Attracting international students in times of immigration restrictiveness. Organizational challenges and bureaucratic politics behind the creation of Campus France (2006-2013).

In 2010, the French government created an agency in charge of promoting French higher education abroad. The new agency named Campus France was the outcome of a long process starting at the end of the 1990s, whereby international students were gradually recognized as desirable migrants. During this period, the various departments involved developed a seemingly shared understanding of which students should be attracted as a priority, i‧e. graduate and postgraduate students from emerging Asian countries (China, India). Based on this selective definition, attracting international students seemed to have become a widely accepted objective within French public administration. As destination states became aware of the value of international students as instruments of “soft power” or as drivers of growth in knowledge-based economies, most studies have therefore assumed that the development of migration promotion activities targeting them was merely consensual. On the contrary, I argue that bureaucratic politics between different administrative actors is critical to the development of a policy that promotes openness in times of increasing restrictions placed on non-EU migrants. Looking at the gradual creation of Campus France (2006-2012), my research aims to explore the effects the new agency had on the distribution of power between the Foreign Ministry, Higher Education institutions, and actors in charge of migration control. Drawing on the literature on administrative reorganizations and on the development of agencies, my argument is twofold. In line with Axis 4, the paper argues first that the creation of Campus France helped marginalize two categories of administrative actors opposed to a coordinated policy designed to attract international students. Campus France’s bylaws sidelined the Ministry of Higher Education and the new coordinated policy left little room for isolated initiatives and decisions made by universities. On the other hand, the new agency made it possible to insulate the policy targeting international students from the growing influence of actors favoring immigration restrictionism. In this context, the efforts to attract international students became primarily a foreign policy steered by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Secondly, I argue that the creation of Campus France has helped to distance the attraction of international students from the French politics, whose hostility towards “bogus foreign students” was increasing at the time, while allowing for its reappraisal as a cultural diplomacy objective. Despite being officially autonomous from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I suggest that Campus France is deeply embedded within its networks and that the new division of labour makes it paradoxically more visible to the executive level of the department. Overall, the paper stresses the importance of administrative reorganization as a prerequisite in times of immigration restrictiveness for the development of immigration promotion activities. This paper is based on interviews conducted with diplomats in charge of creating and managing Campus France and with representatives of the Higher Education sector involved. Even though I was only able to interview a small number of officials in charge of migration control, I had access to archives that provide greater details of their involvement.