The Trump administration keeps shifting the battleground over international students’ visas as it pulls more and more government levers to crack down on the group.
What started with allegedly combatting campus antisemitism by going after pro-Palestinian activists has escalated into attempts to take away all of Harvard University’s foreign students, threats to cap international student admissions at 15 percent at all colleges and Secretary of State Marco Rubio announcing he would “aggressively revoke visas” for Chinese students.
The moving goalposts are difficult to navigate for students and universities and could do long-term damage to a process that experts say brings minds and money to U.S. shores while exporting American values and culture.
“I think he has multiple legitimate motives for taking the actions he’s taking, and that those motives are at least in some ways connected. There’s a general theme that underlies them. And the general theme is that that Trump appears concerned that a segment, not the average, but a segment of international students are coming for political purposes, not educational or scientific ones,” said Jay Greene, senior research fellow in the Center for Education Policy at the right-leaning Heritage Foundation.
President Trump has made cracking down on immigration one of his signature agenda items, though the moves against student visas in particular started off comparatively small, with the administration going after pro-Palestinian protesters it accuses of supporting Hamas and posing a threat to U.S. foreign policy.
But then Trump’s more specific animus toward Harvard found a new outlet, with the Department of Homeland Security trying to take away the university’s ability to enroll international students and ordering those now at the school — some 27 percent of its student body — to transfer. Harvard quickly won an emergency court ruling to block that order.
Meanwhile, the administration on Tuesday ordered U.S. embassies and consulates around the world to halt student visa interviews while it weighs increased screening and vetting procedures.
And then Trump on Wednesday floated a “cap of maybe around 15 percent” for the portion of campus populations made up of foreign-born scholars, while Rubio that same day announced a crackdown on Chinese student visas in particular.
“All these policy actions and statements are interconnected,” said Miriam Feldblum, president and CEO of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration. “So some are directed towards students but what you also see is that other kind of levers are directed towards institutions.”
Feldblum said the combination of surprising policies and threats is “causing chaos and uncertainty and volatility” and schools “do not have the tools or the information or the partnership with the government” to be able to comply with directives while also supporting students.
“We are in a situation in which significant damage has already been done, and we can see outlooks for greater chaos in the future,” she added.
The Hill has reached out to the White House for further comment.
“We have people [who] want to go to Harvard and other schools, [but] they can’t get in because we have foreign students there,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “But I want to make sure that the foreign students are people that can love our country. We don’t want to see shopping centers exploding. We don’t want to see the kind of riots that you had.”
“And I’ll tell you what, many of those students didn’t go anywhere. Many of those students were troublemakers caused by the radical left lunatics in this country,” he added.
Harvard has shown it is possible to freeze the administration’s moves in court, at least temporarily, but the international scholar system is a delicate one, and many are already reconsidering plans to study in the U.S.
“If it doesn’t get reversed quickly enough, it can mean that for so many students who have already accepted offers, that they may not be able to come in time to start the fall semester. So, this is an urgent matter for the administration to address,” Feldblum said.
A court filing from Harvard’s director of immigration services said some foreign students are looking to transfer and others declined offers to go to Harvard over the Trump administration’s attacks. The filing added that colleges in other countries are already stepping in to recruit the scholars, warning of a potential brain drain.
Greene said he doesn’t expect the Trump administration to stop until universities can “demonstrate that they were willing and able to enforce their rules regarding misconduct in a uniform way, applying to all students and readily reporting misconduct by international students to the administration.”
“The reason why the Trump administration demanded disciplinary records is because they had reason to believe that students were not being punished in normal ways for fear that they would be deported, for fear that they would have their visas revoke,” he said, citing a report from a House committee that found some students referred for disciplinary action were not suspended.
“And so, that’s unusual, and that suggests that perhaps they were behaving as sanctuary city and concealing this behavior from the federal government,” he added.
Others fear the Trump administration has already indicated where it may go next, with his nominee to lead the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services saying he wants to end the optical practical training program, which allows foreign students to work in the U.S. after graduation.
“That would be devastating, not only for the international students and part of their educational journey and experience in the U.S., but for thousands of employers across the country and communities. This would be devastating in terms of the economic contributions that international students make as they’re working for U.S. companies,” Feldblum said.
