This study presents a qualitative insight of legal status experience of foreign students’ returnees from immigration center. Convenience sampling was applied in the study, and in-depth semi-structured interview was adopted to collect specific data among selected eleven (11) undergraduate foreign students, studying at a private university college, who were released from leggeng immigration deportation camp, Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia. Data were analyzed, and findings as themes were developed. Results of the study were classified into two categories. The first category indicates, the legal status challenges encountered by the students in the university. The second category reveals the students experience in the deportation camp. The study recommends with remarkable conclusion among others; initiatives to improve immigration collective services, roles of educators and school administration on foreign students’ supports services, and further suggested with a clarion call for more government supports, to improve the conditions of immigration deportation camp in Malaysia.

The saga of U.S. immigrant naturalization is merely sketched for about 25 million immigrants entered in three decades of renewed immigration. This study documents naturalization outcomes for immigrants from ten major countries of origin, using administrative records on immigrants and naturalizations. Following the 1978–1987 admission cohorts for the first decade or more of permanent residence, this study finds significant covariate effects on the timing of naturalization by origin, mode of entry, and immigrant visa class, net other influences of demographic and background characteristics. Immigrants from the Philippines, Vietnam, and China naturalized more quickly than immigrants from India, Korea, Cuba, Colombia, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico. Those who adjusted from statuses as nonimmigrants, refugees, or asylees became naturalized citizens more quickly. Those immigrants with employment sponsorship naturalized faster than family-sponsored immigrants. Spouses of citizens, spouses of permanent residents, spouses of siblings of citizens, and spouses of sons and daughters of citizens naturalized faster than some other immigrants. Gender was not significant in the multivariate analysis, but further research will more fully explore sex-specific variation in the timing of naturalization given likely variation in women's representation by origin and admission categories.

Journalists ―and even some migration scholars ― frame international migration, at best, as a curiosity, or at worst, as an aberration, an afront to the natural order of things. Long-distance human migration has been a constant throughout history. What is new is the dangerous idea that people should self-organize in mutually exclusive homogenous nation-states with discrete societies. Charles Tilly (1984) called on scholars to be skeptical about this political program that he called a pernicious postulate. Unfortunately, as Bourdieu wrote, “To endeavor to think the state is to take the risk of taking over (or being taken over by) a thought of the state, that is, of applying to the state categories of thought produced and guaranteed by the state and hence to misrecognize its most profound truth” (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 36). Citizens often think about the state using the thinking tools given to them by the state, often through basic education and nationalist discourse. Centralized bureaucratic states dislike mobile people who are harder to tax and enlist (Scott, 1998; Tilly, 1992; Torpey, 2000). States make distinctions between citizens and non-citizens, undocumented and legal migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, accompanied and accompanied minors. Then citizens and scholars reproduce these categories and assign moral values to them. In this essay, I offer my own migration trajectory to illustrate that migration need not be seen either as an evil or heroic event. If we take a step back from political and media discourses about migration, we can appreciate “the banality of migration” and that the movement of people should not be feared nor celebrated out of proportion. My story serves as a reminder that often migration happens for professional reasons (Portes, 1976; Portes & Borocz, 1989) and that not all migration involves suffering and trauma, though clearly, those are the cases that need more public support and the realities that should generate policy change.