Abstract:

International student mobility to Portugal has expanded rapidly over the past decade, as higher education institutions (HEIs) are urged to compensate for demographic decline, diversify enrolments and strengthen their international profiles within the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). In parallel, Portugal’s migration regime has become more restrictive and procedurally demanding, with tightened legal frameworks, chronic administrative backlogs and increasingly polarised public debates on immigration. This paper offers a conceptual analysis of how HEIs are positioned within this evolving configuration, arguing that they are no longer merely beneficiaries of global student flows but are progressively implicated in their governance in ways that put pressure on core fundamental values in higher education, including equity, non‑discrimination, academic freedom and institutional autonomy.

Drawing on a qualitative, interpretive design, the paper mobilises recent literature on international students in Portugal, analyses of migration policy reforms, and national and institutional internationalisation strategies. It treats this corpus as a lens through which to examine how universities and polytechnics mediate the tensions between policy narratives of attraction and everyday practices of control and scarcity. The analysis focuses on three interrelated dimensions: the administrative and pastoral work of supporting students navigating visa and residence‑permit uncertainties; the institutional management of housing, tuition and work opportunities under conditions of structural constraint; and the ethical and political dilemmas that arise when HEIs are invited to assume quasi‑regulatory roles in migration control, including the verification and monitoring of students’ legal status. These dynamics are read against the EHEA’s formal commitments to protect academic freedom and institutional autonomy, to ensure fair access and treatment for mobile learners, and to promote inclusive, rights‑based mobility regimes.

The paper argues that focusing on these institutional interfaces helps reframe international student mobility not only as a matter of individual aspiration or national policy, but as a field of contested co‑governance where fundamental values are negotiated, tested and, at times, compromised in practice. It concludes by outlining implications for re‑aligning internationalisation agendas with the foundational commitments of the Higher Education Area, and suggests directions for future empirical research on how institutions, staff and students experience, resist or reproduce these emerging regimes of mobility governance.

Keywords:

International student mobility, higher education, fundamental values, migration policy.