Abstract Despite constituting a major population in U.S. higher education, Chinese international students experience institutional marginalization that is often obscured by individual-level deficit narratives. This study adopts transnationalism as an analytic frame to develop an identity-based model, specifying how legal noncitizenship, racialization, and national identity function as institutional mechanisms of exclusion across transnational contexts. It employs Critical Interpretive Synthesis to integrate federal legal and regulatory texts, policy discourse, and a corpus of 58 sources across empirical scholarship, explaining how these dimensions intersect through institutional pathways to co-produce multi-axis vulnerability. The findings theorize a state of “citizenship limbo,” marked by a conditional rights regime and legal exclusion from social welfare supports. From a transnational intersectionality perspective, Chinese international students’ institutional positioning is shaped by the convergence of legal noncitizenship, racialized visibility, and neo-nationalist national interest logics. These dimensions intersect through racialized constructions of national interest and nationality-linked administrative protocols, producing instability and precarity for Chinese international students. The paper concludes with implications for universities, including the expansion of legal support capacity, strengthened institutional safety nets, and efforts to address bias embedded in academic and administrative practices.
He et al. (2026) studied this question.