International college students may be forced out of the U.S.
Absent an injunction, international students will not be allowed to stay in the country if their colleges go online
Alisha Jani knew she couldn’t go home to London after Stanford shut its campus in March when the coronavirus pandemic swept through the United States. She’s immuno-compromised, and she needed the doctors at Stanford Hospital close by. Getting
on a plane was unthinkable.
Now she’s not sure if she’ll be able to stay in the U.S. at all.
Jani is one of thousands of college students in the Bay Area reeling after this week’s announcement from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which will force international students to leave the country or transfer colleges if their schools offer only online classes in the fall.
Universities decried the move as “horrifying” amid numerous responses — on Wednesday, Harvard and MIT sued President Donald Trump’s adminstration to block the order and the University of California announced plans to do the same. On the ground, students in the Bay Area took to social media to brainstorm ways to stay.
Several institutions includ
ing Stanford, UC Berkeley, USC, Princeton, Cornell and Penn, also have announced intentions to file amicus briefs in support of the Harvard lawsuit. Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne announced in an email to students that he had sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security urging it not to go forward with the rule.
Most universities in the Bay Area, including Stanford and Berkeley, are conducting most if not all of their classes online in the fall. The California State University system was among the first university groups in the country to announce a move to primarily online classes in May. Harvard, Princeton and MIT announced similar plans for their fall semesters Monday, drawing the ire of Trump, who is pushing schools at all levels to reopen this fall.
For international students stranded in the U.S. after college campuses closed in March, the news is another bombshell after months of disruption. Waiting out the pandemic in friends’ homes, Airbnbs and the few campus dorms still open, they now face the potential of deportation and a host of challenges to continuing their education.
“We’ve heard from our students from Mongolia that they can’t go back to Mongolia right now, like they they’re not able to return home,” said Thomas Torres-Gil, director of international services at Berkeley City College. “And other students, maybe from Brazil, for instance, how safe is it for them to return to Brazil with what’s happening with COVID-19 there?
“And then you deal with the mental health issues that are going to come up,” he added. “We have students that are already struggling, that have been in isolation or following these quarantine rules since March, and they’re not as connected with their friends or the classroom or the campus community. And now we’re saying just pack up and go home.”
Confusion and uncertainty have slowed many universities’ official responses. Amid the silence, students and faculty took to social media on Tuesday to find solutions. Professors offered to set up in-person independent studies with individual students to get around the order.
A UC Berkeley student’s tweet went viral — then became the focus of conservative scorn — after she suggested developing single-unit, in-person courses to allow international students to remain on campus.
But Varun Jhunjhunwalla, a rising senior from Mumbai, India, studying electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley, feared that without university action, informal solutions could leave students vulnerable to further repercussions.
“Everyone’s internally trying to figure out loopholes for this, but my fear is that like five years down the line, (if) you’re applying for a green card or an H1B visa or something, they’ll look back and I don’t think the government will favorably look upon this,” he said.
Intervention also could come from the courts. Harvard and MIT’s lawsuit seeks a temporary restraining order that would prevent the government from enforcing ICE’s policy.
ICE’s order was designed to politically pressure schools to reopen and limit the presence of international students in the U.S., the lawsuit argues.
Chris Marsicano, an assistant professor at Davidson College in North Carolina who studies lobbying in higher education, is hopeful that advocacy will be successful. In addition to the impact on students affected by the order, he noted the importance of tuition revenue from foreign students and the educational benefits of having diverse classrooms.
“Having international students in the classroom in a college class makes all the students in the class better,” he said. “I’ve seen that as a professor, I’ve seen that as a college student.”
Until their universities can find a solution — either in the courts or in the classroom — students like Jhunjhunwalla and Jani can only wait and plan for the worst. And they don’t have much time.
“I don’t know what the timeline is going to be for the college actually making decisions because it’s less than a month (before) we have to decide what to do,” Jhunjhunwalla said. “Tickets are basically impossible to get.”
For Jani, who has been alone in her apartment since March, it has been a cruel conclusion to months of hardship.
Online classes were tedious, but she stayed the course to ensure she’d be on track to finish her degree in Earth Systems next year.
Now the uncertainty is paralyzing. Will she be forced to take a medical leave? Can she still graduate on time and avoid an additional year of tuition?
“For the past four months, I’ve just been sitting in a limbo,” she said.
Regardless of where Jani is able to stay next year, the past few days have left her shaken.
“We’ve been told that we’d be legal here … and we came here under the premise that we would be protected and that we would be safe,” she said. “To hear that like, that was a lie or something that could be taken away so quickly is just, it’s kind of terrifying.”