“They Can Stay Over There”: Our Discrimination against International Students
The pandemic has fueled xenophobia and inequity on college campuses
As we surely know by now, COVID-19 is a voyeur to the world of higher education. It peers into rooms full of inequities we thought were long shut up and exposes them to the air.
Our rhetoric around international students, it seems, is one such inequity that the pandemic has unearthed.
We can, and must, change the way that we speak about international students during this pandemic and beyond.
A slew of policies, instituted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and followed by American higher education institutions, have transformed the summer of 2020 into open season on international students.
Although ICE’s heavy-handed attempt to block the visas of all international students taking online classes was shot down in federal court, new policies ban first-year students only from entering the U.S. for solely online classes.
In mid-July, in an attempt to smooth over gaps in policy for international students, Harvard decided to “allow” international students to transfer credits from universities in their home countries this fall.
ICE’s policies are, in some ways, unsurprising. A nationalist and xenophobic federal administration will take any opportunity to deny foreign students an American education.
But the rhetoric employed by our institutions, as they adhere to these policies, is equally problematic.
Harvard — an avatar for American higher education as a whole — has created a policy which will provide much-needed financial and emotional relief to international students facing a difficult choice: either they can take a gap semester, or they can travel back to a COVID-infested United States.
Yet the language it uses to do so exposes the cognitive dissonance that is at the heart of American higher education.
Harvard will “allow” international students to study in their own countries? How kind of the institution, how generous.
It seems that Harvard, and the institutions with which it stands, cannot humble themselves to the possibility that international students may not wish to return to a United States where COVID remains uncontrolled. The policy is an attempt by the college to pretend that American higher education still holds a dominant position in the world and not, as I suspect, that there may be a rotting hole at its center.
If we cannot guarantee the basic freedoms and safeties of our international students — if the very act of boarding a plane to the United States holds the danger of lifelong debilitating illness or death, compounded by outright discrimination — can the academic institution ever “allow” anything of international students ever again?
As we have seen, the virus that causes COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, does not discriminate.
As leading epidemiologist Dr. Michael Osterholm recently explained:
wherever there’s human wood to burn, [the virus] will do it.
We as students, faculty, and administrators, on the other hand, wield the true discriminatory power of the pandemic. Racist and xenophobic remarks made on campus against Asian, and in particular, Chinese students, are reportedly on the rise and may continue to rise this fall.
We must fight against acts of xenophobia with everything left in us, especially as the very methods of protection by which we are attempting to prevent COVID spread may lend themselves to xenophobic aggressions and discriminations.
Due to preventative policies, many international students will remain largely out of sight, and unfortunately, out of mind this fall.
They will not be living in “our” dorms and eating with us in “our” dining halls. They will be in their “own” countries, damn any “ownership” they may feel over the United States, some of them having lived here for three or more years already.
The illusion of the fall 2020 academic semester will be one wherein the faces that faculty do see in person in their courses may be noticeably whiter, more homogenous, and less globally diverse. This creates and enforces some delusion that the infection is somehow coming from “somewhere else” and not from the failings of our own government.
In “allowing” international students to “stay over there,” we are rhetorically enforcing the image of the disease-ridden foreigner who, by entering the US, exposes us to some danger that we somehow still believe is not already here.
These policies of social distance and international quarantine are undeniably safer, and will probably save lives. They may be safer for international students to the extent that they save them from the liability that is the United States.
But, as we slide slowly and unstoppably towards greater forms of institutionalized nationalism, these policies may also make the exclusion of — and discrimination against — international students, slipperier, more justified, and more…normal.
We may believe that there is no good alternative to synchronous remote learning, but what happens when we consider it to be not just problematic for international students, but discriminatory? Is long-term sleep deprivation not discriminatory?
We may believe that refusing to lower tuition rates for online coursework is not a discriminatory act, since students across the board must pay tuition. But international students would probably be disproportionately affected, considering that they pay full tuition at higher rates.
And why, when we think of incorporating international students into our campuses, is the first consideration always the financial efficacy of our institutions? Why does the rhetoric not focus on these students’ humanity instead of their status as “cash cows” for the university?
The secret to our pandemic discrimination is that for every opportunity international students may miss this fall, American higher education will miss even more.
Our faculty, students, and staff will lose precious in-person interaction with a diverse group of thinkers.
Worse still, in “allowing” students to study in their home countries, our institutions will enforce the binaries of “them” and “us,” “here” and “there,” until we slip, even as the pandemic rages on, more deeply into the comfortable, but destructive, delusion of the safe, clean, and pure American campus.
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