In this paper I consider the need to rethink existing ethical approaches to the internationalization of higher education. In particular, I consider the risk that the same developmentalist assumptions that reproduce the highly uneven global higher education landscape also shape many of our efforts to address these inequities. To do so, I situate the current moment within a longer history of colonial relations and identify five pressing ethical challenges for higher education scholars and institutions to address. Ultimately, I suggest the need to be more attentive to the harmful investments and colonial frames of reference that keep us from imagining a radically different ethics of internationalization.