Dear Erica,
It has been a stormy week, and I don’t just mean the weather! If you were visited by a historic snowfall, I hope you are well. If you are on a U.S. campus, I can imagine you and your international students are reeling after officials from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) entered a Columbia University building and detained an international student. While that student was released later that day, such actions send shockwaves across U.S. campuses. Note we are continually updating this NAFSA blog post with resources related to immigration enforcement on campus.
The consequences of driving current and prospective students away from the United States will be steep and wide-ranging, as captured in a new policy brief by the American Immigration Lawyers Association, It was Never About Unlawful Migration—Attacks on Legal Immigration Harm America. While international students are not considered immigrants by U.S. law, they are an important part of the overall picture of how this country benefits from global talent, and what we stand to lose if international students chose to go elsewhere.
This comes on the heels of the revelation by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem that it deported more than 80 individuals who came to the U.S. as children and received discretionary relief from deportation under the DACA program. Far more were detained, according to a February 11 letter from Secretary Noem in response to an inquiry from Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL), Alex Padilla (D-CA), Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and other Senate Democrats.
A recent opinion piece in the Washington Post by two prominent government leaders—former U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan and former U.S. ambassador to Hungary, David Pressman—provides a sobering and inspiring message to college presidents that political pressure and financial threats from government should not be met with individual acts of appeasement. Rather, they must unite and strategize across the sector to fulfill their collective responsibility as “stewards of intellectual freedom and democratic norms.”
Strategic, visionary leadership will be examined in a March 4 NAFSA Peer-to-Peer event, From Survival to Strategy: Leading in Uncertain Times. It will feature several senior international officer perspectives captured in an article of the same name in the January/February issue of International Educator.
In other news, on February 23, the U.S. State Department and the Department of Education announced they will now be collaborating on administering Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965 which concerns the reporting of foreign funds and gifts to U.S. colleges. This follows last November’s announced interagency agreement between the departments that shifts administration of Title VI and Fulbright-Hays programs to the State Department. No further details have been shared on how these agreements will work in practice.
How about some good news? View this video clip of Republican Governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine on CBS’ Face the Nation last Sunday where he affirms the positive contributions of international students to the Buckeye State and why the U.S. needs to retain them. Music to our ears!
WHAT YOU CAN DO:
Thank you kindly.
Best,
Erica
Erica Stewart
Senior Director, Advocacy & Strategic Communications
NAFSA: Association of International Educators
