How international students became a political issue
Not long after the attack on Ukraine began, a U.S. congressmen went on cable news to call for swift action to punish Russia. Among the penalties proposed by Rep. Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat: “Kick out” all Russian students studying at American colleges.
Swalwell’s idea to expel Russian students exploded on social media. Many people condemned it as discriminatory. But others, including another Democratic lawmaker, rallied around the proposal. “Send them packing NOW!” one user wrote in a tweet.
The Biden administration hasn’t followed up, even as it has imposed other diplomatic and economic sanctions on Russia and its government. Yet, Swalwell’s idea and its resonance with parts of the public could signal something potentially troubling for higher education: a new willingness to see international students, or at least some of them, through a political lens.
Typically, American attitudes toward international students have been warm. Eight in 10 people surveyed by the Pew Research Center last year said it was good for American colleges to enroll students from overseas.
To the extent that foreign students have been historically viewed as political actors, it was often as an instrument to spread American ideals abroad. In 1955 President Dwight D. Eisenhower told a group of international students visiting the White House that he hoped they would “promote the kind of understanding that you have gathered in the past year, that you will help to spread in your own countries when you go home.” (You can listen to archival footage in a joint Chronicle/APM Reports documentary on international students in America.)
That’s not to say that international students weren’t sometimes caught up in national-security concerns. I spoke with Ryan M. Allen and Krishna Bista, authors of a recent paper on surveillance of international students and scholars in the United States. There was some “Cold War distrust” of students from the Soviet Union or other Communist-governed countries as potential spies, Allen, an assistant professor of practice at Chapman University, said.
After protesters seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, the Carter administration ordered all Iranian students, then the largest group of international students on American campuses, to report to immigration officials. Those found not to be in compliance with visa rules or deemed to be a national-security threat were told to leave the country. Within five years, the number of Iranians studying in the United States had declined 70 percent.
But Swalwell’s idea didn’t distinguish among the roughly 5,000 Russian students in the United States. (The congressman later said he wanted to sanction students connected to Russian oligarchs.) In fact, there has been no suggestion that Russian students pose any security threat — just that their expulsion could be one more tool to punish and isolate Russia.
While Swalwell is a Democrat, openness to viewing international students as a political tool may have its roots in the presidency of a Republican, Donald J. Trump. Trump’s isolationist and sometimes xenophobic rhetoric had the broad effect of othering international students and other noncitizens for some Americans and sending a message that they didn’t belong.
Trump made students from China an explicit part of growing geopolitical tensions with China. He is alleged to have said all Chinese students are spies and considered prohibiting them from getting visas. When the mainland-Chinese-backed government imposed a new national-security law on Hong Kong, the Trump administration retaliated by ending the Fulbright Program, the flagship exchange program, for China and Hong Kong.
There are good reasons to be concerned about competition with China, of course. But the Trump administration’s singling out of Chinese students may also have informed Americans’ views: When Pew polled people about Chinese students in particular, more than half backed limiting their numbers at American colleges. One in five was strongly in support.
Could the tensions around Chinese, and now Russian, students suggest that the United States is moving toward the normalization of international students as a geopolitical tool? Given the college degree’s status as a premium American export, Allen told me that international students could continue to be a “foreign policy bargaining chip.”
What are the implications of a potential new politicalization of international students? Let me know what you think — I’m at karin.fischer@chronicle.com.
