July 8, 2020
The Economic, Political & Cultural Follies of Kicking Foreign Students Out, By Brian Ping Leung & Nick Wittstock
After the White House’s recent move to suspend the new issuance of several classes of visas, ICE published a Broadcast Message communicating that foreign students under F and M visas may not remain in the US if they exclusively take online classes in the Fall:
“Students attending schools operating entirely online may not take a full online course load and remain in the United States. The U.S. Department of State will not issue visas to students enrolled in schools and/or programs that are fully online for the fall semester nor will U.S. Customs and Border Protection permit these students to enter the United States. Active students currently in the United States enrolled in such programs must depart the country or take other measures, such as transferring to a school with in-person instruction to remain in lawful status or potentially face immigration consequences including, but not limited to, the initiation of removal proceedings.“
This move is thus the latest in a series of policies seeking to curtail immigration and promulgated under the guise of fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. As we stated in a recent piece, we conjecture that these anti immigration policies will hurt the nascent economic recovery, making the average American worse off in the long run.
Let’s cut to the chase and get to the politics of this: While some advocates of stricter immigration policies have admitted that these recent restrictions might inflict some economic damage, they nonetheless downplay the costs and often justify them on the grounds of helping to promote trust and shared values. For example, many pundits point to Scandinavian countries such as Sweden: in attempting to explain the relative success of their economy and generous welfare state model, they finger these countries’ ethnic and cultural homogeneity.
What are the facts, logic and evidence behind this idea?
For one, there is little evidence that immigrants (or foreign exchange students for that matter) have values that differ from those held by most Americans. The overwhelming majority of immigrants and exchange students come to the US because they value political and economic liberty, seek to do better for themselves and their communities, and possess the drive and ambition to try out new ideas and business opportunities. Immigrants value free speech, accountable government, and productive entrepreneurship – in other words, the kind of political and economic liberalism this country was founded upon.
Why is this important? Consider that an entire industry of pension funds, insurance products, and personal finance gurus build their business models around the expectation of 7% or greater annual returns. Investors continue to expect that America’s large corporations, especially its high-tech firms, will continue to generate high profits. These are technology and human capital-intensive companies that rely on the brains and energy of immigrants, many of them former students at American universities, whether they took their classes online or in person.
Broadly speaking, American economic growth very much depends on the labor, ideas, purchasing power, and capital provided by immigrants, as well as foreign university students that inject money and brainpower into American universities, enabling them to conduct the cutting-edge research that paves the way for scientific discoveries, technological innovation, and increased productivity. These foreign students are an integral part of the research machinery that powers new medical breakthroughs, does groundbreaking work on semiconductors and material science, and helps devise the machine learning algorithms that power AI innovations. Many of these foreign students then stay in the US and make invaluable contributions to businesses and the economy more generally.
We can’t help but conclude that a policy that will most likely reduce economic welfare in this country should be a huge disservice to Americans. Universities will lose money, the economy will lose valuable ideas, capital, innovations, and profit opportunities.
Yet suppose we are off the mark here and that this policy, along with prior visa restrictions will have no material impact on the US economy. There are nonetheless sufficient additional reasons to oppose it. Consider that foreign graduate students also live in the US under F1 visas. Will graduate students who are currently conducting research need to enroll in classes to retain their immigration status? Moreover, many students who come to the US to study do not have a place in their home countries to go back to; they have staked their lot to this country under the presumption that they were welcome to come here to live and study.
Furthermore, the US has long been a safe haven for scholars who have been subject to grave personal danger – often for political reasons. This is a place where they have had the ability to continue their intellectual pursuits without fear and repression. Important episodes include WWII and the Cold War: European émigrés contributed tremendously to numerous fields, including the natural sciences, social sciences, and foreign policy. Countless foreign students from authoritarian countries also seek out the US as a safe haven, including students from Africa, the Middle East, and China. We can now add Hong Kong to the list.
The reason? Their research might uncover facts and findings that pose a threat to governments back home or they may be persecuted for their activism around human rights and democracy promotion. Deporting these students will expose them to grave peril.
Perhaps we are being alarmist? Some readers might point out that universities will likely find workarounds to allow foreign students to remain in the US. However, ICE was not completely clear on what steps need to be taken by university administrations to comply with their message. All we know at the time of this writing is that the published directives are not yet finalized and remain to be put into practice. Thus, significant uncertainty over what will happen remains. Students and universities are both scrambling to avoid deportations. And the message that foreign students are receiving, whatever the ultimate intentions behind this order, are loud and clear: stay home.
This policy is especially frustrating because it is so unnecessary. The US sees little if anything to gain from this move but could lose so much. Simultaneously, there is much to gain both economically and otherwise by positioning the US once again as the beacon it once was: a place that welcomes those who seek to live a freer and better life.
