The Trump administration has made no secret of its hatred of international students—and if it can’t stop them from coming to the U.S., it’s going to figure out a way to kick them out early. The Department of Homeland Security just published a proposed rule that would limit international students to a four-year stay here, regardless of their degree program.
There must be a room at the DHS where Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her merry band of bigots just come up with the worst, most jingoistic ideas possible. Actually, it’s probably just Vice President JD Vance reciting his favorite parts of the Great Replacement Theory and a bunch of groypers taking notes. No matter the impetus, there seems to be a near-infinite supply of this sort of thinking.
Currently, foreign students can stay here as long as they are enrolled, full-time students. To anyone not absolutely blinkered with anti-immigrant racism, that makes sense. Sometimes, undergraduate programs take longer than four years. Sometimes, people finish their bachelor’s degree and shift to a master’s or doctoral program. This is how school works. It’s not nefarious. It’s not a Chinese plot or something. But according to the Trump administration, having international students stay in the country for more than four years means they have “taken advantage of U.S. generosity” and are “posing safety risks, costing untold amounts of taxpayer dollars, and disadvantaging U.S. citizens.”
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Under the proposed rule, to stay past four years, students would have to be assessed by DHS. The administration’s dozens of pages attempting to justify this are just straight-up nativism, always grounded in the assumption that foreign students are ready to engage in a little light immigration fraud every time they get a chance as opposed to just wanting to stay and finish their MBA or PhD. The doughy racists that populate the administration are terrified of pluralism, with the proposed rule describing the admission of international students as something that “places research universities and the nation at risk for economic, academic, or military espionage by foreign students.”
Requiring international students to let whatever fifth-tier bigoted college dropouts the administration eventually hires determine whether they can be allowed to stay and finish their degree is untenable. Even if the administration weren’t so transparently committed to mass deportation, why would a bright, eager, well-off foreign student choose to come to a country that may or may not let you finish your degree?
Of course, this administration is transparently committed to mass deportation, so what this really looks like is a way for DHS to restrict the speech, study, and activism of foreign students. If they don’t toe the literal party line and show sufficient fealty to Trump, they’re out. This isn’t speculation. The administration already sent a very clear message with the illegal detention of Rümeysa Öztürk.
Pretending foreign students are dangerous or that they displace American students isn’t just xenophobic nonsense—it’s also economic nonsense. International students contributed $44 billion to the U.S. economy during the 2023-2024 academic year and supported over 378,000 jobs. Rather than taking rightful spots away from Barron Trump, foreign students usually pay more in tuition, get less scholarship money, and are not eligible for many forms of financial aid. They’re an asset to schools, not a burden.
This move joins the administration’s efforts to block schools from offering scholarships for Dreamers and trying to prevent Harvard University from enrolling foreign students. And of course there’s the part where they have already disappeared students who are here legally.
All of these gambits have borne fruit. As the 2025-2026 academic school year starts, there has been almost a 50% drop in students from India from the previous year. The number of students arriving on visas in July 2025 saw a steep drop of 28.5% from July 2024.
Actually, that dropoff could have been bigger, because some international students who were already here and currently enrolled may not have left the United States over the summer to return home or vacation, because schools told those students to stay here so that the administration couldn’t block them from returning.
Uh, that does not make things better? Nice job withdrawing us from the world stage, conservatives. Less money, less expertise, less participation in the global community. Make America Great Again, indeed.