Concepción Reza grew up in a middle-class family in Mexico City and studied economics at UCLA from 1952 to 1953. She was the recipient of two scholarships, one from Mexico’s central bank and the other from the U.S. Department of State. During Reza’s yearlong stint at UCLA, a research team studying the experiences of Mexican students in the United States interviewed her. Why did she pursue the opportunity? Reza did not think U.S. education was inherently superior to Mexican education. But people in Mexico looked very favorably upon those with U.S. degrees, she said, especially when it came to hiring, and she wanted a good job in Mexico with a high salary. She had an abstract motivation, too: Like many Mexicans studying abroad, she hoped that what she learned in the United States could be put to use in Mexico to serve the national interest.
Over 1 million international students, from Mexico and dozens of other countries that continue to send students to U.S. university campuses every year, still harbor similar dreams. Increasingly in the second Trump administration, though, international students report feeling unsafe, vulnerable to detention and removal, and unable to speak freely on U.S. campuses. Many young people from around the world are abandoning plans to study in the United States. And still, hundreds of thousands of international students remain, willing to shoulder uncertainty and countenance the possibility of violence or exclusion. What makes that risk worthwhile?
To answer that question, it’s instructive to look at Mexico, a large country with plenty of educational opportunities that nevertheless has a very long history of sending its young people to study abroad. Powerful political, social, and cultural forces in Mexico have always driven ambitious youth to seek places at the world’s most prestigious universities, even if those institutions happen to be in places with notable anti-Mexican sentiment. The desire for upward mobility via foreign education is just as old as U.S. antipathy toward Mexico and its people. Risk of discrimination and even violence during U.S. sojourns is not a new danger for Mexican students.
Mexican students have studied in the United States and in Europe since the early 19th century, when the country’s most privileged families began investing in the future of their clans by sending their children abroad. Young Mexican elites enjoyed cultural cache from association with European or U.S. institutions, preferred over déclassé Mexican schools where the wealthy might have to rub shoulders with humbler students. Elites studying abroad also reaped practical gains: they developed international social networks, studied the languages of potential investors and customers, and learned cutting-edge technical skills useful for family businesses. For example, future Mexican president Francisco Madero, a scion of one of Mexico’s richest landholding families, studied in Paris as an adolescent and then attended UC Berkeley in the late 19th century. He focused on commercial and agricultural techniques before joining the family business.
Aristocratic families like the Maderos self-funded their children’s foreign education. By the turn of the 20th century, Mexican youth from the upwardly mobile middle class had also gained opportunities to study abroad with scholarships in engineering, music, and pedagogy financed by the Mexican government. The scholarships both rewarded the best students and served as an investment in Mexico’s own national professional schools, which returning students were meant to come back and modernize.
Study abroad came under public scrutiny as the 1910 revolution in Mexico ousted an autocratic ruler, and ushered in new ideals and policies meant to reduce inequality and increase national sovereignty. The new revolutionary government continued to fund scholarships, but Mexican commentators in the 1920s and 1930s began to question whether study abroad was actually good for the nation writ large.
One such commentator was the student Gabino Palma, who received a scholarship from the Mexican government from 1919 to 1921 to study pedagogy in New York City. Life in the U.S. was hard for Palma, whose scholarship payments failed to arrive for months at a time. He complained to the Mexican government that his own reputation, and by extension Mexico’s national standing, was degraded by the low-paid, low-status factory and hotel jobs he had to work to get by. Palma believed that a respectable student abroad should have enough money to avoid manual labor, including one’s own domestic chores, and should have time and resources to partake in cultural events and leisure activities with classmates.
The young Palma found a platform for his stance thanks to his side gig as a journalist and public visibility as a student activist. Writing in Mexico’s national daily El Universal in 1921, he argued that Mexican students would fare best sticking with Mexican institutions for formative undergraduate work and following up with studies abroad. “Those who complete all their education outside Mexico,” Palma argues, were as good as “lost to the nation,” since they had not had the chance to fully develop their Mexican identities. Palma, who shared some of the elitist and racist assumptions of aristocratic Mexicans, also believed that Mexicans without deep pockets or adequate scholarships should not attempt foreign education, lest they fall into debt or be forced to take grinding jobs.
