“I had a very flowery perception of college before coming in,” Rajit Rajpal, a 19-year-old data-science student at the University of California, Berkeley, told me on 7 July. Rajpal moved to the United States a year ago, becoming the first member of his family to travel abroad for college. In March this year, when the novel coronavirus cases began to surge in the United States, the 19-year-old Indian national decided to go back home to his parents in Indonesia but could not travel as the country had shut its borders. He vacated his university dorm in April due to a financial crisis at home, he told me. For the last four months, he has been moving from place to place with his two suitcases in tow, mostly couch-surfing with his friends. Now, he is faced with a new uncertainty. Rajpal risks deportation if his university chooses to conduct only online classes for the fall semester—which typically begins in late August and ends in December—according to a new policy laid out by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.
On 6 July, ICE announced that if F-1 and M-1 visa holders are enrolled only in online classes for the fall semester, they will have to go back to their home countries or face deportation. In the United States, F-1 and M-1 visas are given to foreign students who are enrolled in academic and vocational programmes. ICE wrote in its press release that students currently living in the country “must depart the country or take other measures, such as transferring to a school with in-person instruction to remain in lawful status.” Further, the press release mentioned that students enrolled in schools or programs that are fully online for the fall semester will not be issued visas or allowed to enter the country.
“This latest ban on students is another addition to a long list of racist, anti-immigrant policies which have come to define this administration,” Iman Boukadoum, an immigration attorney based in Washington DC, said. There were around one million foreign students in the United States in 2019, according to the Institute of International Education, a nonprofit that promotes international education. The new policy move could affect tens of thousands of these students and those who were aspiring to study in the country. [Update: Hours after this story was published, the administration rescinded the policy.]
As a daughter of an immigrant, Heba Gowayed, an assistant professor of Sociology at Boston University, considered ICE’s decision as a personal attack. In the 1980s, “my father came here on a visa as a PhD student and we came with him,” she said. “The decision to send him home would have been the end of our American dream.”
“This order essentially created a border inside my classroom,” she said. “It created an arbitrary distinction between a foreign and domestic student, where domestic students can decide how they want to learn, how to protect themselves and their families and foreign students wouldn’t be afforded the same opportunities.” If they are forced to go back, some students may lack quality internet or the ability to access course materials due to government censorship or have an environment at home that might not be conducive to learning, she explained. Her job as an educator is to create a space in her classroom where “people’s worth is not tied to their race or their passport, or to their nation of origin.”
Rajvir Batra is up at 3.30 am these days to attend lectures from his home in Punjab, India, held some thirteen thousand kilometres away in Cambridge. He just completed his second-year at the Harvard University and flew back to India in March when his university advised international students to go back home and transition to remote learning. “There was no fixed timeline as to when the university will open so I did not want to be stuck in the US for the foreseeable future,” he said. It has been hard for him to study at home even though he has a reliable internet connection and a room of his own. “With my younger brother around and my whole family around, it is hard for me to concentrate on my work. I realised that I am not as motivated as I was back on campus.”
Batra said he realises that he is in a privileged position when compared to many other international students. He has friends from Ethiopia, Nigeria and Syria and this rule can be distressing for them. “They cannot go back home; Syria is literally a war zone,” he said, adding that “forcing all of these people to go back home, I don’t think is a right move. They are in a far worse position than I am right now.”
Faced with a pandemic, travel restrictions, a difficult situation at home and pending loan applications, Rajpal, the 19-year-old Indian national, was feeling overwhelmed and helpless even before 6 July. This new policy has only exacerbated his anxiety. He told me he feels “trapped from every single side.” From his experience, Rajpal said, companies may filter out students while giving job opportunities based on their visa status which can leave international students in a tough spot. “I feel so expendable,” he said.
Rajpal said his family has been tapping into their savings to pay for his education so far. The pandemic has caused an upheaval into the family’s income; his father’s salary was slashed in half. For a brief moment, Rajpal did consider transferring to another university but now they are trying to secure a loan to pay his tuition fee.
International students mostly rely on their family savings, bank loans and international scholarships to fund their education in the United States. They were responsible for pumping $44.7 billion into the country’s economy in 2018, according to IIE. Many people I interviewed agreed that this new regulation does not make any business sense.
Emily Farris, an assistant professor of political science at Texas Christian University, considers this move by the Donald Trump-led administration as something that will ultimately benefit universities in Canada. “If I was an international student, I would be a lot more attracted to a Canadian university if I don’t have to deal with this kind of a threat.”
