Some Ivy League schools have been advising foreign students to rush back from their Christmas break before Donald Trump becomes president and introduces travel bans.
Top institutions including Harvard and NYU have given out recommendations for international pupils in light of Trump’s pledges to instate more hardline immigration policies on his return to the White House on January 20.
There were more than 1.1 million international students enrolled in American colleges and universities over the last academic year, and many are now likely to be weighing up their futures in light of the incoming new regime.
‘It’s a scary time for international students,’ recent graduate Pramath Pratap Misra, who is from India, told CNN.
The 23-year-old earned a bachelor’s degree in political science this year from NYU – the school with the most international students in the US during the last academic year at 27,000.
Trump has pledged to launch what he calls ‘the biggest mass deportation in American history’ during his second term in office.
Within hours of his inauguration as America’s 47th president, Trump is expected to sign a series of executive orders, including a radical move to close the border, citing an immigration crisis.
Trump has also promised to expand his previous travel ban on people from majority Muslim countries, and the revocation of student visas of ‘radical anti-American and antisemitic foreigners’.
Foreign students usually come to the US on nonimmigrant visas which allow them to study in the country without carving out a legal pathway for them to stay post-graduation.
The first Trump administration made moves to restrict the entry of all non-American students and workers – and the issue of immigration is even more of a hot-button topic this time around.
