Even in Limbo, Trump’s Travel Ban Reverberates

I f you’re an international applicant to Wayne State University, chances are you might have heard directly from it recently, a personal note to reassure you. We want you to know that this is a diverse, open institution. We want you to know we want you here.

Spring usually brings nerves and nail-biting to students awaiting an admissions verdict. But this year, it may be colleges like Wayne State that are most on edge. The source of that anxiety can be summed up in two words: travel ban.

The late-January decision by the Trump administration to bar travelers, including students, from seven, later amended to six, predominantly Muslim countries has cast a pall of uncertainty over the admissions season. Though the ban on the issuance of visas, originally intended to last 90 days, has been put on hold by a federal court, it is already being felt in far-reaching ways. It’s unclear whether students from the affected countries — Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen — will be able to get visas to study in the United States next fall.

Never mind next fall — it’s hard to know what visa policy will be next month, next week, the next day.

The presidential executive order has also unsettled international students and scholars already on American campuses. Despite the court stay, many are afraid to travel, scared that they could be blocked from returning to the United States and unable to resume their studies or work.

And the reverberations could be felt beyond the countries named in the order. Separate from the travel ban, the administration has ordered stepped-up vetting of all visa applicants to the United States. In a recent worldwide survey, one in three prospective students said they had less interest in studying in the United States because of the current political climate. Forty percent of all American colleges report a drop in international applications this spring.

“We are broadcasting a message globally,” says Farshad Fotouhi, dean of the College of Engineering at Wayne State, “that you are not welcome.”

Wayne State may have more to lose than most colleges. It enrolls more students from the affected countries than all but 10 other American universities.

But the university is also emblematic of American higher education. The past decade has seen unparalleled growth in interest in studying in the United States from abroad; international enrollments have nearly doubled in that time. American colleges have come to rely on international students for the diversity they bring, as well as the dollars. According to estimates by Nafsa: Association of International Educators, foreign students at Wayne State contribute $78.5 million to the local economy and support 1,123 jobs.

A sudden, and perhaps even sharp, decline in international students would be a major reversal.

At Wayne State, they’re working overtime to try to prevent a falloff in applications from turning into a decrease in enrollments. For educators like Ahmad Ezzeddine, associate vice president for educational outreach and international programs, it’s a fine line to walk. They need to acknowledge and address the alarm that the travel ban — and the antiglobalist sentiment that President Trump channeled in winning election — is raising overseas.

At the same time, they don’t want to seed fears in attempting to allay them. Since World War II, the only real interruption to otherwise unbroken growth in international enrollments came after the 2001 terrorist attacks, and even then, the largest one-year drop was just 2.4 percent.

“The optimist in me thinks this is temporary,” Mr. Ezzeddine says of the ban. “But you can’t help but be concerned.”

W hen Aida Jamali heard the news of the travel ban, her first thought was that she would have to leave the country, immediately. (The Chronicle is referring to Ms. Jamali by her first name and her mother’s maiden name because she is concerned about the potential impact of speaking publicly about her experience on her visa status.)

The executive order was announced late on a Friday afternoon in January, just as offices at Wayne State and on campuses across the country were closing for the weekend. Panicky and unsure where to turn for guidance, Ms. Jamali, a 27-year-old doctoral student, made her way to friend’s house, where a group of fellow Iranian students had gathered.

Although they were together, all of them were glued to their phones, refreshing news sites, scrolling through Twitter, and exchanging messages — often rumors — with friends around the country. Of the nations included in the ban, Iran sends by far the most students to the United States, more than 12,000.

“Everyone was posting something,” Ms. Jamali says, “and you didn’t know what was right and what was wrong.”

She is tiny, with a fine-boned, almost fragile prettiness that harbors intense determination and drive. She sought to study abroad not just for the academic experience but also to prove her independence. She is in her fifth year at Wayne State, where she earned a master’s degree before staying on for a Ph.D. in chemical engineering.

