Mobility Repertoires: How Chinese Overseas Students Overcame Pandemic-Induced Immobility

Abstract

The burgeoning field of immobility studies focuses on how migratory aspirations and capabilities shape a given (im)mobility status but devotes scant attention to how people traverse different (im)mobility categories. Through a case study of Chinese students in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, this article develops two arguments to shed light on migrants’ experiences and strategies in mobility transitions. First, during the pandemic, while China's restrictive travel policies and unfavorable public discourses made return migration extremely difficult, Chinese overseas students also felt unwelcome in the United States, due to visa restrictions and Sinophobic violence. This dilemma of being unable to return to the homeland and being simultaneously stranded in a hostile host society pushed Chinese student migrants, a previously highly mobile population, into immobility. Second, drawing on in-depth interviews, we discover that Chinese overseas students deployed four sets of tools—online crowdsourcing, virtual intermediary, temporal adaptation, and institutional cushioning—to reclaim mobility. We propose the concept of “mobility repertoires” to capture social actors’ active retooling and deliberate restrategizing of digital, cognitive, and institutional resources to navigate unsettling (im)mobility predicaments and construct new mobility tactics. By cross-fertilizing studies of immobility and migration infrastructure, we provide an action-centered, processual account of (im)mobilities as agential practices and robust courses of action, rather than static statuses or categories. This article also transcends the mobility bias in the literature on international student mobility (ISM) by unraveling the co-production of international student immobility by migration policies and discursive constraints in host and home countries.