Artificial humanitarian disaster: On international students in the USA
Until recently, international students have been granted the permission to take online classes while remaining in the US. This all changes on July 6th 2020, when the ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) modifies temporary exemptions for foreign students.
Nonimmigrant F-1 and M-1 students attending schools operating entirely online may not take a full online course load and remain in 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.
What this means is international students that are taking online classes only will not be permitted to remain in the US in the Fall. Sounds reasonable, after all, the conditions of the visa is to take offline classes.
The logic works out.
But we have to remember what led to schools turning to online classes in the first place, a pandemic.
Forcing hundreds of thousands of foreign students to leave the US in the middle of a pandemic, is a humanitarian disaster. They might get sick on their way home, or worse still, not able to find a way home. This is not surprising considering the global aviation market has basically collapsed since no one is travelling. Many countries impose entry and flight restrictions, such as China which only allows for 1 flight to 1 city per week for each airline despite having hundreds of thousands to millions of Chinese citizens in the US.
This causes more chaos in the already chaotic environment, and impacts more than just foreign students. Leasing contracts will be broken, schools will see their income dramatically reduced, and this increased wave of travelling will almost certainly result in more COVID-19 infections. Thousands of colleges are already struggling because of the pandemic and many of them will likely be forced to close down or declare bankruptcy.
The consequence is not just merely 1 million people needing to leave the US if their schools do not re-open in person in the fall, but the fall of the global standing of the US.
Trump administration is openly declaring to the world that they do not consider what others might think or how they might be affected when making decisions. They are declaring that the US is not welcoming foreigners, legal or not. They are declaring a new world order, where the US is absent from the world stage, too occupied to care, and not interested in what price others have to pay when making US policies.
Foreign students are invaluable to any country, even to North Korea, because it is education that shapes minds, and minds shape foreign policy. Welcoming international students shows a country’s openness and willingness to engage in international affairs and projects its soft power. When foreign students return to their countries of nationality, they are likely to deepen mutual understanding and reduces conflict between the countries, as they have seen both sides as humans. Instead, when foreign students are forced out of places where they call ‘home’ in the middle of a pandemic, the tales they bring back to their countries of nationality will be less than favorable.
United States has just created a huge problem for not just international students, but for every government on Earth, because nearly every country has citizens inside the US. If F-1 and J-1 students are the first to go, which visa classes will be next? How to arrange for their transport back to their countries of nationality? If this policy is upheld, we will likely see global resentment towards the US and a tsunami of planes from all the governments to bring students back to their countries of nationality. With this tsunami of planes comes with the tumbling down of trust in the US, trust in her being a responsible actor on the international stage, trust in her being a reasonable decision maker, and trust in her economic and political stability. For the United States of America was founded by immigrants, built by immigrants, welcomed immigrants, but now closing itself in and pushing out immigrants.
This is not the first, nor the last of the artificial humanitarian disasters created by the US. Losing America’s position on the world stage does not seem to matter to Trump. Just like he has pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement, he continues to create more disasters for his country and the rest of the world, and edges us, humanity as a whole, ever closer to extinction.
When the United States, the most powerful nation on Earth, decides to do things one way, countless other nations will follow. The consequences might appear now, as Siberia reaches 100 F/38 C degrees, or later, as 3 billion will either be forced to live in uninhabitable environments, or simply, die.
America has spoken, “I will not engage in international cooperation, I do not care about the consequences of my actions, I do not care if other countries are hurt, I will not use my position as the country with the most resources to deal with problems humanity faces as a whole, because they are fake news, and most important of all, I DO NOT CARE!”
And we will all be burning because of her.
