Jack Masliah is a senior at Northeastern University and an international student from Mexico. Yelyzaveta Zablotska is a sophomore at Wellesley College and an international student from Ukraine. Leo Gerdén is a senior at Harvard and an international student from Sweden.
Largely lost in the Trump administration’s attempted crackdown on international students are the reasons why students are drawn to the United States in the first place. Many come to pursue a world-class education; others for career opportunities after graduation. For us, the draw is the ability to dream about our futures — about innovating and creating, about being free to think and explore the unknown.
International students are natural dreamers: We leave our homes, families, and languages in pursuit of a greater future. Yet despite the powerful forces that draw us in, the opportunity to study here comes with its share of difficulties.
Our presence in the United States relies on a meticulously maintained mountain of documentation, near-constant communication with our universities’ offices of global services about our compliance with rules and regulations, and a tremendous dedication to staying on top of our academic work.
We also understand that we may face greater consequences for the same infractions than our American-born peers. But we have continued moving forward, true to our commitment to the American ideal that a better future is always attainable.
Now that ideal is being threatened. The Trump administration’s attempt to revoke Harvard’s ability to enroll international students, as well as the across-the-board pause on all new student visa interviews, is an affront to all 1.1 million international students in this country, and highlights how easily we can be stripped of the opportunity to fulfill our dreams.
This decision was made with little understanding of the love international students have for this country or the benefits we provide by being here in the first place. This country may not have been our birthplace, but we contribute to it — academically, economically, and culturally — because it is our second home.
If we are pushed away, the loss will not only be ours; it will be a loss of the tens of billions of dollars we contribute to the economy and to the hundreds of thousands of American jobs we support. It will be a loss for American students, who will find increases in tuition costs and a lack of diverse perspectives in their courses, and for prestigious institutions, which will be stripped of much of what made them world-class to begin with.
Today, international students are no longer just dealing with inconveniences and anxieties brought on by our status as non-citizens; we are being used as political leverage in an effort to bring American universities to heel. As a consequence, some prospective international students are abandoning their dreams of pursuing higher education in the United States altogether.
Many in the United States are steering clear of public demonstrations and avoiding drawing too much attention to what once was a source of pride — our foreign identity. Across the country, international students are consulting immigration lawyers in an attempt to decipher what we can and cannot say, what we may and may not post on our social accounts, and how we should or should not act.
Although we have always been aware that the government may screen our social media, many of our peers are now self-censoring to a much larger extent — especially following news that the Trump administration has ordered consulates across the globe to conduct social media screenings of visa applicants seeking to enroll in Harvard University.
Many are removing opinion pieces published in our school newspapers, and making contingency plans in case our visas are revoked, or worse — in case Immigration and Customs Enforcement shows up at our doors. Our universities are warning us to cancel planned flights home over fears that we will not be let back into the country we worked so hard to get into and are so fond of. We approach Customs and Border Protection agents with a feeling of fear and dread, knowing our future is in no small part in their hands.
But we must remember why we were drawn to this country in the first place: because it is a nation for dreamers. That is an idea that, today, is at great risk — and it is our obligation, as those who embody the fundamental ideals on which this country was founded, to find the courage to help defend it. We must not stay silent.
In the past, international students have largely kept to themselves — but now the time has come for all students, international and American, to come together, collectively organize, and speak with a united voice.
