One cannot underestimate the precarity that orders the lives of international students in the United States.
I remember making my maiden journey from Kolkata to upstate New York as an international student to pursue an undergraduate degree at a small liberal arts college. This was back in 2003 when the US-led so-called “war on terror” was in full swing. The US had invaded Iraq only a few months before my arrival in New York.
Be it the on-campus jingoism inspired by America’s battle against the “Axis of Evil” that left little room for critical assessments of US foreign policy in the classroom, the “random” airport security checks at airports or the near-consistent racism and Islamophobia on the American airwaves – it was soon painfully apparent to me that someone who “looked like me” didn’t belong in the “Land of the Free”.
In the years since, things hardly got any better for international students making their way to America. They remained untrustworthy and unwelcome outsiders in the eyes of many Americans, and the sense of precarity surrounding their lives persisted.
Under Trump 2.0, however, this sense of precarity has reached unprecedented levels. In fact, these days the US appears to be not only unwelcoming, it is a blatantly unsafe destination for international students.
Trump has made the lives of international students much more difficult than before. This did not come as a surprise, as he had promised to do just that on the campaign trail, well over a year ago. Besides claiming that universities and various accreditation bodies were dominated by Marxists and radical leftists, he made his particular hatred for Palestine solidarity activists on campus well-known. He declared that, if re-elected, he would revoke the student visas of “radical, anti-American and anti-Semitic foreigners” participating in pro-Palestinian protests on US college campuses as early as October 2023.
After his return to the White House, he made targeting pro-Palestine international students and faculty a priority.
One of his highest-profile targets was Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate. Khalil, who was on the front lines of Columbia’s pro-Palestine protests as a negotiator between the student protesters and university leadership, is a green card holder. However, the Trump administration is pushing to deport him, claiming that he was engaging in pro-Hamas, un-American activities. Khalil was abducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers from his home in New York in front of his pregnant American wife in early March, and has been held at a detention facility in Louisiana for over a month.
In a similar case, Tufts University PhD student and Turkish citizen Rumeysa Ozturk was abducted by masked, plain-clothed officers in Boston. She, too, was transferred to the detention facility in Louisiana. Her crime? Co-authoring an op-ed in Tufts Daily calling for her university to divest from Israel.
Indian citizen and Georgetown University postdoctoral scholar Badar Khan Suri has also been targeted for deportation and is faced with an uncertain future at an ICE detention facility in Texas. Suri didn’t even participate in any Palestine solidarity protests. His crime seems to be that he is the son-in-law of a former adviser to the Hamas government in Gaza, Ahmed Yousef. Yousef, however, left the position in the political wing of Hamas more than a decade ago and has called the group’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 “a terrible error”.
Then there is the case of Cornell University PhD candidate Momodou Taal, a dual citizen of the United Kingdom and Gambia. He participated in Palestine solidarity protests and was called upon by immigration authorities to surrender. After going into hiding for two and half weeks in fear for his personal safety, Taal decided to leave the US.
These few high-profile cases are just the tip of the iceberg. The Trump administration has revoked the visas of hundreds of international students for their pro-Palestine activism and social media posts. As of April 10, more than 600 international students in over 100 colleges and universities across the country are believed to have been affected. And there seems to be no end in sight. The Department of Homeland Security has begun screening the social media accounts of non-citizens and says it will deny visas and green cards to all individuals it deems as having participated in pro-Palestine activism or, as the Trump administration deems it, “anti-Semitic activities”.
America’s leading universities, meanwhile, appear more than willing to capitulate to Trump’s demands, and are throwing their international students to the wolves, to stay on the good books of the administration and keep federal funding.
Columbia University, for instance, quickly caved when the Trump administration decided to withhold $400m in federal funding due to the university’s supposed inaction during the Palestine solidarity protests. Despite sitting on an endowment valued at just under $15bn, Columbia’s leadership responded to Trump’s funding threats by overhauling the university’s protest policies and introducing new security measures that would swiftly crack down on any possible return of Palestine solidarity encampments and protests on the campus.
The Trump administration also demanded that Columbia’s Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department be placed on academic receivership for five years. Typically, academic receivership involves internal processes and measures implemented by the university leadership to bring a dysfunctional department or programme “back on track”. Seemingly agreeing to Trump’s demands, the university appointed a new senior vice provost to oversee the department.
Harvard University – another institution with a massive endowment – faced similar demands from the Trump administration in return for federal funding. Specifically, its leadership was asked to make “necessary changes” to “address bias, improve viewpoint diversity and end ideological capture” in “programs and departments that fuel antisemitic harassment”. Unlike in the case of Columbia, there was no mention of specific programmes or departments.
But it would seem that the Harvard leadership knew what Trump meant. Harvard’s interim dean of social sciences David M Cutler dismissed the leadership of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. He justified his decision by claiming that there was “a lack of balance and multiple viewpoints in the Center’s programming on Palestine”. Harvard also severed its ties with the Palestinian Birzeit University in the occupied West Bank.
The ways in which the leaders of America’s elite universities capitulated to Trump’s demands demonstrated clearly that these institutions no longer view broadening the intellect and vision of future generations as their primary purpose. Indeed, they proved that these universities are no longer independent institutions of higher education committed to the betterment of humanity’s collective future, but merely businesses that provide a product (ie, a college degree) to a paying client (ie, the student). It is therefore not at all surprising that university leaders decided to abandon international students to their fates when they made the calculation that these students are costing the “business” more money (in federal funding) than they personally contribute in tuition fees.
The Trump administration’s attacks on foreign students over pro-Palestinian activism came alongside a simultaneous crackdown on Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, which had made American universities a bit more welcoming to foreign students from marginalised and minority backgrounds over the years. Taken together, these policies swiftly turned American campuses into hostile environments for foreign students, especially for those hailing from the Global South.
In view of all of this, it would seem that the lives of international students in the US have become simply too precarious to bear. There is no guarantee that the Trump administration’s crackdown would remain limited to pro-Palestinian speech and protests. A precedent has been set. Every international student in America today must accept that they may be abducted, detained and deported at any moment for attending a protest, writing an article or expressing a view that upsets the White House or its allies. They can even be detained and threatened with deportation due to the past employment of a relative. There seems to be no meaningful legal recourse or political respite in sight. Future international students would therefore be prudent to wonder: is a higher education in the United States worth the risk?
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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