One of the things that Ms. Jamali has enjoyed the most about her graduate studies has been the opportunity to work as a teaching assistant. She feels a surge of pride and excitement when one of her students has a breakthrough with difficult material. Teaching has also given her the chance to get to know Americans, who are in short supply among the university’s largely international graduate-student population in engineering.

She likes how open and friendly Americans are: “If you smile at them on the street, they don’t think you’re crazy.” In Iran, she says, people might.

Suddenly, though, with the announcement of the travel ban, she felt uncomfortable being around other students, worried that they would ask her where she was from, that they would think that she didn’t belong here. “I felt like I did something wrong,” she says. “It felt shameful.”

By text, her father offered words of encouragement. What challenges you makes you stronger, he wrote.

He had given her the same advice the previous summer, when she had run into a problem with her student visa.

Ms. Jamali’s adviser was organizing a conference in China, and he had encouraged her to attend. It would be good professional development, he told her, and since she would already be out of the country, she could stop in Tehran.

It had been four years since Ms. Jamali had seen most of her family. When she came to the United States, she had been issued only a single-entry visa, meaning that if she left the country at any point during her studies, she would have to reapply for a new one. (Typically, international students have multiple-entry visas, allowing them to come and go for vacations, research trips, and study abroad, but such visas are rarely given to students from certain countries, including Iran.)

It took 57 days of waiting to get a new visa, because Ms. Jamali’s application was subject to additional screening — as is often the case for Iranian students. At times she feared that she wouldn’t be able to return to Detroit. “I have my life here, my apartment, my research,” she says. “I thought maybe I would never see my boyfriend again.”

Because of the stress, she couldn’t fully enjoy the visit.

Now, with the travel ban, she was again plunged into uncertainty. She and her adviser were about to submit a research paper, and as they exchanged revisions, she tried to keep her feelings in check. Still, she found herself “crying a little bit and working a little bit.”

“It felt like a disaster happening,” she says.

On the Monday after the travel ban’s announcement, after a weekend barrage of phone calls and emails from rattled students, Wayne State’s Office of International Students and Scholars was in emergency-response mode. It sent out an informational message to those affected directly by the order and organized a Q&A session for all international students. The meeting was scheduled to go for an hour, says Kelli E. Dixon, the office’s director. It lasted more than three.

Like Ms. Jamali, many students were afraid that they would have to quit their studies and leave the country. Others fretted that the executive order might merely be an opening salvo. Wayne State’s 2,300 international students come from a variety of nations, some with Muslim-majority populations, and many worried that their home countries would be added to the list.

One woman’s mother had told her that, to keep safe, she should remove her hijab, the scarf that observant Muslim women wear to cover their hair. Another student had heard that President Trump wanted all Muslims to wear badges identifying them. A third student said he thought he would have to drop out of his Ph.D. program to be with his fiancée in Iran.

Ms. Dixon says the students’ apprehensions went far beyond the Trump administration’s relatively terse executive order. The shadowy perceptions, the what-ifs, she says, can be more terrifying than reality.

For Ms. Jamali, the meeting helped calm her anxiety. She would be able to stay and finish her degree, which she expects will take another year. But she worries that other Iranian students, with ambitions like hers, might not have the same opportunity.

She had another question for the international office: Was it OK for her, as a foreign student, to take part in a campus protest? She was assured it was.

On a blustery day, she joined a throng of students in front of the library to call on Mr. Trump to rescind the travel ban. The rally had been organized on short notice by several campus groups, and slowly, its numbers swelled as passers-by stopped to show their support.

Ms. Jamali spotted fellow international students in the crowd. She saw Americans, too, and it heartened her. “I realized,” she says, “that they are with us.”

I f the executive order was jarring for Ms. Jamali and other international students, Mohammad Mehrmohammadi’s predicament started long before President Trump signed the travel ban.

