US' student visa pause makes no sense and does real harm

This is a season of anxiety for international students in the US, who find themselves demonized by the Trump administration as it devises new ways to limit their numbers.

The latest tactic came in a diplomatic cable from Secretary of State Marco Rubio to US embassies and consulates abroad, ordering a halt to the student visa interviews necessary to enter the country.

The reason? An as-yet-undevised policy to further scrutinize the social media histories of students in a search for … what exactly? No one seems quite sure.

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It was President Donald Trump who, in his first term, initiated screenings of student visa applicants’ social media histories, looking primarily for terrorists or terrorist sympathizers. The policy became one of the few that was maintained by President Joe Biden when he succeeded Trump.

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In April of this year, Homeland Security said it also would begin monitoring international students’ social media for evidence of antisemitism. That raised alarms among free-speech advocates because of the administration’s tendency to conflate opposition to the Israeli government’s policies or the war in Gaza with antisemitism. At the time, Edward Ahmed Mitchell, national deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a statement that the administration was “pursuing witch hunts into American colleges.”

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Now comes another amorphous, arbitrary standard that, even before implementation, is sending shock waves through an already traumatized international student community.

Rubio’s “pause” on new student visa interviews will last until his department issues “guidance on expanded social media vetting for all such applicants,” according to the cable. It does not specify what might disqualify an applicant or what the State Department will be looking for. It does not even say when the guidelines will be available nor when new interviews will resume, although on Thursday the department announced a pilot program to vet Harvard University’s visa applicants for antisemitism. That cable advised those doing the vetting to consider “whether the lack of any online presence, or having social media accounts restricted to ‘private’ or with limited visibility, may be reflective of evasiveness.”

That is an unconscionable level of opacity for students whose biggest sin is wanting to come to the US to further their education and who have a limited window in which to pursue such opportunities.

Recall that the last administration-announced “pause” was to the US Refugee Admissions Program back in January. That was four months ago. It’s still in effect.

Bizarrely, Rubio’s decision even includes J-1 visa applicants for the State Department’s own Exchange Visitor Program. Often those relate to cultural visits, summer work or other education-related travel.

But that program also includes physicians and International Medical Graduates, who often serve in teaching hospitals and medically underserved rural areas or other hard-to-staff roles. These J-1 applicants already run a substantial gauntlet of vetting just to reach the interview stage.

Finally, there is the conundrum of how the State Department will implement this enhanced vetting even as it plans huge cuts to its footprint and workforce.

Trump earlier this year signed an executive order axing budgets at embassies and consulates. In April, CNN reported that according to internal State Department documents, up to 30 embassies and consulates overseas could be closed and others could see reductions.

Those kinds of cuts are at odds with the plan to increase the vetting of international students, who already go through exhaustive checks in their attempts to enter the US.

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers is right when he says that “all this is just going to scare people away from the United States, people that might come here, get an education, stay here, make some really important progress in some area … It’s just all wrong-headed.”

Wisconsin alone had more than 15,000 international students in the 2023-24 school year, according to a study by NAFSA, the National Association of International Educators. That stimulated the state economy by an estimated $541 million. Multiply that by every state and it’s easy to see the damage from restricting foreign students won’t only be felt by colleges and universities.

Fanta Aw, executive director of NAFSA, said in a statement that international students “already represent the most tracked and vetted category of nonimmigrants in the United States,” calling the pause unnecessary and the additional scrutiny “a poor use of taxpayer dollars.”

And the State Department is unlikely to draw the line at students. Rubio could also easily crack down on business visas, tourist visas, H-1B work visas and others.

Despite the fear fostered by the Trump administration’s policies, the intellectual richness of an American education remains a potent draw. And while Trump may be happy to set the bar close to zero for foreign students, few outside his MAGA base would agree. The benefits the students bring are indisputable, both in talent and economic impact.

The swelling numbers of international students over the last few decades affirm this nation’s primacy, spreading American values through “soft” diplomatic power. America First cannot become America Alone, isolated and parochial. Whether they remain here or return to their native countries, we should hope these international students remember their time here fondly — not with fear.