Congress must act to keep international students in US
The Trump administration has lobbed a hand grenade into American higher education.
Last week, the federal agency that issues visas to international students studying in the U.S. — Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE — unexpectedly announced that all international students studying here this fall must attend institutions with substantial on-campus instruction or be forced to leave the country.
Administration officials immediately acknowledged the purpose of the move was to force schools to hold classes on campus just as many have been leaning towards more remote instruction amid COVID-19 threats in student living spaces, among athletes or simply through inevitable travel.
Even before formally taking effect, this proposed rule has created chaos in the already frantic process of fall planning. If not reversed, it will cause irreparable harm to higher education in Ohio and the U.S. generally and especially to the hundreds of thousands of international students being used as pawns in a misguided political argument.
Under non-pandemic circumstances, the in-person visa rule makes sense. If a student can begin a program and take courses entirely remotely, there is no necessity to be physically in the United States and thus there is no need for a visa.
But the pandemic upended this logic, a reality appreciated by ICE this past spring. In March, as all U.S. schools quickly shifted to remote instruction, ICE suspended its usual restrictions, recognizing that forcing already-enrolled students to leave the country in the middle of the semester served no purpose, especially as most of these students anticipated returning to in-person instruction as soon as public health circumstances permitted it. Crucially, both students and schools expected this dispensation to last as long as the public health crisis did.
Why do international students matter? Part of the answer is admittedly financial: international undergraduates typically pay full tuition, effectively subsidizing student aid to domestic students and allowing many institutions to remain solvent. The ICE rule purposefully pits this financial reality against the public health precautions schools may need to adopt as the pandemic continues to worsen.
But international students are also integral members of the research community. Take Ohio’s public institutions. As of last fall, fully 11% of doctoral and masters students at our 13 public universities were international students, with 16% of the students at both the University of Cincinnati and Wright State, 14% at Ohio University, 13% at Bowling Green State University, 11% at Kent State University and 10% at Ohio State University (whose size makes it second only to Cincinnati in absolute numbers). Taken together, this is more than 5,000 students.
At my own home of Case Western Reserve University, roughly 1,500 graduate students are enrolled across our many programs, with students researching in laboratories, treating patients in hospitals and studying business, law and social work. These students are a part of our community and we would simply not be able to operate without them.
The choice is not between having schools open or not. All institutions are planning on opening this fall and welcoming students back to classes. Faculty, staff, administrators and students have been working nonstop since the pandemic began to adjust and adapt, ensuring that faculty continue teaching classes, researchers continue running labs, and students continue to receive all the services and resources we can safely deliver.
When it comes to this fall, the only question is how much instruction will happen in person and how much remotely, a question that will be answered only by public health constraints and the resources of individual institutions.
One solution is through the courts, and last Wednesday, MIT and Harvard jointly filed a lawsuit asking the rule be declared illegal. Schools across the country immediately joined briefs in support.
But we should not have to wait for a judge — and the possibility of time-consuming appeals — to allow this uncertainty to persist with the fall semester just weeks away. Congress must immediately require ICE to issue and maintain visas for international students so long as the current public health emergency persists.
Normally, it can take years for a university to make even modest changes to its operations. This summer, we have been forced to redesign nearly every aspect of higher education, whether it’s instruction, athletics, research, housing or dining.
In this period of crisis, we need support from our government, not one more obstacle.
Peter A. Shulman is an associate professor of history at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.