Opinion | Shame on Trump for using international students as political pawns

The Trump administration’s aborted visa rule change, which threatened deportation for foreign students in the US, was political and desperate. Kudos to the US universities and companies who stood up and fought to right a wrong

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Students and pedestrians walked through the Yard at Harvard University, after the school said in March it would move to virtual instruction. Photo: Reuters

Published: 6:00am, 17 Jul 2020Updated: 6:07am, 17 Jul 2020

Early last week, in the wee hours of the morning here in Hong Kong, my WhatsApp started to pop with messages. Some were from anxious friends. Others came from family, including my niece who has been studying law in the US.

“Today was a hard day. “This morning the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced that international students whose classes are all online in the fall will have to leave. My courses are all online. We don’t know what to do,” she said.

I was shocked to hear that the United States had decided, with no warning or consultation, to throw the lives of 1.1 million international students – including 370,000 from China and 7,500 from Hong Kong – into even further chaos by threatening them with deportation during the pandemic.

The decision to keep schools open, or closed, at the appropriate time is an extremely difficult calculation. I realise that in both Hong Kong and the US, governments need to take sudden and sometimes unpopular measures to protect public health. Even so, the abrupt US decision to send all international students back home if their school has gone fully online was poorly thought out, inflexible and cruel.

Let’s look at the timeline of what happened. In mid-March, when the US began reacting to the pandemic, many universities began moving instruction online, or ending semesters early. The Trump administration, reasonably, gave temporary extensions to international students on the F-1 visa.