Divergent International Student Policies Under Enrollment Pressure: A Comparative Analysis of South Korea and the United States, 2013–2026

South Korea and the United States have higher education sectors under structural enrollment pressure for which international recruitment is a compensating strategy, yet between 2013 and 2026 they built opposite policy regimes. This comparative policy study analyzes 125 documents, 52 Korean and 59 United States federal instruments plus 14 association documents, coded across a five-stage pathway from recruitment to settlement for orientation, stage span, and student naming, and triangulated with six enrollment and visa series. Korea consolidated integrated attraction with selective control: eleven national plans link recruitment to employment and settlement, the average instrument reaches 2.6 pathway stages, and universities hold delegated custody under certification incentives. The United States developed institutional attraction under federal restriction: no national plan appears, the average instrument reaches 1.4 stages, policymaking migrated from rulemaking toward immediate-effect instruments, and correction came from the courts, which stopped or reversed executive instruments of a kind that Korea’s regime never had to withdraw. The divergence tracks policy problem ownership, which conditions rather than competes with demand, partisan turnover, geopolitics, and federal structure: the subsystem that owns the problem students represent, demographic development in Korea and security enforcement in the United States, structures regime formation. The study contributes a documentary method reading ownership from issuing authority alone, an institutional map of who can issue what in each system, an implementation record for every coded instrument, and eight conditional lessons for reciprocal learning.