Understanding foreign students’ diverse backgrounds is essential for both institutions and educators. Yet identifying who qualifies as ‘foreign’ has grown more complex in a globalised context. Through the sociological lens of the stranger, this paper examines the dynamics of foreign-making through an analysis of the diverse 2023–2024 foreign student population at Luxembourg's highly international university. Using legal frameworks, it analyses residence, nationality, and legal status. Findings show that while most respondents fit within legal definitions, a substantial proportion presents different or more complex situations. The case of Luxembourgish students from families with migration histories illustrates this complexity particularly well, as their migration heritage appears to hold enough weight to position them ambiguously between national and foreigner categories. This in-betweenness highlights the limitations of rigid classification systems, even those commonly applied. It also invites further discussion on how strangers are made, moving beyond nationality-based framing. These reflections highlight how intertwined the legal construction of foreignness and the social process of stranger-making might be, while also suggesting that the experience of strangeness as stranger-feeling is not exclusive to those who cross borders. Implications for future research are discussed.
National citizenship has consistently been instrumental in ‘deciding whom to label as foreign’. Luxembourg, where almost half of the resident population holds a foreign nationality, is no exception. Despite its highly international demographic profile and long-standing self-identification as an immigration country, this small Western European state con- tinues to rely on a legal framework in which belonging is conferred through filiation and time spent in the country (Scuto 2023). According to this logic, even in super-diverse contexts, foreigners ‘who have sufficiently mastered (...) the language or have “blended into” the local community by actively partaking in the local social life’ may still be labelled as strangers based on their inherited border-crossing or perceived non-nativeness.