Trump’s Harmful and Unjust New Restrictions on Foreign Students

The Trump administration recently adopted new, gratuitously restrictive, rules constraining foreign students at US universities. My Cato Institute colleague David Bier, a leading expert on immigration policy, has a helpful piece summarizing the policy changes, and their pernicious nature:

Previously, international students on F visas, exchange visitors on J visas, and foreign media on I visas were granted admission for their “duration of status”—that is, for as long as they were in status or following the rules of the visa programs. DHS’s final rule replaces that with a fixed period of entry of no more than four years (for international students and exchange visitors). But it does far more than end open-ended admission. Littered throughout it is a set of unprecedented restrictions with no statutory basis.

• Students can’t change majors or transfer schools in year one—and graduate students can’t ever. The rule’s own summary states it plainly:

For F‑1 students changing educational objectives or transferring to an SEVP-certified school, requiring that the student complete his or her first academic year of a program of study at the school that initially issued his or her Form I‑20 or successor form, unless an exception is authorized by SEVP; Prohibiting F‑1 students at the graduate education level or above from changing educational objectives at any point during a program of study.

Undergrads get one year before this restriction lifts. Graduate students never get it lifted at all, absent a SEVP exception. Change your mind about your PhD topic in year four, and you’re the same as someone violating status on day one.

• You can’t complete a second degree at the same level, or step down a level, ever. Also from the summary:

Requiring any nonimmigrant who has completed a program at one educational level to only be allowed to begin another program at a higher educational level as an F‑1 student and prohibiting a change to the same or a lower educational level while an F‑1 student.

Finish a master’s and want a second master’s in a different field? Illegal. Finish a PhD and want to pick up an associate’s degree in something practical? Illegal.

• DHS’s real response to people worried about the need to double-major: plan ahead, or too bad. Commenters pointed out this would devastate students in interdisciplinary fields who need two degrees to do their work. DHS’s answer:

this rule does not prevent students who need double majors to achieve their goals from planning ahead and enrolling in both at the same time. For example, nothing in this rule prevents someone from doing a J.D./M.B.A. program at one institution with one I‑20 indicating the program end date that accounts for the longer time it takes to complete the double major.

A J.D. and M.B.A. are not even examples of majors at all, as opposed to types of credentials, so whoever wrote this rule doesn’t have the slightest idea what students are even doing in higher education. More to the point, though, many people arrive at a US university not already knowing they’ll need to pursue a joint degree on day one. DHS’s answer to that reality is: you should have known in advance.

As David explains, the new rule also makes it more difficult for foreign students to find jobs and stay in the US after graduation.

From an educational and economic point of view, the new rules make no sense. As David notes, some degrees take more than four years to complete, for various reasons, and there are often good reasons for students to change fields, add additional majors, and the like. The real purpose of all of this is just to reduce the number of foreign students.

That, in turn would, over time, do serious damage to the US economy, especially in combination with other anti-foreign student measures adopted by Trump. Johns Hopkins Prof. Michael Clemens – one of the world’s leading immigration economists – recently published a valuable article outlining many of these harms:

For generations, students from around the world have fueled universities in the United States, their top destination by far. Those students don’t just sustain a $43 billion export industry in higher education services per year. Many remain after graduation as a key source of high-skill science and engineering workers, and thus innovation and growth in the US economy.

That system is now crumbling. The White House has enacted a spate of policies to restrict and repel international students en masse….

These policies, if sustained, would constrict a key supply of science and engineering talent to the US economy, reducing productivity and slowing economic growth in the long run. Using imperfect but best-available estimates from the economics research literature, we project the loss produced by a sustained decline of one third in international student inflows. Over the course of a decade, real US GDP would be smaller than it would be otherwise—an annual loss, at current GDP, of between $240 billion and $481 billion. The annual loss would be comparable to erasing the entire economy of Wisconsin or South Carolina.

The one-third reduction is extrapolated from the effects of Trump policies adopted even before this latest rule.

Clemens’ article outlines the basis for these estimates in detail, and also notes additional harms that they do not consider. For example, many US universities are significantly dependent on foreign-student tuition, which is often used to subsidize financial aid for US-citizen students.

The new policies are also layered on top of Trump’s unconstitutional and harmful efforts to deport foreign students who engage in political speech the administration doesn’t approve of, a policy which, among other flaws, is a menace to academic freedom.

In addition, the new policies will deny valuable educational and career opportunities to many thousands of would-be students. And for no better reason than that they were born to the wrong parents in the wrong place. Conservatives rightly condemn racial and ethnic preferences in college admissions as unjust and anti-meritocratic, because they judge applicants based on morally arbitrary circumstances ancestry over which people have no control. In previous writings (see here and here), I have outlined why immigration restrictions – including discrimination against foreign students – are unjust for similar reasons, but to a much greater extent, because the effects are much larger. The difference between going to lower-tier school instead of, say, Harvard (the effect of racial affirmative action) is not as great as that between being allowed to study in the US and being categorically excluded.