As a professor at Villanova University, I am blessed with the opportunity to interact with international students from all over the world. They take my physics classes. They study black holes in my research group. And they are in danger.
On Monday, ICE announced a new rule concerning online classes for international students, denying visas to students at universities that will be fully online and threatening international students with deportation if their institutions start in person but transition to fully online in the event of a campus outbreak. The new rule reverses a policy announced in March (in the wake of pandemic-related university closures) that allowed international students to take more online courses than usual “for the duration of the emergency.”
This rule is deliberately cruel and dangerous.
Using the pandemic as an excuse to go after law-abiding international students is callous. This sudden policy reversal comes on the heels of a pattern of cruelty in immigration policy and sentiment from the administration. This pattern includes tearing families apart at the southern border and the “arbitrary and capricious” rescission of DACA, which protects people brought to the US as children.
It includes seizing children in hospitals for deportation along with detaining and deporting veterans.
It includes large cuts to visas granted to Afghan and Iraqi citizens who aided U.S. forces during our 2001 and 2003 invasions. We should not forget the racist responses to the pandemic. This is not merely a matter of policy: we are seeing a spike in violent hate crimes and, this year, a wave of attacks against Asians and people of Asian descent. Now ICE turns its gaze toward my students, and these bright, hard-working people don’t deserve to be terrorized. But the threat of deportation for circumstances entirely beyond their control is undoubtedly terrifying.
And what is the purpose of this cruelty? Is it to reduce immigration? Is cruelty the point? Yes and yes. But it is also an election ploy, designed to pressure universities to reopen in full in the fall, despite the raging pandemic. This pressure is two-fold: moral and financial. Teaching physics is, for me, an act of love for my students. I love my students; I don’t want to see them terrorized or traumatized or deported.
This rule is a Catch-22: it is a danger the health and safety of our students if we return to campus in full, and it is now a danger to their health and safety if we don’t. Moreover, many universities depend on the billions of dollars in tuition and fees paid by international students. Over one million international students studied in the United States in 2017-18, and international students pay approximately three times more than in-state students at four-year public universities, which means that they effectively subsidize the cost of college for domestic students.
In a world where universities are already trying to juggle the human costs of reopening with the financial costs of closing (likely hundreds of millions of dollars for some institutions), pressuring universities on these fronts recklessly risks lives and hurts domestic students at a time when federal student aid is dropping. Making international students a pawn in this election-year gambit is unconscionable.
Harvard and MIT have sued the administration to block the rule from going into effect; other universities need to join this suit. In the meanwhile, my faculty colleagues and our representatives in congress need to stand up for our students and condemn this policy as the needless and dangerous cruelty that it is.
Joey Neilsen, PhD, is an assistant professor of physics at Villanova University.
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July 11, 2020 at 07:21PM
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