Universities and students say the Department of Homeland Security’s proposed rule to limit international students and exchange visitors to fixed terms would be disastrous for America’s future. They’re right.
Today, at ports of entry, international students are admitted for “duration of status,” which means they can continue their studies at a United States university so long as they pursue a full course of study and make progress toward completing those studies. The new rule would allow foreign students only fixed two- or four-year terms unless they convince U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services adjudicators that they have a “compelling academic reason” to keep studying in America.
The rule will discourage international students from coming to the U.S., and its purpose is suspect. The DHS rule would require the cash-strapped and inefficient immigration agency to process 364,000 more extensions each year. One USCIS service center already takes up to 10 months to approve a change of status for F students and up to 19 months for J-1 exchange visitors.
The DHS says that requiring students to get extensions will improve monitoring. However, international students are already the most-watched foreigners in the U.S. The Student and Exchange Visitor Program, operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, receives updates on students. If a student drops out or does not report for classes, ICE can act. A far narrower rule could address specific security threats.
The DHS also argues that the rule is necessary to address “overstays,” such as people who do not leave the U.S. when required. The problem is that the DHS can’t reliably measure who qualifies as an overstay despite the overstay “rates” that it records to the second decimal place for each country in its annual reports. Those rates are used in the new DHS rule to limit students from about 60 countries, including Vietnam and the Philippines, to two years. But even the DHS’s dubious measurements show the student overstay rate has dropped by more than half over the past three years.
Since fiscal year 2016, the DHS has reported on overstays. These figures are really only upper-bound estimates of people whom the DHS could not confirm as having left the U.S. The DHS has two main problems: trouble verifying departures, particularly via land borders, and recognizing in its system when a student has remained lawfully by changing status inside the country, such as by getting married or becoming a skilled worker. Such dodgy figures should not be used to make policy.
Dr. John Andrilli, the program director for the Internal Medicine Residency Program at Mount Sinai in New York, said the rule could cost him most of the one-third of his residents who are foreign and provide clinical care daily to patients. Dr. William Pinsky, the president of the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates, said that requiring the government to approve an extension every year for foreign-educated physicians serves no purpose and will disrupt medical training and patient care. His organization and doctors like Andrilli already tell the government each year through SEVIS whether a physician is making progress on their medical education.
The DHS received over 32,000 comments on the proposed rule. International students fear they will spend tens of thousands of dollars a year on an education, only to be forced to leave the U.S. early because a government bureaucrat thinks they should have finished a program sooner. The median time to get a doctorate in the U.S. is 5.8 years, but after four years, a USCIS adjudicator may conclude the student has had enough time. Madhan Kumar Arulanandam, a doctoral electrical engineering student at Arizona State University, said he told friends in his home country, India, to wait and see what happens with the rule before deciding to study in the U.S.
U.S. universities, already in a cash crunch due to the pandemic and years of declining international student enrollment, see the rule as a death knell for America’s role as a center of international education. Fewer international students will mean less revenue, and for U.S. students, this will translate into fewer available classes. The Trump administration concedes that Canada and Australia, America’s leading competitors for students, don’t arbitrarily cut off students after two or four years and force them to hope for an extension.
The comment period for the proposed rule ended on Oct. 26. If the regulation goes into effect, expect U.S. companies to follow the talent to where foreign-born students choose to study and work. It won’t be in America.
Stuart Anderson is the executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonpartisan policy research organization.
