‘Cascading Consequences’
Since then, the government has proposed more regulations: capping foreign students’ time in the U.S. at four years with an unclear process for renewal, and further constricting the issuance of H1-B visas for skilled workers.
“We have to anticipate if there’s a second Trump administration, more of those types of policies will be put forward,” said Rachel Banks, Nafsa’s senior director for public policy and legislative strategy. Biden, in contrast, is “definitely more open to immigration, more open to America being that welcoming beacon.”
The proposal to limit stays drew more than 32,000 comments in a just a few weeks with schools and students lining up against it.
“The proposed rule would create negative and cascading consequences for U.S. research, scholarship and training,” Harvard President Lawrence Bacow wrote in one such letter.
Many universities use H1-B visas to hire professors and scholars to educate American students and conduct research. To head off the proposal, colleges joined the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other trade associations in suing the Department of Homeland Security and the Labor Department. They accused the government of trying to use the pandemic as a pretext to curtail immigration.
It’s so disruptive to U.S. innovation it could’ve been written by a foreign government, said Stuart Anderson, executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy, a non-partisan research organization focused on issues related to globalization. “The overall policy does not serve our national interest,” he said. “It’s simply meant to keep people out of the country, no matter how skilled.”
Homeland Security has said limits are needed on stays because it has become too difficult to monitor whether students are complying with the terms of their entry into the U.S. “The department is currently reviewing comments received during the public comment period and will take them into consideration when drafting the final rule,” a spokesman said in an emailed statement.
Still, even a Biden victory may not help colleges attract students for the next school year, given that many applicants will make decisions before January’s presidential inauguration.
“It grieves me that we have not been at all welcoming to international students in terms of the national political climate,” said Audrey Smith, vice president of enrollment at Smith College, a liberal arts college of about 2,500 undergrads. “They bring so much to our institutions and our country.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.