He also says countries with large numbers of globally mobile students, such as China, India and Malaysia, should pressure education providing countries for the creation of a "systematic regime of protection and respect for their student citizenship". Export nations could then negotiate an ‘international student compact’ with the student source countries - establishing a pattern of bilateral negotiations that could eventually drive common global standards.

Professor Marginson, a University of Melbourne Professor of Higher Education, and member of the Centre for the study of Higher Education, was addressing the Asia-Pacific Association for International Education annual conference, hosted by Griffith University at the Gold Coast, today.  He is lead author of the forthcoming Cambridge University Press book, International Student Security (Simon Marginson, Chris Nyland, Erlenawati Sawir & Helen Forbes-Mewett). Both the book and Professor Marginson’s address are based on a detailed study of the international education experience in Australia, as reported by students themselves.

The study found that loneliness, isolation, difficulties with cross-cultural interactions, the need for safer, more hygenic and better housing, health cover, personal safety, problems with immigration authorities, and employment exploitation were key problems facing international students.

Professor Marginson says that issues facing international students are similar to those facing other stateless or internationally mobile people, such as refugees, and believes international education could "lead the development of global approaches in relation to other, more difficult forms of cross-border people movement - not just labour and business migration, but political refugees, and the growing number of people displaced by global climate change."

During his address, Professor Marginson said that in Australia, the UK and New Zealand, the "normalising policy and legal concepts" around international students are ‘consumer’ and ‘market’, and that no English speaking country emphasizes the human rights of the temporary migrants who are international students.

"With cross-border mobility continuing to grow (doubling in the last 10 years to reach three million people in 2007), and with education being the nation’s third largest export industry after coal and iron ore (ahead of tourism and specific agricultural goods), it is high time for the provider nations to get real about human rights and move the security and conditions of international students up the policy agenda of national governments, multilateral forums and global agencies," he says.