This article draws on a qualitative study of Chinese international undergraduates at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Throughout, I argue that these students' FYW experiences compel BW instructors and WPAs to reevaluate pedagogies long thought to empower underrepresented students, ones rooted in our encounters since Open Admissions with working-class students, multilingual writers, and students of color. For my participants, these pedagogies narrowed their educational goals, casting them to the margins of a campus where they had been given unprecedented access (and where access had contracted for domestic students of color). Their stories reveal a university transformed by profit-driven internationalization, one that requires new approaches to writing assessment, assignment design, and programmatic activism in order to secure access for historically underrepresented domestic students and international students.