For 15 months, the assistant professor of biomedical engineering has been in legal limbo, waiting for his green card. His H-1B visa, the temporary work permit for skilled foreigners, will expire in May.

The travel ban has raised new doubts about whether, as an Iranian, he’ll be able to stay in the country where he has studied and worked for more than a decade. After all, his current troubles began under the relatively more open Obama administration. He’s unsure what to expect from President Trump.

Mr. Mehrmohammadi knows other professors and postdocs who have gotten their green cards in a matter of weeks, and no reason has been given for the delay in his case. Why him? Is it his research? He uses lasers and ultrasound imaging to develop more effective ways to screen for breast cancer and to measure the oxygen levels of infants during difficult deliveries. Important work, to be sure, but neither controversial nor classified.

The rest of his activities seem equally unlikely to raise any flags. In what little free time he has, he likes to go hiking with his wife, Maryam.

Although he has a document permitting him to travel, he’s afraid to, anxious that if he leaves the United States, he might not be allowed to return. He’s not alone in this; despite the federal court’s stay, many international students and faculty members have remained close to campus, worried they could get caught up in the travel ban’s latest twist.

Mr. Mehrmohammadi turns down invitations to international conferences. He has important collaborators just across the Detroit River in Canada, at the University of Windsor, but he doesn’t visit their labs. Without permanent residency, he can’t apply for the federal grants that are the lifeblood of scientific research.

In the long term, Mr. Mehrmohammadi worries that such restrictions could damage his academic career and chances for tenure.

So he has begun to contemplate what was once unthinkable: leaving America. More than any other nationality, recent doctoral recipients from Iran say they hope to stay and work in the United States after earning their degrees here. But Mr. Mehrmohammadi knows he is not alone in considering positions in other countries.

Anecdotally, universities in Canada with job openings say they have seen an uptick in highly qualified applicants from Iran and elsewhere, candidates whose first choice just months ago would have probably been the United States. Wayne State, in fact, recently hosted several foreign-born, American-educated finalists for a position at the University of Windsor who did not want to risk crossing the border for an interview.

A drying-up of the international talent pipeline would be disastrous for programs like Mr. Mehrmohammadi’s, in which the majority of his colleagues are foreign-born.

The professor isn’t giving himself a deadline, but at a certain point, if his green card doesn’t come through, he says he will have to start looking for jobs outside the United States: in Canada, in Australia, in Europe. (Wayne State has filed the paperwork to extend his H-1B, so he is able to remain in the country for now.)

One place he probably won’t go is back to Iran. Much of the high-tech equipment he uses in his experiments isn’t available there. The constraints on science in Iran are a big part of why he came to the United States in the first place — as a master’s-degree student, he couldn’t even download papers from an international engineering database because of military, scientific, and trade sanctions against the country.

If he left the United States, Mr. Mehrmohammadi might have to restart some of his work. But he’d be free from the shadow of his legal status and able to travel — to conferences, for research, on vacation. He has watched enviously over the years as friends and colleagues have taken advantage of last-minute airfares to jet off to places like Mexico. “Maybe I’d never go to Mexico,” he says, “but I want to feel like I could.”

Most important, he’d be able to visit Iran, where his family still lives. His parents are growing older, and although Mr. Mehrmohammadi has two sisters, in Persian culture it is the son’s responsibility to care for them.

Still, he hopes it doesn’t come to that, to the point where he has to choose between his family by blood and his academic one, between the country where he was born and the one he has chosen. He likes his colleagues and enjoys his work. America has become his home, and, despite the political rhetoric, it still feels welcoming. Several times since the election, he says, he and his wife, who wears a hijab, have been approached in the shopping mall by strangers offering words of support.

Every day, then, Mr. Mehrmohammadi hopes for his green card. Every day, he tries not to grow discouraged. “I feel like I’m in debt to this country for giving me an education,” he says. “But at the same time, things like this really eat at your energy.”

A hmad Ezzeddine has been in this spot before.

