During last year’s presidential campaign, Donald Trump endorsed a novel idea: Foreign students who graduated from college in the United States would automatically get a green card, instead of having to scramble for a new visa or leave the country entirely. “They go back to India; they go back to China,” he told the tech-plutocrat hosts of the All-In Podcast in June. He lamented the loss of students who “become multibillionaires employing thousands and thousands of people,” and declared, “It’s so sad when we lose people from Harvard, MIT, from the greatest schools.”
But now that he’s back in power, Trump seems determined to scare foreign students away from enrolling in American universities in the first place. Yesterday, Politico reported that the State Department had instructed embassies and consulates to hold off on scheduling new student interviews while the administration considers expanding the vetting of prospective students’ social-media accounts, likely for perceived anti-Semitic or pro-terrorist posts.
Would-be foreign students are likely to notice a wider pattern: In March, plainclothes officers arrested Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University graduate student, and detained her in Louisiana for more than six weeks, apparently because the government had construed a pro-Palestinian op-ed that she had co-authored as “activities in support of Hamas.” Since Trump retook office, the government has quietly terminated about 4,700 foreign students’ ability to study in the U.S. Last week, the administration announced that it had revoked Harvard’s ability to enroll any international students.
Nicole Hallett, a University of Chicago law professor, cast the administration’s recent strategy as a major shift in American immigration policy, which previously welcomed foreign students. “In past administrations, there has been an attempt to go after undocumented immigrants and people with serious criminal convictions,” Hallett told me. “What we’re seeing here is an attempt to target groups of noncitizens that previously, I think, considered themselves to be fairly safe from immigration enforcement.”
The administration has broadly connected foreign students with pro-Palestinian protests and the harassment of Jewish students on university campuses. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that the administration will not grant visas to students who want to participate in movements “doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus.” In a letter to Harvard, which draws 27 percent of its student body from overseas, Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the school “has invited foreign students, who engage in violent behavior and show contempt for the United States of America, to its campus.”
The administration is demanding that Harvard provide information about international students’ coursework, disciplinary records, illegal activities, and history of participating in protests. The school says it has provided the information required by law—a response that the administration deems incomplete. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem declared in a letter that the university had refused to adequately answer questions about its international students “while perpetuating an unsafe campus environment that is hostile to Jewish students, promotes pro-Hamas sympathies, and employs racist ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ policies.”
Harvard’s experience is a cautionary tale for foreign students considering other schools, especially because Trump has said that other universities could face similar scrutiny. The State Department’s latest move could have more immediate effects at institutions across the country. An estimated 1.1 million foreign students are enrolled in the United States. Closely vetting the social-media accounts of the hundreds of thousands of foreigners who apply for student visas every year will be time-consuming. As the Öztürk case suggests, the government’s grounds for revoking student visas may be opaque and expansive, ensnaring not only terrorism supporters but also students with a mere political disagreement with the administration.
The thousands of students who have lost permission to be in the U.S. appear to have been targeted for having had contact with law enforcement. But many had been charged with only minor offenses—including underage drinking, overfishing, or violating traffic laws. (Some of the affected students told reporters they were unsure what had triggered the action.)
After facing more than 100 legal challenges from such students—and setbacks in dozens of those cases—the administration said that it would temporarily restore students’ legal status while it developed a new framework for visa cancellations. Trump faces other obstacles in the court system: A judge temporarily blocked the administration’s move to revoke Harvard’s ability to host international students.
But even if universities and foreign students challenging Trump’s policies ultimately prevail in court, his recent campaign could nevertheless have a powerful deterrent effect. It is bound to unsettle one of America’s most successful export industries—selling undergraduate and graduate degrees to intelligent foreigners—and disrupt the considerable scientific and technological research that overseas students enable at major universities. In the 2023–24 academic year, international students contributed almost $44 billion to the U.S. economy. They supported 378,000 American jobs. And they founded companies; about a quarter of the billion-dollar start-ups in America were founded by someone who came to the United States as an international student. “The smartest people in the world voluntarily move to the United States,” Kevin Carey, vice president of education and work at New America, told me. “Many of them stay on and live here, start companies, do all these things that we want. It all starts with student visas. If you cut that off, they’ll go somewhere else.”
Yet that outcome fits neatly into Trump’s “America First” ethos while helping the administration hurt elite universities. Vice President J. D. Vance said in an interview with Fox News that international students are “bad for the American dream for a lot of kids who want to go to a nice university and can’t because their spot was taken by a foreign student.” Trump himself told reporters that Harvard had too many foreign students “because we have Americans that want to go there.”
Cutting off the flow of foreign students would financially hobble higher education. Many universities rely on wealthy international students to pay full freight and subsidize the cost of educating American students. But if the Trump administration is bent on limiting the number of foreign students who study in the United States, it has many tools at its disposal to accomplish this. It could simply reject more individual students’ visa applications, an approach that would be difficult to challenge in court because of the deference that consular decisions generally receive. “People applying for visas are in a kind of Constitution-free zone,” Daniel Kanstroom, a Boston College law professor, told me.
In a telling shift, Harvard, which typically expects admitted students to turn down other schools when accepting its offer, will now allow international students to accept a second offer of admission from a university overseas, in case their U.S. visa falls through.
The outcome of the president’s strategy seems clear: fewer foreign students in America. As Trump understood last year, this will come at a considerable cost to the country.
