Flight or Plight: International Students in the USA
For decades, the US has held its rank as the number one international student destination: learners from all over the world flock here on the promise of the great American college experience; a liberal education in the land of opportunity. And it’s not a one way street; US colleges recruit rigorously abroad. International students offer crucial financial support in the form of tuition fees, they diversify and culturally enrich the campuses and communities in which they live, and advance their fields of study with new perspectives and ideas.
In our world of globalization, the power of cultural exchange and an international education is well understood. The most prestigious academic scholarship programs in the world are study abroad scholarships; The Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford and the US’ Fulbright Commission. Senator J. William Fulbright founded The Fulbright Commission with the belief that international education exchange was the key to preventing another world war. In his book The Price of Empire, he says;
"Of all the joint ventures in which we might engage, the most productive, in my view, is educational exchange. I have always had great difficulty--since the initiation of the Fulbright scholarships in 1946--in trying to find the words that would persuasively explain that educational exchange is not merely one of those nice but marginal activities in which we engage in international affairs, but rather, from the standpoint of future world peace and order, probably the most important and potentially rewarding of our foreign-policy activities."
According to the Institute of International Education (IIE), international students numbered approximately 1.1 million - 5% of all students in higher education in the US in 2019. These million+ students face unique challenges; as well as all the usual pressures of starting school, they’re adapting to a new country and culture, where they are often left to figure out things like finding housing, opening a US bank account and getting health insurance - alone.
But COVID-19 has demonstrated just how vulnerable these international student populations really are. When college dorms closed down in March, domestic students simply headed home. It wasn’t so simple for international students, when flights were grounded and many countries’ borders were already closed.
A dorm for international graduate students near Columbia University in NYC, known as International House, gave their 700+ residents just eight days notice to pack up and leave in March, after one of their residents died from the virus. Many were left homeless and in financial dire straits. International House claimed that the eviction ban in place at the time did not apply to them, as their residents were legally “members” and not “tenants.”
The growing vulnerability of international students was demonstrated most recently on July 6, 2020 when the Trump administration enacted a policy that would bar international students from entering or re-entering the US, and see any already based here threatened with deportation if their universities did not return to in-person classes in the Fall. This was despite publicly announcing on March 9, 2020 that international students would be able to remain in the US in the Fall, even if all of their classes were online.
The policy left international students and colleges with the decision of either risking public health to return to in-person teaching so that international students could maintain visa status, or deporting all international students, many of whom had already paid tuition, housing deposits, etc.
Harvard and MIT almost immediately issued a legal challenge to the law, backed by signatories including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, PayPal, Twitter, Spotify and the US Chamber of Commerce. Other colleges, in the interim, introduced “workaround” classes - a single class which would meet in person once per semester, that international students could take simply to maintain visa status. The whole situation seemed ridiculous - and it was - and on July 14, 2020, the policy was rescinded.
International students still face huge delays in visa issues, renewals and bars on US entry from certain countries, all of which will obviously affect enrollment in the Fall. It’s also not unlikely that the current administration will yet retaliate with a more legally water-tight version of the policy.
The future is uncertain for almost all of us right now, but we must not allow uncertainty to lead to fear, and fear to lead to regression, displacement and othering. We must work to protect our international students, and in the words of Senator William J Fulbright, “through these means, to bring a little more knowledge, a little more reason, and a little more compassion into world affairs and thereby to increase the chance that nations will learn at last to live in peace and friendship."