Students without Visas: An International Crisis

When students leave their countries to study at foreign universities, they usually think about forging a better future. Institutions of higher education that receive foreign students are concerned with creating an environment of international cooperation in which millions of students, teachers, and researchers can share knowledge and collaborate in many areas.

But what happens when a student’s country of origin and the destination country have a conflict of interest? International tensions between the two can severely affect the educational opportunities of these students.

Such is the case with U.S. international relations with Iran, which have become more adverse, especially this year. Iran-U.S. ties have long eroded, but new tensions erupted in September this year when the U.S. administration accused Iran of conducting strikes on oil facilities in Saudi Arabia. After the accusation, the Iranian head of state, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, announced that there would be no dialogue of any kind with the United States.

What does this mean for Iranian students admitted to universities in the United States?

At least 20 Iranian students who had managed to enter academic programs, most of them at Californian universities, had their visas revoked at the last minute before boarding their flights from Iran or connections to intermediate destinations. One of them even made it all the way to Boston, only to be intercepted and sent back. No one received an explanation or notification prior to this sudden decision.

The measure affected students who traveled after September 14, the date of the attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities. The University of California’s Board of Regents spoke out against the ban on students from entering the country and reinforced its intention to support international students and protect them from sudden and harmful measures that would disrupt their academic futures.

But the blocking of these Iranian students has some legal basis. A law put into force during 2010, requires the U.S. government to reject the visas of students whose academic careers prepare them to work in the nuclear energy sector. However, this law leaves a lot of room for interpretation by the consular officials, who are not specialists in education nor in the fields of research that are supposed to be prohibited to Iranian students.

There is a high degree of difficulty in predicting how a student will use the knowledge gained in his or her academic career in the future. An electrical engineering student could build electrical power plants in Iran to make this resource available to villages that previously did not have it, just as a journalism student with specialties in marketing and semiotics could use their skills to develop campaigns that destabilize the political and social order at the international level, possibly causing an economic crisis or armed conflict. Who decides which student is “dangerous”, and why? What criteria do you use?

The mere fact of asking those types of questions shows us that we find ourselves in a panorama of high political tension, with a fear of conflict and the weapons that the potential opponent may have to attack. The first casualties in this conflict, who do not start it, are the students, academicians, and researchers whom the pre-combatants see as potential weapons instead of people, they are the ones who pay the price of rising political tension.

The cost to them is highly personal in time, money, and irreversible life decisions. All the students who were denied a visa at the last minute had to start a process to find out the reason for the revocation. To do this, they had to travel to Armenia due to the absence of a U.S. embassy in Iran. The students also covered the costs of applying to these universities, and they paid from their own accounts for the exams necessary to prove the level of English required by the universities. Others had even started paying for their homes; the total amount of money to secure their studies represents a large capital expenditure for both the students and the families who support them.

Some of them will have the opportunity to enter programs in Canada or Europe instead, which they had initially rejected when they thought they had their opportunity in the United States assured, but the waiting and preparation time is at least two years. Both the time and the capital invested represent a significant loss for these students and victims of the shift in the geopolitical landscape that exacerbates the conflict between the United States and Iran.

An extreme case is that of Mehran, who only gave his first name for fear of repercussions that would affect the process of applying for a new visa. According to information from The Guardian, Mehran graduated from Tehran University at the age of 24 and founded an award-winning software company. With the idea of studying for a Ph.D., he applied to a university in the United States. Upon receiving the news that his visa was approved, he sold his house, gave up 40% of his company’s shares, and delegated his position to a new director. After his visa was rejected at the last minute, Mehran had to stay in Tehran, homeless and out of work. He currently lives with his parents and suffers from consequent anxiety and depression from the episode, a problem he shares with most students with similar experiences.

“This is something I can’t undo, I’m very affected, weak in my physical health,”

Mehran told the Guardian. The students impacted by these measures are still not receiving answers about the revocation of their visas or whether it will be possible to receive new ones. However, this event will accompany them for life, states Milad Aghajohari, another student who was detained at the airport, having been barred from entering the United States.

 “All the passengers saw me as if I were a criminal; it’s very hard for me to forget this moment.”

He said. Situations such as the one that happened to Aghajohari and his compatriots whose visas were revoked have consequences not only for the victims of these arbitrary measures but also for those who see them as outsiders, because it contributes to creating an image that certain ethnic groups pose a threat, in this case, the Muslims. The social implications of these stereotypes are disastrous in the long term and support the growth of xenophobia in the United States, a country that already has serious problems in combating different forms of racism and social inequal
ity.

The case of China

Another situation of political tensions in international relations handled by the United States is that of visa status for Chinese students and academicians. More than 200 of them have been affected by a hike in the rejection of student visa applications and the cancellation of visas for the academicians.

This one is the result of a growing fear of espionage in the United States and the flight of technology and intellectual property from the country.

“It’s normal for China and the United States to compete and cooperate, and everyone plays by the rules, but now the United States is nervous about the influence of Chinese academicians and decided to play dirty and cancel their visas.”

Says Wang Wen, Executive Dean of the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies. These political maneuvers by the United States could be part of a strategy of commercial distancing in order to reduce the dependence of the country on China; it is motivated by the commercial war between both powers.

Most Chinese academicians whose visas were canceled were notified of the fact after their last trip to the United States. The country offered them the option to apply for a single-entry visa, but the academicians pointed out that the required questions are invasive and unnecessary.

The academicians in the social sciences are the most vulnerable to this measure, explained Jin Canrong, Associate Dean of the Renmin University School of International Studies in China. “Social science academicians are under greater scrutiny because their research commonly involves China’s policies and communications with government departments; however, this type of research is normal in Western countries. No normal country would treat academicians who research policies as spies. This is ridiculous,” commented the Dean.

Sofía García-Bullé

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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0