to the university.

The sustainability of humanistic internationalization incorporates a duty of care for refugees and at-risk migrants. We urge international educators to cultivate “hope-nurturing conversations” within their institutions that focus on understanding the human needs and capabilities of those who have engaged in mobility for survival.

The stories of past migrants like Einstein and Pulitzer, who excelled where they were planted, and the exhilarating potential found in new migrants, such as the Rhodes Scholarship winner Jin Park, make the argument abundantly clear that we cannot squander our opportunity to act.