LETTER: NO “US” AND THEM IN DEFENDING INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS

Last week, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced a new rule requiring international students to leave the US if their classes in fall 2020 will be conducted only online rather than face-to-face. Higher education institutions immediately decried the decision. Many faculty members have signed petitions and open letters or written op-eds  this decision. Harvard and MIT quickly filed a lawsuit, and leadership at UMass Amherst and schools across the region and nation have also vowed to fight it and defend the educational careers of their international students. 

Many public arguments have emphasized the financial boon of international tuition dollars. While these economic benefits are real, we worry that framing students in terms of their monetary value sends the wrong message, and may even contribute to the same dehumanization of our students that the cruel and pointless #StudentBan capitalizes on. 

In this context, we raise our voices as an interdisciplinary group of faculty at UMass Amherst who collectively have decades of experience of working with international students. We are also scholars of migration, with expertise in the complexity of immigration law and policy and the many factors driving human mobility.

Our message is simple: international students are an integral part of our communities. For anyone living in the Pioneer Valley, these students may well be among your neighbors and friends. But for professors and students at UMass and at the other institutions of higher education in our area, international students are all that and more. They are part and parcel of our efforts to pursue knowledge and educate a new generation. They enrich every aspect of university life – contributing to classroom discussions as students, educating undergraduates as graduate instructors or TAs, and expanding research in all fields from anthropology to astrophysics, communication to computer science. 

Therefore, we feel compelled to write, not only to protest ICE’s unjust and unwise decision, but also to express the deep appreciation we have for our international students for all of the contributions they make to the educational endeavors and scholarly pursuits to which we have dedicated ourselves.

International students enrich our classrooms. For example, one of us, as a linguistic anthropologist, teaches courses about language and culture, helping students understand communication around pressing issues of the day such as climate change, health crises, and racism. International students have had the mind-expanding experience of learning to communicate in more than one language across cultural boundaries. Many come from societies where multilingualism is the norm, where different language hierarchies emerge from particular histories of migration. They offer insights in class discussions that challenge assumptions that monolingual English-speaking students make about how language works, deepening our collective conversations. These contributions often end up incorporated into future teaching. 

International students also enrich our universities as research institutions. Foreign students bring diverse perspectives and social grounding that benefit their broader university communities. Research by the Michigan social scientist Scott E. Page, among others, shows that intellectual diversity improves groups’ ability to solve problems, whether in research labs or in workplaces of all kinds. Often, groups need someone who sees things from a different angle to provide the missing ingredient to solving a challenging problem. Students raised in other countries with different cultural experiences are disproportionately likely to come up with those sorts of insights. 

These unique perspectives bring real benefits to the research enterprise. For one of us (Mednicoff), personal experience as a former Fulbright student and faculty Scholar to several Middle Eastern countries has shown how international collaboration is essential for research into solving global problems. His work with foreign scholars has led to multinational research teams anchored here at UMass, working on important issues of law and policy. These international research ties also feed back into UMass students’ experience, enhancing teaching about comparative public policy and the critical region of the Middle East. 

The perspectives of international students are particularly important in our present age, when so many of the most pressing problems are international in scope. Climate change, refugees and other displaced people, and, more recently the COVID-19 pandemic, defy national borders and require transnational solutions. For example, UMass School of Public Policy recently showcased a former student in India who just co-authored a book on distance learning in Indian secondary schools, a topic of heightened importance at this moment given the ongoing pandemic. Current UMass students have been important to emerging intellectual and policy debates about key Middle Eastern current focal points of US policy, such as Iran and Syria. Addressing these policy problems requires well-educated specialists working in diverse societies who understand both international research tools and the dynamics of multiple societies. 

The proposed new ICE regulations warrant strong opposition because they are unjust and terribly burdensome for foreign students. We appreciate basic ethical arguments of this nature, as have been made by the Chancellor of our university among many others. We also recognize the merits of instrumental arguments based on international students’ sizable contributions to the American economy, and their practical value as students, workers, and teachers within their American institutions. But from our perspective, any argument about benefits “they” bring ultimately misses the point. We value international students because they are a part of “us.”  A threat to student visas is a threat to the educational and research missions of the American university. We stand with our students and will defend our community and its values in whatever way we can.

Lynnette Arnold, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, UMass Amherst

David Mednicoff, Professor, School of Public Policy and Chair, Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies, UMass Amherst

Scott Blinder, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, UMass Amherst