Foreign students are confronted with uncertainty in the context of Trump’s exchange visa policies | Education news

Santa Barbara, California – far from the public confrontations of the American president Donald Trump with elite universities such as Harvard And ColombiaStudents of the animated University of California in Santa Barbara (UCSB) finish their final exams under the sunny sunny sky over the neighboring beach.

Despite the distance and the pleasant time, the students here always feel the cloud of uncertainty that suspend them, created by the rhetoric and the policies of Trump towards foreign students.

“The global atmosphere through the room (among international students) is that people are looking for other options,” said Denis Lomov, a 26 -year -old Russian doctoral student who has been at the UCSB since 2022 studying climate change policy and energy transitions.

Since its entry into office this year, the Trump administration has revoked student visas of hundreds of foreign nationals, reduced funding for science and research programs, arrested and tried to expel foreign nationals involved in Pro-Palestine campus activismand suspended Go to student visas.

For international students in universities such as UCSB, where almost 15% of all students come from outside the United States, rhetoric and politicians have left that students wonder about their future in the country.

“This makes you ask if you may prefer to go elsewhere,” Lomov told Al Jazeera, adding that it is still several years to finish his doctorate.

Like his international student colleagues, he said that he had started to determine whether his skills could be more valued in places like Canada or Europe after completing his program.

“I think it is the unpredictability of these policies that makes me fear for the future, both with me being a student, but also after having graduated,” he said.

Lack of certainty

The actions of the Trump administration against universities and foreign students met with mixed results in court.

On Monday, in one of the first important legal victories of the Trump administration in these efforts, a federal judge rejected legal action from the University of Columbia for the government’s federal funding, on the basis of allegations that the university had not taken adequate measures to limit pro-Palestine activism in the name of the fight against anti-Semitism.

In another decision, also on Monday, a judge extended a restriction order by arousing Trump’s efforts to prevent incoming international students from frequenting Harvard, because the case is making its way through the legal system. Trump also threatened to revoke Harvard tax exemption and frozen more than $ 2.6 billion in research grants. Harvard also put a legal action contesting these cuts.

Several universities of the UC system, including the UCSB, have warned international students against trips outside the country, a restriction which poses serious complications for their academic work and their personal life.

“People examine if they will be able to go home and visit their families during their program,” Anam Mehta, a national student and a doctoral student in the United States at the UCSB, told the UCSB.

“They are very careful about what they publish online for the sake of their interrogation at the airport,” added Mehta, who is also involved in the UAW 4811 academic workers’ union.

These concerns, he said, could also thwart the ability of international students to carry out work in the field in foreign countries, a common characteristic of graduate research or attend university conferences abroad.

Some students – and even the university administrators themselves – have noted that it is difficult to follow the series of political announcements, media reports, legal proceedingsAnd counter combinations that took place while Trump presss his attacks against higher education.

“There have been frequent changes and many of these policies have been implemented very quickly and without advanced notice,” said Carola Smith, administrator of Santa Barbara City College (SBCC), noting that future international students have contacted their question to find out if they are still able to study in the United States.

Smith says that between 60 and 70 different national identities are represented on the campus and that in addition to international students paying higher tuition fees than American students, their presence on the campus offers a welcome exhibition to a greater variety of prospects for their classmates and creates links with people from other parts of the world.

With the appointments on student visas currently suspended, Smith predicted that the number of registrations for foreign students could drop up to 50% in the coming year.

Changing attitudes

The stress of following changing developments has also been combined with a more abstract concern: that the United States, formerly considered as a country which was proud of its status of global destination for research and academics, has become more and more hostile to the presence of the presence of foreign students.

“Harvard must show us their lists (foreign students). They have foreign students, almost 31% of their students. We want to know where these students come from. Are they troublemakers? What countries do they come from? ” Trump said in March.

The administration also declared that international students took university spots that could go to American students, in accordance with a more in -depth approach to the policy which sees various forms of exchange with other countries Like a drain in the United States rather than a source of mutual benefit.

“They argue that they do not need international students, that it is talent that they should cultivate here at home,” explains Jeffrey Rosario, assistant professor at Loma Linda University in South California.

“You can see a line line between this and their prices abroad, on the basis of this form of economic nationalism which says that the rest of the world was tearing us away,” added Rosario, who wrote on the history of the government to try to exert an influence on universities.

For Lomov, the Russian student, the atmosphere wonders if his skills could find a better house elsewhere.

“I left Russia because I did not feel welcome there, and my expertise was not really necessary. This is why I left for the United States, because I knew that the United States offers incredible opportunities to academics and research, “said Lomov.

“But now I feel like I’m back in the same place, where I have to leave.”