When policies are interpreted as discourses, issues of identity become significant in policy making. In this article I want to problematise the authoritative regulatory discourse of policies on international students in the United States (US) particularly after 9/11/2001 and how they maintain an essentialising notion of identity. Starting from this analysis I want to argue for the reframing of international students as co-producers of knowledge by questioning the more pragmatic sense of what internationalising higher education means. In the process I raise a range of relevant questions such as the ways policies are forms of cultural production condition experience, interpretation and reality (Campbell, 2000, 34). This has emerged from my doctoral dissertation in which I was located as an international student. This experience made me question how the subjectivity of international students is posited in policy documents and research in the United States.