Though I am at peace with everything one thing that happens recently does invoke emotions within me: the experience that international students are having in the United States. I saw the video of the Tufts University student and the scene looked too familiar to me for a reason: it was what happened in my nightmares when I was studying in college.
But this writing isn’t to talk to the people who already know what the international student / immigrant experience in the United States is like. I am sharing my experience as an international student in the United States in hopes that it will help people understand WHY students get in a precarious situation with their visas in the first place.
I’m from Korea and Korea is one of the countries that is on good terms with the United States. The terms are SO good, we actually don’t even need a visa to temporarily visit the United States; we can apply for a ESTA online and we’re good to visit for 90 days. But this was not always the case. Prior to the late 2000’s every single purpose of visit needed to apply for a visa back home. This was the case for me and this was the case for my parents.
It’s easy for Koreans and other immigrants from “good-term” countries to dismiss the difficulty of arriving at the United States, but when I remember the past I remember the process being extremely taxing on the body and mind. You’re applying for the visa in your home country, but when you enter the United States embassy you suddenly see real guns for the first time on display on another human being. You are speaking to someone behind bulletproof glass and they are ruthlessly unforgiving when it comes to checking every detail of your papers.
The crazy part is (this happened to my parents), sometimes you had the right set of papers but the officer would just deem you as “suspicious” and your visa would be denied. But this has a point: isn’t it up to the homeland security officials to take responsibility for any potential security breach into the United States? Moreover, it’s not that your visa is permanently rejected (in most cases), so you can always apply for a new one.
There are people who can afford to do that, they have other options or aren’t in a rush. But the people who cannot afford to do that… Tend to have time-related constraints like meeting the school’s start date. Suppose you have your eyes set on American education and you got everything checked out, worked hard, and even got into the school of your dream. The start of the semester is coming soon and you are packing your things, getting ready to go… Then your visa gets denied.
What good is an acceptance letter if you cannot attend the school in the first place? And when you miss the entrance date, then from the school’s perspective you paid and said you would come but you just no-showed. Of course this is why every school has an international students’ affairs office, but these aftermath of such a timing mismatch and the financial / time loss that comes from it is exactly the stressor for all international scholars. Especially for scholars who come from “bad-term” countries.
And what determines “good-term” and “bad-term”? That changes a lot too, and you can’t really tell when your fate will be that of a “bad-term” peer scholar. Just look at the Canada-US relationship pre-2025 and post-2025. Look at what the public perception of China suffered pre-covid and post-covid. When your entire status depends on these factors that constantly change, you are always going to be on edge.
Suppose you finally come to the United States. International students typically have a very different financial burden compared to the American peers because international students typically cannot apply to scholarships and financial aid as those are often funded by federal or state government. So higher education exacts a very heavy lump sum total (which can be beneficial when compared with the time-based burden of student loans), that puts international students at a very big deficit from the start.
And this is where all the potential status problems lie.
Because you are already at a deficit, unless you’re already rich enough you cannot really afford to go back and for to your home country that often. This is usually not a problem but what happens when you have an emergency like a death in the family? You may scramble to afford the flight back home but to come back to the United States again you’re at an even bigger deficit than before.
What happens when you get sick? Not many countries have the same healthcare system as America and there are countless stories of international students being blindsided by something that would be a trivial hospital visit in their home country. So after experiencing it once, they are likely to have all their health problems accumulate until they go back home. Unfortunately these are learned by hindsight and what do you do as a student when you get charged thousands of dollars for an ambulance call and an atypical surgery?
When you study in the United States the prospect of working in the United States becomes more real and attractive to you. But the work visa is yet another cause of woe for so many immigrants, which I won’t go into detail for this writing. There is one part of the work visa that needs to be discussed, though: the transitional period where you’re a student and are waiting for your work visa approval. It is yet another timing race and nobody can guarantee (or quite frankly, cares) to make the papers line up on time. This is where a lot of overstaying happens, because the risk of overstaying is preferable compared to booking flights back and forth with moving all of your stuff to storage.
Most affluent international students don’t have to worry about these things because their ideologies already closely align that of America’s by virtue of being rich, and even if they get deported they have a pretty affluent life waiting for them back home. America was optional for many of my peers in college. The recent events surrounding international scholars are generally targeting those who do not have the affluence nor the luck to make all the student visa stars align.
I got my permanent residency in 2020 and am eligible for application to citizenship this year. But there are reports of permanent residents and citizens being captured. There are implicit benefits I get because I am an Asian and I did everything “right” at the cost of my mental health, but the truth of the matter is: there are still ways my life can be impacted outside of my wishes and will.
If you are an international student, that is the takeaway: your happiness cannot be dependent on anything, not even the once-all-glorious ideal of a country to live in. You must find agency and happiness within yourself so that you can be happy inside of a detainment cell, in your home country, or in death. Recent events are a sobering reminder that nothing is guaranteed to us but nevertheless as long as we are alive we can persevere and find refuge in ourselves.
One can think, “if America is so bad for you, why don’t you leave?” and for the longest time I hated the idea of a non-American life and I chased the American life for it equated to my happiness. But I find the advice that I give for others applies to myself as well: if I can be happy in America, I can be happy anywhere else. I happen to be in America despite all the seemingly negative things because I love America. This applies to all the immigrants who overcame all the obstacles of immigration to leave a contribution to America. Every contribution to America from immigrants was from a love to the ideals of what this country stands for. And despite all the recent events this still remains true for me. But regardless of my life, things can change. Thankfully as a Buddhist I am more than equipped to handle any change.
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