However, Palma’s warnings also presaged another kind of risk, which would grow more apparent by the early 1930s: Even elite Mexicans sometimes encountered racism in the U.S., including from college classmates who subjected them to stereotypes, microaggressions, and even violence. This had been true for some time. In 1903, a Mexican student in Mississippi was tarred and feathered. In 1914, U.S. students at Notre Dame threw Mexican classmates into the river, prompting a complaint from the local Mexican consul. But the worst violence against Mexican students took place in 1931, when two Oklahoma deputy sheriffs murdered two young men—one of whom was a nephew of Mexico’s sitting president. An international scandal ensued. On both sides of the border, high-level officials and prominent thinkers agreed that the “Oklahoma Tragedy” was both a criminal injustice and diplomatic affront to Mexico. There were student protests in Ciudad Juárez. U.S. and Mexican mourners sent funerary wreaths to the young men’s families.
When a local jury acquitted the Oklahoman sheriffs, Mexicans again questioned whether the risks of U.S. education really outweighed the benefits. One pundit warned Mexican parents that sons and daughters sent abroad might come back as “cadavers.” Leftist student groups, who saw the elite penchant for study abroad as evidence of U.S. “psychological penetration, a phase of American imperialism” in Mexico, demanded that all Mexicans, including politicians, stop sending their children north to study. But U.S. credentials remained too valuable for many Mexicans to pass up. In fall 1931, the one student survivor of the Oklahoma Tragedy resumed his studies in the United States, and Oklahoman officials soon announced a new scholarship for a Mexican student, to be chosen by the Mexican president, to attend Oklahoma’s Agricultural & Mechanical College. The olive branch sparked Mexican nationalist ire. But Mexican students begged to be considered for the scholarship. As one young man wrote to the president, he believed this educational opportunity would allow him “to do something for [his parents] and for the patria,” his homeland.
Over the 1930s, Mexican public opinion and public policy coalesced further around the utility of foreign education for the good of all Mexicans. Even leftist student groups petitioned for access to international scholarships for their members. In 1939, one group of future schoolteachers connected their political mission of putting “education at the service of the people” to their demand for “12 scholarships for graduates to study abroad, preferably in Europe or North America.”
In the 1940s, Mexico’s central bank created a scholarship program that sent hundreds of Mexican youth abroad, especially to the United States. U.S. scholarship programs bringing Mexicans to U.S. campuses also flourished. The State Department launched scholarships to generate friendly feelings for the United States among Latin Americans, exercising soft power through cultural diplomacy. Institutions seeking to promote global development, including the Rockefeller Foundation, also created avenues for study abroad, paying Mexican students generous stipends to complete graduate studies in the United States, where they could learn key skills to modernize agriculture, research, and public health at home.
Scholarship offerings continued to expand, with the number of Mexicans enrolled in U.S. colleges growing from a few hundred each year to thousands over the course of the 20th century. In recent years, about 15,000 Mexicans have attended U.S. universities at any given time. Whether their numbers will drop significantly remains to be seen. In its initial analysis of fall 2025 enrollment, the Institute for International Education, a century-old nonprofit that administers U.S. government scholarship programs and keeps data on international student mobility, found that nearly three-quarters of institutions surveyed noted stable or growing enrollments from Mexico.
These numbers may not hold, but it’s reasonable to expect many thousands of students from Mexico to continue coming here to study, despite the risks. Students from other parts of the world will likely continue arriving, too, as long as U.S. immigration policy allows. For many young people thinking about their futures after graduation, their plans—for themselves, their country, and their families—still require touching down on the slippery stepping stone of U.S. campuses.
Rachel Newman is the author of “The Future in Their Hands: Making Mexico’s Foreign-Educated Elite,” available for free download. She teaches migration history and Latin American history at Colgate University.
This article was written for Zócalo Public Square, an ASU Media Enterprise publication.