Trump's New Front in War on Immigration: International Students
It has been a shocking year in the US. Coronavirus deaths have topped 133,000 so far, with Dr. Anthony Fauci warning of a "very disturbing" surge. There has been a brutal police response to protests against the killings of unarmed black men and women. Donald Trump has made a career out of writing tweets designed to foment racial tensions.
With so much going on, it would be easy to overlook the latest act of wanton cruelty from the Trump administration. While the brazen measure may seem bureaucratic and unimportant to those who are unaffected, it could have a long-lasting and far-reaching impact on the future of the US as a nation of immigrants.
On Monday, the Student and Exchange Visitor Program, part of US Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS), announced “modifications to temporary exemptions for non-immigrant students taking online classes due to the pandemic for the fall 2020 semester.” In practice, more than 1 million international students registered at US universities may not enter or remain in the country if their classes have been moved entirely online because of the pandemic. The ruling came just as many universities, among them Harvard, began announcing plans to move almost all instruction for the upcoming semester online.
You may ask: if instruction is going to be online, why should international students seek to come to the US anyway? Why not just stay at home?
Pity the student in Shanghai who will take classes in the middle of the night, and will be subject to the Chinese Government’s strict monitoring of online learning platforms. Think of the doctoral candidate from Cork, Ireland who needs to be physically present in the US in order to be eligible for the stipend that pays his way through college. Imagine what it is like for the undergraduate from Accra, Ghana who is currently in the US and has just found out that he has a couple of weeks to find another course of study, or else he will have to leave the country.
USCIS has effectively told all of them that, unless they are able to be in a classroom with other students — and are willing to risk infection to do so — they have no right to be in the country.
The ruling seems arbitrary, and confusing. After all, what harm would it do for students from other countries to come to the US and take online classes in the same time zone as their instructors?
The obvious explanation for the decision is that the Trump Administration decided this week to go on an all-out offensive against schools and universities, forcing them to reopen for in-person instruction even in the face of a worsening pandemic.
Why? If many schools and universities are closed in the autumn, the country will look like it is still in crisis on November 3, Election Day. So the appearance of normality must be achieved, insist Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, and Education Secretary Betsy De Vos, at the price of the health and well-being of students, teachers, support staff, and their families.
At the same time, this latest act of executive cruelty likely has its origin in a far larger Trumpian agenda that has been given a shot in the arm by the Covid-19 crisis: the push, spearheaded by White House advisor and white nationalist Stephen Miller, to curb all immigration, documented and undocumented.
First, Trump raced to shut down arrivals from China, then he blamed migrants crossing the border from Mexico for the spread of the disease. Now it is students whose movements are being restricted under the cover of an emergency ruling.
Activists are already calling this a #StudentBan, exposing the naked opportunism of the move. From the Muslim Ban to abolition of protections for young Dreamer immigrants, the Trump administration has relentlessly pursued every single opportunity to keep foreigners out, especially those who are Black and Brown. Only last week they announced a temporary halt to almost all H1-B visas, substantially claimed by applicants from India, who travel to the US to work in the tech industry. The stated reason was that the jobs of H1-B visa holders should go to unemployed Americans — never mind that the visa category is especially for workers with skills that are in low supply among US nationals.
For the White House, a pandemic is not to be treated as a public health emergency, but as an opportunity for rapid social engineering. With the USCIS ruling, they may succeed in denying the severity of the Covid-19 pandemic; they will cut the number of people in the country on non-immigrant visas by several hundred thousand; and they will punish institutions of higher education, caricatured as bastions of liberalism, by forcing them to reopen or reducing their income from international students. The high-contact, high-cost, high-revenue model of much of US higher education is already under duress because of Covid-19, but this ruling will make it even more difficult for universities to avoid the rush to in-person instruction, putting students at risk to ensure continued revenue.
Some universities and students are pushing back however they can, from emergency lawsuits against USCIS to plans for ad-hoc, low-stakes, in-person classes so international students can abide by the letter of the law.
Of course the universities are doing this because of the money involved — international students are a significant source of revenue. But it is not all about the money. If Stephen Miller and his White House group crush demand for a US education and availability of visas for international students, the intellectual and pedagogical loss will be incalculable. Even if Trump is defeated in November, the damage may already be done, as students question whether there is a place for them here any more.
International students will always be welcome in US universities, but this latest move by the Trump Administration, under cover of Coronavirus, has revealed the lengths to which the Administration will go to seal off US borders. If universities are severely financially damaged at the same time, it is a bonus for an administration that has shown little regard for higher education.
The late Edward Said, a Palestinian intellectual who studied and taught most of his life in the US, admired the American higher education system as “the last remaining utopia". A key part of what makes it such a utopia is the genuine welcome for voices and ideas from all over the world.
For all its faults, most of which have to do with the financial model, the American university remains a beacon for millions of students and scholars from all over the world. It is a beacon that we will have to fight very hard to keep aflame.
Cóilín Parsons is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Global Irish Studies Initiative at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. A graduate of NUI, Galway in Ireland, he studied and worked at Syracuse University and Columbia University on international student visas.