As I watched the recent video of federal agents descending on Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University Ph.D. student and Turkish national, I thought of Wai-Hing Tso—the first Chinese student to graduate from Georgetown University, where I am teaching this semester.
His yearbook picture, taken in 1924, depicts a serious young man, black hair combed back, with thin glasses and a tense expression. Georgetown likes to highlight Tso, who graduated from its nascent School of Foreign Service, as a symbol of the university’s global credentials and history of positive engagement with China.
We know little about Tso besides his entry in the yearbook. But despite the differences in circumstance, nationality, moment in history, and treatment by the U.S. government, Ozturk and Tso have an underlying similarity: They are symbols of the United States’ attempt to balance its conflicting desires to engage with the world and shield itself from it.
Since early March, the Trump administration has ratcheted up its assault on international and noncitizen students at U.S. colleges and universities, an agenda that has included revoking visas, accusing these students of collusion with terrorist groups, making daylight arrests, and attempting deportations—some of which are undergoing court battles.
The administration claims that it is culling campuses of “people that are supportive of movements that run counter to the foreign policy of the United States,” particularly targeting those whom it accuses of supporting Hamas—even though some detainees have only mild connections to last year’s protests over the Israel-Hamas war.
But the recent wave of detainments and visa revocations, while chilling to the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, are only the latest and most feverish stage in a longer history of suspicion toward international students.
For a century, many U.S. policymakers have agonized over whether these students present an opportunity to imprint American virtues or a threat to national security.
The number of international students arriving in the United States grew over the 19th century. At the time, non-European countries seeking to strengthen themselves saw an American education as a valuable source of training. China’s Qing dynasty sponsored trips to attend U.S. schools for several batches of young elites, who would ideally return home with advanced knowledge. (Liang Tun Yen, the last Qing dynasty foreign minister, was the pitcher for an all-Qing men’s baseball team called “the Orientals” at Yale University.) In 1882, Sutematsu Oyama graduated from Vassar College and became the first Japanese woman to earn a U.S. degree. She came to the United States as part of the Iwakura mission, which was an effort by the Meiji government to learn from the West and modernize.
The number of international students grew sharply during the early 20th century. In 1928, there were 9,113 international students attending U.S. universities; by 1966, there were more than 100,000. Following World War II, a new wave of decolonizing and rapidly developing countries sent students to the United States’ higher education institutions, whose first-rate technical training and resources were extremely attractive to the world’s youth.
As the number of non-American students at U.S. universities skyrocketed, Washington began to consider their presence critically. Starting in the 1950s, the United States supported and encouraged international students to attend its universities, particularly through the Fulbright Program. Signed into law by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, the Fulbright program sponsors foreign citizens to study or conduct research in the United States and supports U.S. citizens to study, teach, and research abroad. Today, around 4,000 students come to the United States each year to study on a Fulbright.
As historian Paul Kramer has argued, U.S. government support for international students was not just a benevolent gift: As the Cold War raged, these students were seen as a soft-power opportunity. Students could come to the United States, be impressed by their educations, and spread American ideas to their home countries when they left. Graduate students were also seen as an important source of skilled labor, particularly when geopolitical rivalry put a premium on recruiting top engineers and scientists and maintaining technological advantages over the Soviets.
Washington extended this soft-power thinking to other groups, too: Beginning in 1949 and lasting throughout the Cold War, the U.S. government trained foreign soldiers in the United States through the military assistance program, brought numerous visitors to the country at cost through the Exchange of Persons Program, and even trained teachers from developing countries at U.S. schools.
But not all foreign visitors and students were awed by what they saw in the United States. Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian theorist later known for his promotion of violent jihad, was a graduate student in the United States from 1948 to 1950 and came away deeply offended by what he saw as American vulgarity and promiscuity.
Racism was another issue. Park Jong In, a South Korean officer training at Fort Benning in the 1950s, noted that “the discrimination against Negroes in the Southern region” was “terribly distasteful.” The White House was embarrassed by high-profile incidents in which foreign dignitaries were discriminated against.
Guidebooks for foreign students sometimes sought to downplay the issue of race. “You have probably heard many stories about … our extreme wealth, extreme poverty, and discrimination against racial or religious minorities,” stated a 1959 Defense Department guidebook for international military trainees, “Some truth may be found in these reports, but the actual circumstances may not have been described appropriately.”