When he took the job leading international programs at Wayne State, a decade ago, its international-student numbers were plummeting. The university had once ranked among the top 25 in foreign-student enrollment. Now it was hemorrhaging students.

The reason: Detroit was in free fall. Two of the Big Three car companies, a major draw for international students because of the promise of internships and even jobs after graduation, had declared bankruptcy. So, too, had the city itself, which had run out of money to provide even basic services like collecting garbage or policing the streets. The federal government bailed out the automakers. And the university stepped in, its officers patrolling beyond the campus boundaries into the Midtown neighborhood.

Still, the damage had been done. Without the lure of auto-industry jobs, international students stopped applying. Photos of a hollowed-out Detroit were broadcast globally, leaving parents afraid for their children’s safety. In a period when many American colleges were experiencing record growth in international enrollments, the number of foreign students at Wayne State tumbled by more than 6 percent.

Now Mr. Ezzeddine, who first came to Wayne State in 1989 as a young computer-science student from Lebanon, finds himself in this position again, except this time the challenges may be bigger and broader than Wayne State and Detroit.

If there’s one area on campus that’s likely to feel the full force of any drop in international enrollments, it’s engineering. Three-quarters of graduate students in engineering at Wayne State are from overseas, and applications to those programs are down 40 percent from this time last year. It’s too soon to know how many students will accept the university’s offers of admission, but early signs aren’t promising.

Nationally, an informal survey of engineering schools by Science magazine this winter found a widespread decline in applications from abroad; one dean called the drop-off “precipitous.”

At the doctoral level, a slowdown from Iran in particular could have an outsized impact. Though Iran is just the 11th-largest source of international students at American colleges, only three other countries account for more Ph.D. students. Of the 79 Iranian students at Wayne State, most are doctoral candidates, and almost all are engineers.

Already the travel ban has left its mark. One promising Iranian Ph.D. student was preparing to come to Detroit to begin his studies when the executive order was announced. Without a valid visa, he was stranded, and the faculty member whose lab he was supposed to join has had to start from scratch to recruit a new student with the right skills and research interests.

Given the time and effort it takes to recruit doctoral students, and the crucial role they play in research teams, Mr. Fotouhi, the engineering dean, says he fears that faculty members will pass over applicants from Iran and the other five countries included in the travel ban because of uncertainty over their visa status.

But the broader apprehensions about anti-foreigner backlash sparked by the travel ban could ripple far beyond those countries.

Indeed, it’s India, not Iran, that’s likeliest to keep Mr. Ezzeddine up at night. Second to China nationally, it is the largest source of international students at Wayne State. Renewed interest from Indian students is a major reason for Wayne State’s rebound from its auto-bailout lows. Last year alone, Indian enrollment there climbed 17 percent.

But it remains to be seen whether Indian families will continue to feel safe sending their children to study in the United States after an Indian engineer (and American university graduate) was shot and killed in Kansas, apparently because he was mistaken for an Iranian.

Of perhaps even greater concern may be the belief — widely reported as fact in the Indian media — that the travel ban is just the first step by the Trump administration to tighten American borders and close off the country’s job market to outsiders. Getting on-the-job experience is paramount for Indian students, and they fear that the president could take steps to reduce the availability of high-skilled work visas or to roll back a program that allows science and engineering students to stay and work in the United States for up to three years after graduation.

Indian students’ paycheck priorities could affect the university’s bottom line. The majority of Wayne State’s Indian enrollments are at the master’s-degree level, meaning that they pay their own way. Tuition and fees for a full-time engineering student add up to about $30,000 annually.

Mr. Ezzeddine is trying to identify other promising markets, should numbers from India and Iran decline sharply. He and Mr. Fotouhi recently traveled to Brazil, but one possible source might be right here at home: Ninety-five percent of undergraduate engineering students are Americans, and applications this year increased by double digits. If more local students could be persuaded to pursue a master’s degree, it could help offset potential international losses.

