ICE visa order doesn’t surprise Sacramento-area professors. College students are worried

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced Monday that any international students currently studying in the U.S. would have to leave the country or transfer to another school if their colleges shift to online-only classes this fall, throwing the futures of tens of thousands of students into sudden uncertainty.

Under the new policy, only students whose colleges use a “hybrid” model – a combination of in-person classes and online classes – will be allowed to take more than one online course. International students whose colleges shift online will not be allowed to enter the U.S. at all.

Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, international students were allowed to enroll in only one online class per class term, a rule ICE waived for the spring and summer.

The timing is particularly harsh given the ongoing pandemic, professors and university officials said, but several added the order is unsurprising under the current federal government.

“It has this sort of tone of immigrant minimization that’s consistent with the anti-immigrant policies that we’ve seen from this administration,” said Gabriel J. Chin, a professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law.

But the policy is filled with question marks. ICE officials have yet to define what counts as a “hybrid” program and it’s unclear how this policy will apply to graduate students who have completed their coursework, but are still conducting research.

Several universities have already pledged to fight the order in court, with the University of California announcing Wednesday evening that it would be filing a lawsuit against ICE and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security hours after Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced their own joint lawsuit. And on Thursday evening, the state of California added its own lawsuit to the growing list.

Now, international students face a choice between potentially risking their health with in-person classes or going home, where they may face even greater risks to their health and obstacles to their learning. A second-year student at Sacramento State University, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution, told The Sacramento Bee she can’t afford a flight home at this time and said her home’s internet connection is spotty.

“The decision by ICE has elevated the anxiety I have been experiencing since the pandemic started,” she said. “Will the U.S. government guarantee that my health is not going to be at stake?”

Sacramento colleges scramble to respond

Online-only learning has effectively been eliminated for international students, said UC Davis Asian American Studies professor Sunaina Maira, an especially fraught decision given that many universities were advised by public health officials to temporarily shift to online learning as much as possible.

“It is a catch-22 that is beyond belief,” Maira said. “They’re being put in this impossible situation. We’re being told a significant portion of the student population is basically going to be ejected from education.”

California’s foreign student population doubled from 2006 to 2016, with about 205,000 students enrolled in 2016. More than 7,000 international students were enrolled at UC Davis last fall, while Sacramento State had 750 and Sacramento City College had 139, according to representatives at each institution.

Classes at UC Davis will combine online and in-person instruction this fall. Sacramento State plans to do the same, according to Paul Hofmann, associate vice president for international programs at the California State University campus.

But Sacramento City College had planned to move entirely online for the upcoming fall semester, according to spokeswoman Kaitlyn Collignon, with exceptions only for classes that require in-person instruction such as clinical nursing programs and lab sessions. The college will have to rethink that plan following ICE’s policy, Collignon said.

“The reason some schools are online only is because there’s a health risk to in-person classes,” Chin said. “A lot of people are concerned about that. I certainly am.”

There’s no reason why ICE couldn’t extend the current exemption allowing international students to take online courses for another year, Chin said. Doubling down on the old requirement during the pandemic is “harmful” for international students, Chin said, and might also create severe economic consequences for universities.

“It’s very concerning that schools might feel like they have to take a health risk for potential financial benefit or to avoid financial harm,” Chin said. “(International students) are spending money on food, and housing, and tuition, and not getting public benefits.”

The similarity between this latest policy and the government’s response immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks is troubling, Maira said. The Patriot Act, a controversial anti-terrorism act that dramatically expanded government surveillance, was passed a month after the attacks with little debate.

Both the Patriot Act and ICE’s new policy, Maira said, can be seen as examples of how the administration used a national crisis to push forth a “nationalist agenda.”

“This is part of a long history. In that regard we shouldn’t be surprised,” Maira said. “But the fact that it’s taking place in these circumstances …That’s how authoritarianism works. People prey on a sense of national insecurity.”

The coming weeks will be a test of higher education’s moral character, Maira said. She’s hoping that more universities will follow Harvard, MIT and the UC’s example and resist complying with ICE’s new policy.

“Is the university just a cog in the machine and willing to carry out all policies, no matter how racist or inhumane they are?” Maira said. “Or will they push back and say, ‘Enough is enough’?”

A risk at home and in class

UC students and faculty urged the UC to protect their students and voiced their anxiety over the new order during public comment at Tuesday’s UC Regents’ meeting.

“This is just a political move that uses international students as scapegoats for a political agenda,” Chris Deng, a junior and international student majoring in economics at UCLA, said at the meeting. “And the worst part is that we don’t have a vote.”

The Sacramento State student, a business major, said she’s nervous about the health risk of attending in-person classes. But the journey home to her small village in India would be even more unsafe, she said. After ICE announced the policy Monday morning, she cried for hours.

“It’s scaring me,” she said. “We’ve already been facing so much anxiety being away from parents … My first thought when I woke up in the morning is, ‘What if I go back?’ In general, I’m scared for my health.”

She would have preferred to take all her classes online, she said, but the new policy has tied her hands. In-person classes are vastly preferable to the alternative, she said, which is a $5,000 plane ticket to India, three days of travel and another two weeks of self-quarantining.

Even if she returned home, she said, the internet connection in her house isn’t strong enough for her to livestream classes and do homework, and the time difference between Sacramento and her village is more than 12 hours.

Being an international student was already challenging enough, she said, as she’s only allowed to work on-campus. Some of her friends who couldn’t return home due to pandemic travel restrictions had to take out loans to pay for housing.

This latest order, she said, may undermine international students’ trust in the American school system.

“Since the beginning, we have been treated as outsiders. The name very well defines it: ‘nonresident aliens,’” she said.“I get it, we signed up for it. But we are also students ... Making things difficult for us is not the right option at the moment.”

This story was originally published July 9, 2020 at 2:54 PM.