Batten Down the Escape Hatches!

"There's a fear that this kind of restriction will enlarge into a wider community, considering the geopolitical tensions nowadays around the world, so the fear is definitely there."

"If the U.S. is really a champion of academic freedom, what you should do is not restrict this kind of communications between different countries of the world."

Jacky Li, 3rd-yr environmental studies major, University of California, Berkley

"We aren't bringing in anyone from Gaza, Syria, Somalia, Yemen or Libya or anywhere else that threatens our security."

"[We will] revoke the student visas of radical anti-American and antisemitic foreigners at our colleges and universities [in response to campus protests]."

President-elect Donald Trump ... October 2023 election campaign

Cornell University has issued a travel advisory to international students.  LightRocket via Getty Images

Uncertainty over the status of foreign students studying at U.S. universities and colleges with the accession of Donald J. Trump back to the White House appears to have caused a frisson of excited responses, where a growing list of American academic institutes are now advising their international students to make haste in returning to campus before the president-elect is inaugurated, to ensure that they can, after all, return to their studies in the United States. 

In anticipation of travel bans being once again instituted, over a dozen schools have now issued travel advisories. For anyone facing uncertainty over whether they may be able to remain in the United States who depends on an academic visas, the advice is to return to campus from abroad before January 20. 

In January 2017 then-President Trump had issued an executive order banning travel to the U.S. by citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries: Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan Libya, Somalia and Yemen; just incidentally countries where the U.S. was or had been at war with, and whose nationals often turn out to be problematic in observing American laws, their faith in Islam leading them to socially incongruent methods of 'expression'.

Either barred from flight or detained at U.S. airports after landing, travellers who included both students and faculty, tourists, businessmen, and visitors, faced unpleasant interdiction. Some of those countries were removed in time while others were added; some 15 in total and over 40,000 individuals had been refused visas resulting from the ban. A ban rescinded when President Biden took office in 2021.

US. colleges and  universities enrolled over 1.1 million international students during the 2023-24 school year; students from India and China accounting for over half of all international students in the U.S. While roughly 43,800 had arrived from the 15 countries that had been affected by Mr. Trump's original travel restrictions. The question hovers as to what the Trump transition team knows is to come, although Mr. Trump himself has iterated his intention to revive the travel ban and expand it with new "ideological screening" for non-U.S. citizens.

He made it clear that his intention is to bar "dangerous lunatics, haters, bigots and maniacs". The list of institutions advising international students to return before inauguration day and to prepare for potential delays at immigration control, includes Harvard and Brown, Boston schools like Northeastern University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and others around the country, from Johns Hopkins University to the University of Southern California.

Cornell University informed its students that a travel ban involving the 13 countries President Trump previously targeted "is likely to go into effect soon after inauguration", and it is likely that other nations could be placed on the list; in particular China and India.