The High Price of Barring International Students
In fall 2024, I taught a first-year undergraduate seminar at Northwestern University named “Oil and Water in the Gulf of Mexico.” I was also the faculty adviser for the 14 students enrolled in the class, who came to our campus from all over the world. On the first day, as we were getting to know one another, one of my students asked, “Can historians tell the future?” It was a question about our seminar topic—the future of places like my hometown, New Orleans, and lower Louisiana, one of the many places in the world dealing with the environmental challenges of climate change. It was also a question about the forthcoming U.S. presidential election. As someone who believes in the evidence of things unseen, I took the question seriously—and said I didn’t know, but if we could, no one would listen to us anyway.
When my class met on the day of the U.S. presidential election, I returned to my student’s question. We had spent no class time discussing what could happen; our focus on comparing the urban infrastructures of Chicago and New Orleans, two cities surrounded by very different bodies of water, had absorbed us. But we did our work in an increasingly hostile political context. Donald Trump and his supporters rooted themselves in an “America First” language that demonized non-European immigrants as dangerous criminals who stole jobs from U.S. citizens. More broadly, “America First” rhetoric simplified the complex global exchanges and interconnections of people, knowledge, and wealth that were foundational to the nation’s origins and underpinned our contemporary reality. Similarly, “anti-woke” and “anti-DEI” became shorthand for an ideology that claimed that nonwhites, women, and queers—with exceptions for those who hewed to Trumpian and other right-wing ideologies—had been unfairly elevated over more-qualified white straight men because of identity politics. These campaign talking points culminated in a Madison Square Garden rally the week before the election that was a horrific echo of an event held there by Nazi sympathizers in 1939.
The Trump assault on international students and researchers ignores the collaboration necessary—economically, politically, and intellectually—for success, if not survival, in our hyper-connected global world. Nationally and internationally, the expansion of the U.S. higher education population to include non-U.S. citizens in the post–World War II era has been a critical part of this nation’s research, economic, and political success story. Many academic researchers are part of international teams, particularly in the sciences and business, but also in the social sciences, the humanities, and the arts. We share rather than duplicate knowledge production, imbued with the recognition that creating solutions to infectious diseases, famine, poverty, climate change, and much more must be understood regionally and globally to be truly effective. The federal government supported and welcomed these connections not only because of research, but also because the rich diversity of the U.S. higher education system was the envy of the world: It was a valuable tool of soft power, first in opposition to Soviet communism during the Cold War, and more recently as a way to exert political influence in a range of places around the world.
Sharp increases in international student enrollments occurred after the 2008 financial crisis, which temporarily decreased endowments across higher education but also spotlighted other emerging crises: How would American families continue to bear the costs of upward mobility via higher education? How would higher education survive the forthcoming decline in college-age students? Because international students are often from the elite classes, or are invested in by their governments, by and large they bring their own funding. In 2023, nearly 80 percent of their funding came from private sources, and the majority of that from “Personal and Family” sources (54.5 percent) and “Current Employment” (21.8 percent). These funds pay for their education, of course; but they also are a significant financial support for U.S. institutions and American students. Similarly, state schools from New York to Michigan to California calculate enrolling a percentage of higher-paying nonresident students in their budgets to support state resident students and offset the loss of state taxes that used to support their educational systems. Today, international students from all corners of the globe plow nearly $44 billion into the American economy annually.
Members of the Trump administration argue that they are rebalancing the politics of higher education by withdrawing federal money if schools do not remove “DEI” and “woke” ideas. By arresting international students and faculty who the administration claims without due process are Muslim terrorists or Chinese spies, they purport to be protecting students and the nation from destabilizing political influences. But the broad-based defunding of research universities that the federal government has threatened and enacted in these first months of the administration is not protecting the nation or improving free speech on college campuses. Rather, these actions will render our higher education system inoperative.
