International student mobility and immobility

Abstract

This chapter looks at another form of international travel greatly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic: the mobility of tertiary education students. Again, the focus is on the Portuguese context, and as in Chapter 3, the discussion engages with developments before and after the start of the crisis, with the decade prior to the pandemic characterized by a sustained period of expansion, followed by uncertainty. However, as suggested by the statistics presented in Chapter 1, while the status of shortterm exchanges – credit mobility – is unclear due to limitations in the data, there are some signs that levels of student migration to Portugal actually increased during the pandemic. Such developments reflect the fact that the country has a distinct international student mobility profile, perhaps different to the European norm, having become a destination for visitors from neighbouring nations, via programmes such as the European Commission-supported Erasmus platform, as well as those from farther afield, including Africa, Asia and the Americas, with many of these students staying in Portugal for longer durations (Sin et al, 2017; França and Cairns, 2020; Malet Calvo et al, 2020). As noted in prior research on this topic, it may have been logical for these latter students to stay in place after the start of pandemic due to a lack of opportunities to return to societies more deeply affected by the pandemic (Cairns et al, 2021a; 2021b; Malet Calvo et al, 2021).