US visa hell
THIS week, the Trump administration imposed an abrupt pause on visa interviews for international students wanting to study in the US.
The move comes at a crucial time since the hundreds of thousands of international students that have been accepted to degree programmes in America are currently applying for visas so that they may begin their studies in September. Now their prospects appear grim if not completely doomed.
Central to the Trump administration’s war on international students is the idea that the latter cohort should not have any anti-American views, such as support for Palestine. The requirement for visa applicants to turn in their social media handles was put in place during the first Trump administration and was continued during Joe Biden’s presidency.
This policy is going to be expanded and the pause in interviews is being attributed to the administration’s move to scrutinise applicants more closely. President Donald Trump wants international students who “can love our country. We don’t want to see shopping centres exploding”.
The move was legally challenged in 2019. In 2023, the Knight First Amendment Institute, an American think tank at Columbia University obtained government documents showing that the policy was ineffective. However, such assessments are not likely to stop the administration. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently announced that the US would “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students”, including for those who had links with the Chinese Communist Party or those working in “critical fields”.
This means tens of thousands of Chinese students working in tech and engineering fields could lose their visas and be sent back to China. Over 270,000 Chinese students study in the US. The targeting of Chinese students was met with opposition by China, particularly since it negates US efforts to de-escalate tensions with Beijing following the tariffs that President Trump imposed, and then later reduced, recently.
In the long term, the damage will be to America itself.
In the meantime, US consulates all around the world have been instructed to halt visa interviews for J, M and F applicants. The student visa stoppage could have a considerable impact on the US economy. Figures show that in 2023-2024, international students contributed about $44 billion to the American economy and created thousands of jobs.
None of this seems to affect the Trump administration, however. Statements by President Trump, particularly in relation to his ongoing enmity with Harvard University, suggest that he does not like foreign students studying at Ivy League campuses. Trump’s battle with Harvard, which refused to accede to his demands to allow scrutiny of its admission policies, hit an obstacle last weekend when a federal judge pulled the plug on the government’s bid to stop the university from enrolling foreign students.
President Trump has criticised the fact that over a quarter of Harvard’s student body is made up of foreign students; he wants more American students. These sorts of statements are part of an effort to appease his anti-intellectual support base that sees elite institutions like Harvard as sidelining natural-born Americans in favour of foreign students.
Meanwhile, the US healthcare system relies on foreign medical graduates in its residency programmes. In exchange for training and a basic strategy, these foreign medical graduates provide relatively low-cost labour to keep the US healthcare system going. The pause in granting these visas means that when medical training begins this year, thousands of spots will be unfilled because trainee doctors would not have been able to obtain their visas. This less-discussed aspect of the pause in visa interviews and grants is likely to have a huge impact on the US healthcare sector, unless it is halted.
Not only do such moves spell doom for the careers of doctors and students who thought they were headed to the US, they are also going to destroy America’s reputation as a meritocratic haven for research and educational achievement. In the short term, these moves will only impact the unlucky ones whose visas are still in the pipeline. In the long term, however, the damage will be to America itself.
The banishment of so many students and researchers will mean that the US will lose its edge in the very fight over technology and research advancement that it is seeking to win.
America, once a haven for progressive intellectual achievement and innovation, has, within the space of a few grim months of the Trump administration, been transformed into a right-wing fortress of narrow-minded, morally bankrupt and retrogressive ideas.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
rafia.zakaria@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, May 31st, 2025