“Our current budget,” Mr. Fotouhi says bluntly, “heavily depends on enrollment.”

A s Wayne State’s president, M. Roy Wilson has to keep an eye on the bottom line.

But it wasn’t dollars and cents he was considering when he sent a message to the campus expressing concern about the travel ban’s impact. He was thinking of the potential costs to the university in other ways, in terms of diversity, of openness, of the opportunity to meet people from other countries and different cultures.

“Engaging with the world, and each other,” he wrote in the January 30 letter, “is integral to our mission of creating and advancing knowledge [and] preparing a diverse student body to thrive.”

Mr. Wilson had a particularly personal view of what was at stake. When his wife, Jacqueline, started a program four years ago to combat homelessness among Wayne State students, her first volunteer was a student from Syria, named Selma. Both of the Wilsons got to know Selma well; an outstanding student, she eventually became head of all the organization’s volunteers.

Across the country, many college presidents, of course, spoke out against the travel ban. Some even joined lawsuits challenging its constitutionality.

At Wayne State, the Student Senate joined Mr. Wilson in taking a public stand on the executive order, passing a resolution in support of the university’s international students.

The possibility of being detained at the border spooked some students who, because of Wayne State’s location, regularly commute from their homes in Canada. One medical student with Canadian and Iranian citizenship was visiting family in Toronto when the ban went into effect.

The language in the original ban did not make it clear whether dual citizens, or those born in the affected countries with permanent residency in the United States, would be affected by the ban, and the Trump administration contradicted itself on whether they were included.

Frightened that he might not be able to return to the United States and his studies, the Canadian-Iranian student cut short his trip. Though he was able to get back without a problem, the episode made student leaders realize just how close to home the executive order hit for many of their classmates.

Anthony Eid, the senate’s president, says the resolution, which also called on the university to take steps to assist affected students, passed unanimously, with almost no debate. “Our diversity,” he says, “is what makes us.”

Indeed, Wayne State’s student body is diverse by a number of measures, reflective of the city around it: One in three undergraduates is from a racial minority, and half of all students qualify for Pell Grants, the federal aid program for needy students. Many are the children of immigrants. Mr. Eid’s mother is from Iraq, his father from Lebanon.

Mr. Wilson, too, can trace his belief in inclusiveness to childhood. A military brat, he grew up around the world, particularly in Japan, and carries himself with the square-shouldered posture of a soldier. “Getting an understanding of different cultures, of how different people think, was enriching,” he says. “I want that for our students.”

Fostering diversity, including the goal that students graduate with global exposure and skills, is a big part of Wayne State’s strategic plan. Yet just 500 of the commuter school’s students go abroad each year, fewer than 3 percent of all undergraduates.

Overseas students are likely to continue to be an important means of internationalizing the campus. They, too, gain a deeper understanding of America after studying here, Mr. Wilson says.

Before the ban, the university was inching closer to its goal of having 10 percent of the student body be from other countries. At one point, back when Detroit was making news for all the wrong reasons, international enrollment had dropped as low as 5 percent, but for the past five years, there has been steady growth. After coming so close, Mr. Wilson says, it would be unfortunate to backslide.

Sentiment on campus, however, is not uniform. Some students would like Mr. Wilson to go further in challenging the policies of the Trump administration, such as declaring Wayne State a sanctuary campus. But others support the travel ban. A student emailed Mr. Wilson, complaining that one of his professors had been too outspoken in criticizing the executive order and in offering public support for those students affected.

Mr. Wilson took time in responding. Wayne State, he wrote, stands with all of its students, no matter where they’re from: Iran, Syria, America.

The travel ban cuts against the values of the university, of higher education, he says. “Sometimes things are too important not to take a stand.”

Karin Fischer writes about international education, colleges and the economy, and other issues. She’s on Twitter @karinfischer, and her email address is karin.fischer@chronicle.com.