The Trump administration is quickly implementing its immigration agenda, which far exceeds deporting illegal immigrant criminals. Recently, the administration has begun revoking the legal status of foreign students en masse, in a move that may end up sabotaging American businesses in the long term.
There are more than 1500 known cases of foreign student legal status being revoked at this point, with apparently little to no explanation given. Lawsuits have ensued, and some attorneys claim that these students are not criminal, nor have participated in pro-Hamas protests that so concern the administration, nor pose any sort of security risk for the country. They claim that the reason behind the revocations could have to do with offenses as small as a parking ticket (which shouldn’t trigger a revocation), and that some students don’t have any offenses at all but still saw their legal status terminated.
Attorney Steven Brown, who’s involved in the ongoing litigation over revoked student statuses, explained in an interview that “not only are [these terminations] arbitrary and capricious and not supported by the current [student visa] regulations, there is [also] a substantial lack of due process.”
This new approach to student visa revocations not only causes stress and fear for the 1,500+ individuals directly impacted. It will also trigger a chilling effect on the enrollment of international students in the future due to the lack of clarity and apparent arbitrariness of the revocations. These students will think twice before going through a laborious visa process and spending tens of thousands of dollars in tuition and other expenses to come study in America if they think they can be deported and have their studies ruined for a traffic ticket or no reason at all.
An underappreciated consequence of the administration’s new direction on student visas is its potentially damaging impact on American businesses, which often rely on recruiting international talent through these programs.
International students often include high-achieving individuals selected competitively by prestigious American institutions across the country. They often spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in their education and are highly motivated to excel. Some successful people who came to America through student programs include Elon Musk, Mike Krieger (founder of Instagram), and Sundar Pichai (founder of Google). (Albeit less financially successful than these examples, yours truly also came to America as a law student.)
Student visas function as a talent pipeline to bring specialized workers to the US, via a program that allows them to work for 12 months in an area related to their degrees. American companies recruit from this talent pool to fulfill their worker needs, especially in high-demand technical fields. In 2023, there were 160,627 students working in American companies under this program, mostly in crucial STEM fields. Some of the major companies that recruit international students at this stage include Apple, Amazon, Blackrock, Deloitte, JP Morgan, and many others.
Hiring international students is already difficult due to extensive regulations, limited visa availability, and application uncertainty– especially if businesses want to transition these new employees to longer-term visas. Yet many companies still navigate these hurdles because the talent they access through student programs is indispensable, even if already artificially limited by the cost and complications of procuring a student visa in the first place. If arbitrary revocations persist, the talent pipeline will shrink even further, directly hurting businesses.
Some argue that eliminating opportunities for foreign students will benefit native-born workers in the long-term, but that isn’t the case. Research suggests that ending these programs would have deleterious effects on the native born, in part by crushing the innovation that these international workers bring and the employment opportunities for Americans that they create (Musk, Pichai, and Kreiger alone are responsible for hundreds of thousands of jobs). But, fundamentally, restricting these opportunities for international students would further constrain the right of American businesses to hire the best workforce that they wish to hire to fulfill their missions and compete globally.
It should be much more straightforward for talented international students to come here and for companies to hire them. The system as it exists right now already severely restricts these freedoms, and the apparently arbitrary revocations of student visas will only worsen their erosion by sending the message that students shouldn’t come here anymore.
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Agustina Vergara Cid is a Young Voices Contributor (joinyv.org) and columnist for the Southern California News Group. You can follow her on X at @agustinavc
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