Trump administration proposes revamping visas so students would have to apply for an extension after fixed terms of no more than four years. Some students would have to reapply after two years, depending on their country of origin.
So, this is happening. Basically the Trump admin has proposed massive changes to the rules for international student visas. Highlights include but are not limited to...
There will be a 4-year limit on student visas. Note that these rules also apply to PhD students, whose programs generally take upwards of 5 years to complete. The visa can be extended, but you have to show that there’s a good reason it’s taking you longer than 4 years, which means more paperwork, and nobody needs to be dealing with visa logistics in the middle of writing their thesis.
This limit is 2 years for certain countries. This is based on “terrorism risk” and the percentage of students from each country who overstay their visas. Would you go to undergrad in a country where you could be kicked out halfway through the program? No? Didn’t think so.
The “grace period” after visa expiration is changed from 60 to 30 days. This doesn’t seem like a big deal until you realize that the OPT application (which many students apply for when applying for jobs after graduation) can’t be submitted more than 90 days before visa expiration... And that you’re supposed to give visa services 90 days to wrap up your paperwork. If there was an issue with your initial application, the amount of wiggle room you have to deal with the slow back-and-forth of visa bureaucracy just got cut in half.
It limits English language training to a maximum of 2 years, over a person’s entire lifetime. You can see why this would be a problem for, say, an English major.
To borrow a quote from the article: The last thing we want to do is make people think twice before coming here and make them think a) they’re not welcome and b) they might get booted out of the country before they finish their course of study. If we’re going to do something like this, we better have a very good reasons, and presenting a handful of anecdotes about people who stayed too long is not a good enough reason.
The full text of the proposed changes, including detailed info on how to comment on the changes via official channels, can be found here.
The changes are also open for public comment here for the next 30 days.
I strongly encourage y’all to comment, spread the word, call your senators, and vote. The last #StudentBan they tried to push through died before it could come to fruition because we, and the universities, rallied against it; let’s hope this one meets the same fate.
