Smart move
Trump administration right to rescind rule on international student visas.
The Trump administration made the right call Tuesday in rescinding a muchcriticized rule that would have forced international students at universities that have switched to all-online courses to either suddenly find a new school for the fall term or leave the country.
The policy, announced July 6 by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, threw the lives of the students into deep chaos. Colleges, too, were left scrambling as many were well into planning for a return that included a heavy load of online classes to help deal with the coronavirus pandemic.
Harvard and M.I.T. quickly filed the first of several lawsuits seeking a restraining order to stop the rule from being put into effect.
At a hearing on the case Tuesday afternoon in Boston, U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs confirmed that a settlement had been reached. The government, she said would rescind the policy, and return to the status quo of guidance issued by ICE in the spring that gave international students flexibility to take all their classes online and remain legally in the country with student visas.
No other explanation was immediately given, and a query by the editorial board went unanswered at the Department of Homeland Security press office. Perhaps that’s fitting for a policy that never made sense in the first place.
Asked last week if he saw any benefit coming from the rule, Rice President David Leebron was blunt.
“Not unless you see as a benefit excluding foreign students,” Leebron told the editorial board. “Not unless you see as a benefit making the United States a less desirable place to be for foreign students.”
Given the Trump administration’s harsh and often cruel positions on immigration, it wasn’t hard to interpret bad motives in the rule change. But these students are foreign guests the nation should be seeking and hoping to retain: well-educated, creative, ambitious and many paying full-freight tuition to attend college here.
In a separate conversation last week, Rice political science professor Paul Brace noted that nations around the world fiercely compete for just these students, with the United States’ long advantage coming under increasing pressure from nations in Europe and elsewhere, especially this year as the coronavirus is surging in the United States.
The students who attend our universities either find work in important and crucial fields in the United States or return to their home countries, often with a positive view of America and democracy.
More than a dozen technology companies, including, Google, Facebook and Twitter had declared support for the Harvard and M.I.T. lawsuit, arguing the ICE policy would harm their businesses.
“America’s future competitiveness depends on attracting and retaining talented international students,” the companies said in court filings.
Thank goodness that someone in the administration finally pulled the plug.
Whether they finally saw the light of reason, or just realized they were fighting a losing case, dropping the policy was the right move for the students, the colleges and the United States.