Degrees of Empire

Noncitizen Students and the Making of U.S. Higher Education

A sweeping history of how noncitizen students shaped U.S. universities

From colonial missionary schools to the globalized university of the twentieth century, U.S. higher education has long depended on students who were never meant to belong. Degrees of Empire tells the untold history of how noncitizen students—Indigenous youth, students from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, and others positioned outside the boundaries of citizenship—have been central to the making of American universities and the expansion of U.S. power.

Tracing the intertwined development of higher education, immigration law, and imperial governance from the seventeenth century through the mid-twentieth, Abigail Boggs shows how universities functioned as fundamental instruments of empire. Noncitizen students were recruited and educated under conditions of surveillance, restriction, and impermanence, trained to circulate knowledge, labor, and political ideals on behalf of the United States even as they were denied full political membership and exposed to constant threat of exclusion or deportation.

Drawing on archival records, immigration policy, institutional documents, and the writings of students themselves, Degrees of Empire demonstrates how universities helped produce racial hierarchies, manage populations, and naturalize liberal ideals of merit and mobility. By examining the figure of the noncitizen student genealogically across time, Boggs reveals a fundamental contradiction at the heart of U.S. higher education: Institutions that present themselves as open and universal have long relied on selective inclusion structured by race, citizenship, and capital.

At a moment when immigration and higher education are once again sites of intense political struggle, this book offers a powerful rethinking of the American university—not as a neutral engine of opportunity, but as a central technology of empire and a contested space in which alternative futures may yet be imagined.

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