“I’m relieved,” Reyhan Ayas, a Princeton doctoral student from Turkey, told me just hours after Joseph R. Biden Jr. was declared the president-elect. “Recently, it felt like no matter how hard I studied or how hard I worked, it didn’t matter. I wouldn’t be welcome here.”
Relief is a dominant theme among the flood of messages I’ve received from international students since Biden’s election. Four years under President Trump has been difficult and dispiriting for many of them.
One of Trump’s first acts as president was to abruptly enact a travel ban that barred students and other visitors from a number of predominantly Muslim countries. On his first day in office, Biden says he will repeal it. Reportedly also on Biden’s Day 1 agenda: reinstating DACA, the Obama-era program that gave temporary legal protection to young immigrants, known as Dreamers, who had been brought to the United States illegally as children. Trump had ended the program and defied a Supreme Court order to reopen it.
But DACA is only a temporary fix, and Biden, who served eight years as President Barack Obama’s vice president, has pledged to give Dreamers a pathway to citizenship. Polls consistently show bipartisan support for DACA recipients, noted Miriam Feldblum, executive director of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration.
The president-elect has also called for overhauling the immigration system, expanding visas for skilled workers, and exempting recent graduates of Ph.D. programs in STEM fields from any caps.
“Foreign graduates of a U.S. doctoral program should be given a green card with their degree,” Biden’s campaign platform states. “Losing these highly trained workers to foreign economies is a disservice to our own economic competitiveness.”
Hopes for comprehensive immigration reform, however, could be off the table even before Biden takes office. Democrats lost ground in the U.S. House of Representatives, and Republicans may retain control of the Senate. Even if Democrats won run-off elections for two Senate seats from Georgia, their margin in the chamber could be too narrow to pass legislation as historically contentious as immigration reform.
Biden also faces a host of challenges, including surging coronavirus infections, a weak economy, and simmering racial divisions. It’s an open question where international-student issues will fall among those competing priorities. “The rollback of the harmful policies of the past four years won’t happen overnight,” Feldblum said, “and positive change won’t be fully realized without us staying engaged, focused, and determined.”
If legislative avenues are not promising, Biden could use presidential orders to set policy, much as Trump has done. Trump has put in place more than 400 executive actions or rules related to immigration, according to Stephen Yale-Loehr, a law professor at Cornell University. He “effectively built an invisible wall.”
Through executive action, Biden could undo a number of Trump policies, such as a ban on awarding emergency Covid-relief grants to international students. He also could use administrative orders as a way to promote his own agenda. The new president needs to give more certainty to students seeking to study in the United States, said Rachel Banks, senior director for public policy and legislative strategy at NAFSA: Association of International Educators.
“Those who choose to come to the U.S. to contribute to our campuses and our communities need to know that in choosing to do so there will be processes in place that are fair, which they can rely upon to make choices for themselves and their families,” she said.
But like Trump, Biden could face legal challenges to his authority. States and anti-immigration organizations could try to block presidential orders and rules through litigation, Yale-Loehr said, just as colleges, business groups, and others have done during Trump’s term.
It’s Not Over Til It’s Over
Even now, a tech-higher ed coalition is suing to block Trump’s new restrictions on H-1B visas that would make it more difficult for international graduates to stay in the United States and for colleges to hire foreign-born professors and researchers.
What’s more, nearly two and a half months remain before Inauguration Day, and Trump could still impose new policies that are unfriendly to international students.
Banks expressed concern that the Trump administration could make last-minute changes in optional practical training, a popular program that permits international graduates to gain work experience. And advocates are eyeing warily a proposed rule that would put strict time limits on student visas. If approved, it could be a “significant deterrent” to international students, Feldblum said, noting that regulatory changes are more difficult than presidential orders to undo.
More than 32,000 comments have been submitted on the draft regulation, and officials are supposed to read every one before releasing a final rule, so opponents could run out the clock. But Feldblum said she worries that the administration could push through the rule on its way out the door.
Still, Biden’s win — and Trump’s loss — cheered the international students I heard from, many of whom said they had felt under siege during the Trump administration, constantly concerned that a new policy could disrupt their studies or make it difficult to get a student visa. “I, at least, can stop being in combat mode,” said Mason Ng, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“I feel relaxed as, in the near future, I feel no unexpected ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] restrictions are going to be announced,” a San Jose State University student from India told me. While he said he was skeptical of Biden’s promise to reform the immigration system, “at least it won’t be under attack by Stephen Miller,” Trump’s chief adviser on immigration policy.
In particular, students said they believed that Biden’s election meant that optional practical training, or OPT, would no longer be in peril. The administration has constantly threatened to repeal or restrict OPT. A Ghanaian student at Boston College noted that it is always hard for international students to secure work placements, but “at least organizations and institutions would not have to deal with executive orders that frustrate employers.”
It wasn’t just policy changes that made international students feel unwelcome. “Being an international student in the U.S. during the Trump administration, it was easy for me to see right vs. wrong, but hard for me to feel like I could say something because I kept feeling out of place,” said Atharva Bhagwat, a student at Drexel University. “With Biden, I feel an increased sense of inclusion in American society and feel more valued than I did before.”
International-student advisers and other educators also expressed relief on their students’ behalf:
But Santiago Castiello-Gutiérrez, a doctoral candidate in higher education at the University of Arizona, questioned whether hostile attitudes toward outsiders would change overnight just because a new president was in office. “To sum it up, I have mixed feelings. I am relieved, happy, ecstatic to see Trump out of the White House. This country that has hosted me and my wife, and that regardless of our future will always be the birthplace of my son, deserved better,” he wrote me.
“At the same time,” he continued, “I am shocked that a whole lot of people were able to vote for him because they really support his agenda or because they were willing to tolerate his rhetoric and blatant actions of discrimination as long as they could keep their status quo.”
Ayas, the Turkish Ph.D. student, said the election’s outcome “gives me faith. Faith that I just won’t be deported because someone had a mood swing. Faith that I’m welcome.”
That the vice president-elect is Kamala D. Harris, a “daughter of immigrants who came here just like me, is a nice added bonus.”
This article was excerpted from Karin Fischer’s weekly newsletter, latitude(s). For regular insights into what matters in global education and why, subscribe here.
