Of greater significance is the reality of the better preparedness of students and staff from other African countries who were spared Bantu Education and are thus able to compete on merit for undergraduate, postgraduate and staff positions. Further complicating the determination of foreignness is the cumbersome definition of what constitutes a neighbouring country. For purposes of state subsidies to international students, a diplomatic and economically and politically constructed definition is used. Thus South Africa's neighbouring countries are not only Botswana,Swaziland, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia and Zimbabwe, countries with which she shares common borders, but all the other SADC member states. The implications of this for continued state expenditure on the education of international students are profound.
International students have reason to feel aggrieved by recent policy.
The spectre of deportation continues to haunt them throughout their student life and the repatriation arrangements they are required to make in advance compound their anxiety. The feeling among some international students is that the Department of Home Affairs is pursuing a policy of discouragement. They feel that the policy is not only unnecessarily punitive and deliberately designed to break their spirit but also tinged with xenophobia. University authorities' failure to secure favourable deals for their international students has the unfortunate consequence of being perceived as collusion with the Department of Home Affairs. Iinternational students see the withdrawal of subsidies as a deliberate attempt to make fees prohibitive and exclusionary and another of South Africa's thinly disguised excuses to curb the influx of international students.