It was one in the morning in India when Fazil Khan learned from a WhatsApp group that his future plans might be jeopardy because of this new ICE rule. Khan, a 23-year-old who lives in west Delhi, is due to start his masters in data journalism at Columbia University in New York next month. He resigned from his job as a data correspondent for CNN News18 in March after receiving the acceptance letter from Columbia. “I was speechless,” he said. The next morning, he began working on a story about the Trump administration’s latest anti-immigration policy.
“I am the first in my entire family to go to university outside of India,” Khan said. He told me he is still awaiting a United States visa because all American embassies in India have been temporarily shut down due to the pandemic. Under this ICE policy, incoming students might not be eligible for a visa if they are not attending in-person classes in America. When he read the news, he said, “I just thought, ‘The mess just gets bigger with each day.’”
He did not think that it would be possible for him to get all his paperwork in order because there is no information as to when embassies will start accepting new visa applications. Moreover, existing backlogs might further delay his visa. With so many unknowns, a start date in August seemed unrealistic.
Some international students in his class are considering a deferral—postponing beginning their courses—but in Khan’s case that is not an option because he would lose his scholarship money. He explained that he has gathered the funds for his education and living expenses in New York through a combination of scholarships, personal savings, a bank loan and his well-wishers. He considered himself fortunate because he was able to keep his job. The last few months have been extremely frustrating, but he did not lose hope.
Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology filed a lawsuit on 8 July in a federal court in Boston to block this new regulation. Several other universities such as Columbia University, Northwestern University, Princeton University and Johns Hopkins University, have also filed briefs—a supporting document submitted by interested parties—or new lawsuits. Many universities across the United States, including Columbia and Berkeley, have responded to the regulation by opting for a hybrid program in the fall, which means a combination of in-person and online classes. In other cases, domestic students are rallying together to help international students stay in the country by complying with ICE’s regulation.
On the night of 6 July, Sumana Kaluvai, a recent graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles, circulated a Google spreadsheet through which students could sign-up to donate an in-person class to an international student in need. The next morning, she said, “I woke up to 900 emails in my inbox.” The sheet had crashed as it reached its maximum limit of 1,000 entries in a few hours, she told me. Kaluvai along with groups that promote equity, such as San Jose Strong and Community Equity, then created a website named SOIS, Support Our International Students, to assist students affected by ICE’s new policy. This temporary fix can help students maintain their legal status in the country, she said. Kaluvai, who is from India, understood the pressures of being on a visa in America. She has dealt with it all her life. “People are really scared and that has given ICE power over our communities,” she said.
An Indian student pursuing a PhD at the University of Michigan said that as an international student, she considers herself to be in a precarious position. She requested to withhold her name due to fear that her visa status might be affected because of publicly speaking against ICE. “I am completely outraged but I feel like I can’t be openly vocal.” She told me she has read several stories in the media which shows that the US government is tracking social-media profiles. Therefore, on her friends’ advice, she deleted some of her tweets on the student ban. She said that her entry into the US is at the discretion of the border agent “who will choose whether or not to let me into the country every single time, regardless of how much documentation I might have.”
Saad Mahmood, a cardio-oncologist who holds a green card, said he understands how disruptive this rule could be for international students. He came to the US twenty-one years ago on an F-1 visa to study medicine. Mahmood now teaches at Weill Cornell Medicine, a medical school in New York city. For him, America has always “been a gold standard for fairness and this move does tremendous damage to that global reputation.”
Boukadoum, the immigration attorney, said she expected a temporary restraining order on the policy to come in on the 14 July. “With this ban, America is shutting its doors to those who bring creativity, integrity, and determination to our nation.” A month earlier, the Trump administration drew criticism for suspending work visas which allow hundreds of thousands of foreigners to work in the US until the end of this year. “These tragic immigration bans will hurt all of us,” she said.
Rajpal has managed to sign up for an in-person class which gives him a temporary respite from the uncertainty surrounding his visa status. But a recent uptick in coronavirus cases in the US—where the virus has caused more than 137,000 deaths till now—may strip him off this protection. If the numbers continue to grow at an alarming rate, the local government may order a complete state lockdown, he said. If the in-person class gets cancelled, this move could result in ICE revoking his student visa and deporting him back to India.
Editor’s Note: Hours after this story was published, the administration rescinded the policy. This story has been updated accordingly.