From USA Today:
“ICE: International students must
leave US if universities only offer online classes this fall”
The Trump administration
announced international students will have to leave the United States, or face
possible deportation, if the college or university they attend switches to
online-only classes in the fall because of the coronavirus pandemic. Similarly,
international students enrolled in colleges or universities offering only
online courses this fall will be barred from entering the U.S. The news comes
as some colleges and universities, including Harvard University, say they will
only offer online classes in the fall to protect students and staff from the
new coronavirus. The move, a reversal from the spring when international
students were allowed to remain in the U.S. to attend online-only classes,
could represent a major economic blow to colleges and universities as well as
local communities over the loss of tuition and other revenue from international
students who typically pay full price. It comes at a time when colleges and
universities are are already implementing layoffs, furloughs and other
cost-clotting measures to offset a loss in revenue amid the coronavirus
pandemic as more and more students opt to defer attending college. The move
drew immediate criticism from immigration advocates who say it is part of the
Trump administration's ongoing attempt to restrict legal and illegal immigration
into the U.S. The new policy, issued in a memo by Immigration and Customs
Enforcement, is "clearly designed to chase foreign students out of the
United States and to bar foreign students who were coming to the U.S. from
entering the country if the schools they are going to are only online,"
said Charles Kuck, an Atlanta-based immigration lawyer and representative of
the American Immigration Lawyers Association, an advocacy group. Kuck predicted
the ICE policy will push international students from U.S. schools to schools in
Canada in Europe. The policy memo comes
two weeks after President Donald Trump signed an executive order that will
suspend temporary visas for foreign workers until the end of 2020. Kuck said
the new policy is directly contrary to the memo that was sent out in March
allowing international students to remain in the U.S. while attending online
only classes because of the coronavirus pandemic. International students
generally must attend all of their courses in person and are prevented from
taking more than one online class a semester while studying in the U.S. In
March, however, ICE made an exception for international students attending
schools that had switched to online classes only amid the pandemic. Mabel Lui,
a rising senior at Scripps College, told USA TODAY she hoped ICE would continue
this policy. "If they did, it would
protect international students and give them more flexibility on whether they
want to conduct their studies in the U.S. or from home," said Lui, who is
from Hong Kong. "Instead, it seems like they are kicking students out of
the U.S. if their institution goes entirely online." This new guideline,
additionally, "fails international students," she said, because
"there’s a lack of clarity and ambiguity within the guidelines, and a lot
of questions unanswered." There were 872,214 international students
enrolled in the U.S. in 2018-19, the most recent year data was available,
according to the Institute for International Education, a State
Department-backed initiative that tracks international student enrollment in
the U.S and internationally. International students contributed $45 billion to
the U.S. economy in 2018, the institute said. Harvard president Larry Bacow
said in a statement that the guidance by ICE "imposes a deeply blunt, one
size fits all approach to a complex problem." Harvard currently has 10,285
international students from 155 countries, according to their website. The
school announced Monday that it plans to bring up to 40% of undergraduates back
to campus for the fall semester. The guidance "undermines the thoughtful
approach taken ... by so many institutions" to welcome back students in
response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Bacow said. Under the policy memo announced
Monday, international students enrolled at institutions that offer classes
entirely online in the fall will be given the option of switching to a school
that offers a hybrid of online and in-person classes or leaving the country and
taking online classes from their home countries, said Carissa Cutrell, acting
ICE deputy press secretary. Those who decide to return to their countries while
enrolled in all online classes in the U.S. will maintain their non-immigrant
visa status, Cutrell said. "So you can engage in remote learning as any
other student would at that school but you would just do it from home as the
other students would," Cutrell said. Universities and colleges rely on
international students for a significant share of their revenue. The move
requiring them to go home if only online courses are offered could put added
financial strain on U.S. colleges and universities, said Doris Meissner, senior
fellow and director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration
Policy Institute. "Universities and colleges are struggling enormously as
it is to figure out how to provide education under these pandemic circumstances
and so this adds a much greater burden," Meissner said.
"International students are so baked into the higher education,
environment and model that exists in this country." U.S. schools benefit
from international students in other ways beyond financial, including through
cultural exchanges, Meissner said. "They are an important part of the
student body. They make it possible for native-born students to meet people
from all over the world," Meissner said. "They create the possibility
for international students who come here and experience living in this country
and experience going to colleges, universities in this country at a really
formative time in their growing up." U.S. schools benefit from the research
conducted by international students, said Kuck, the immigration attorney. More
than 60% of STEM grads are foreign students, he said. The new policy
"could have a massive impact on the research and the extraordinary
developmental work done by universities and colleges in their Ph.D programs and
their post-doc programs," Kuck said. Allen Orr, a Washington, D.C.,
immigration attorney, fears the new ICE policy will pressure universities to
offer in-person classes just to avoid losing revenue from international
students, putting professors and students at risk of the coronavirus, which
causes the disease COVID-19. He also said it may not be practical for many
international students to take classes remotely from their own countries
because of huge time zone differences. Orr said the policy appeared intended as
a slap at China, which sends the highest number of international students to
the U.S., followed by India, South Korea and Vietnam. Trump frequently blames
China for the coronavirus pandemic. ICE's policy likely will send international
students and U.S. schools scrambling to figure out how to respond.
^ I am torn on this. On the one
hand I understand that if Colleges and Universities do not hold in-person
classes then International Students can do remote learning from anywhere (ie
their home country.) On the other hand I don’t want the US to become anti-International
Students and have ICE deport them. This really is one of those issues that can
not and should not be addressed with a “one size fits all” solution. It should
be done on a case-by-case basis (since
it depends on the International Student and what College or University they
attend.) ^
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