By the 1970s, there was a growing rupture between the foreign-policy and national security arms of the U.S. government regarding international students. While U.S.-China rapprochement led to more exchange programs, the FBI conducted security checks on Chinese graduate students. Then-FBI Director William Webster, referring to exchange students, said in a 1979 interview that “if they are not coming over as espionage agents, they are coming over as intelligence gatherers.”
There was further panic in the 1980s, when newspaper coverage described foreign students as a “flood,” and some argued that bringing highly-skilled international students had been too successful, eroding the pool of “home-grown” talent.
Still, through the 1990s, the presence of international students was seen as an opportunity for Washington. Events such as the Tiananmen Square massacre offered the George H. W. Bush administration an opportunity to demonstrate the United States as a safe refuge for international students, and the fall of the Soviet Union increased enthusiasm for efforts to influence ex-Soviet students.
It was the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that dramatically raised the specter of the student as a threat, as several hijackers entered or remained in the United States on student visas. In the years afterward, Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s predecessor—the Immigration and Naturalization Service—implemented the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, which allowed for the efficient sharing of information and tracking of international students. With increased visa requirements, screenings, and new federal procedures in place, international student enrollments in the United States declined for the first time between 2002 and 2005.
Enrollments recovered but dipped again under President Donald Trump’s first term following the infamous “Muslim ban,” a 2017 executive order banning entry for nationals from seven countries with predominantly Muslim populations. The Trump administration also gave numerous signals that international students were a national security threat and not welcome. In 2020, Trump issued an executive order canceling visas for more than 1,000 Chinese graduate students and attempted to cancel the Optional Practical Training Program, an incentive that currently grants more than 276,000 foreign students the ability to work in the United States after graduation.
The casting of international students as a threat is bigger than Trump. The Biden administration, for example, initially continued the Justice Department’s China Initiative, begun in 2018 and ended in 2022, which purported to identify Chinese spies in the United States. But Washington’s anti-espionage efforts had a distinct racial bias, meaning that the program largely failed in its spy-catching objectives and instead often targeted Asian and Asian American scholars and scientists at tremendous cost to their careers and livelihood. It also incentivized Chinese scientists to leave the United States, with departures rising by 75 percent from 2018 to 2024.
Meanwhile, under President Joe Biden, the FBI produced documentaries on Chinese espionage, prominently portraying Chinese scientists in the United States as spies, and former FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before Congress about what then-Sen. Marco Rubio described as the “counterintelligence risk posed to U.S. national security from Chinese students.” Efforts to raise the alarm about Chinese students in the name of national security greatly damaged the United States’ image as a welcoming place for highly skilled students to pursue an education or make a career.
The discourse portraying international students as threats was further inflamed in recent years by campus protests against the Israel-Hamas war. Flattening the myriad protests as “pro-Hamas,” future Attorney General Pam Bondi stated in 2023 that students at U.S. universities who supported Hamas needed “to be taken out of our country, or the FBI needs to be interviewing them right away.” Since taking office, Bondi has said that international students “need to be kicked out” if they threaten the safety of American students.
But as the Trump administration’s detainments of graduate students such as Ozturk have shown, the standards by which an international student constitutes a threat are dangerously unclear. Following Ozturk’s detention, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson claimed that she had engaged in activities in support of Hamas but did not offer supporting evidence, and no charges have yet been filed against her.
While the Trump administration’s current policies represent a new escalation against international students, they are by no means the opening shots of this conflict. For decades, the United States has struggled to decide whether the foreign student is a conduit of its influence—a Wai-Hing Tso—or a threat to its safety—a Rumeysa Ozturk.
The truth, however, is that neither figure fits in those rigid categories. To be clear, international students are not threats. Far from home and family—and subject to visa revocation should they commit a crime—international students have served as essential contributors to their academic and local communities. So long as foreign students have come to the United States, the only universal truth is that the interior selves of students have never fit into neat boxes.
It seems unlikely that the Trump administration will take this lesson to heart. For the foreseeable future, foreigners at campuses around the country will be increasingly asked a question for which there is no answer: What kind of student are you?
The post The U.S. Has Never Known What to Do With Foreign Students appeared first on Foreign Policy.
