Weaponising Visa

The Donald Trump administration in the US has been on a campaign against universities there ever since he got elected. Anti-wokeism was a main plank of his election campaign and educational institutions were thought to be its cen­tres. And then came the agitation against Israel in the campuses which led to accusations of anti-Semitism. After he took office, universities are being coerced to get students under control by tougher regulations. Those who didn't toe the line, like Harvard University, have seen their grants revoked. Recently, they were barred from taking foreign students.

The latest salvo is now not against universities, but foreign students. The administration asked its embassies to stop doing interviews for student visas. This was to give it time to look at the social media accounts of applicants. The political news outlet Politico got a copy of a cable sent to the embassies that said: "Effective immediately, in preparation for an expansion of required social media screening and vetting, consular sec­tions should not add any additional student or exchange visitor (F, M, and J) visa appointment capac­ity until further guidance is issued septel, which we anticipate in the coming days." After that, Secretary of State Marco Rubio also announced that they would aggressively revoke visas of Chinese students with connections to the Communist Party.

While India is not the target of these measures, Indian students are becoming collateral damage. Harvard has close to 800 of them whose future is now uncertain. And a stay on the student visa process means that those who were preparing to study in the US will have to wait. India has the maximum number of students in the US, crossing China in the 2023-24 academic years, ac­cording to Open Doors, an organisation thay tracks the data. As many as 331,602 students were present in the US, a leap of 23 per cent from the previous year.

Students planning to go to the US also don't know what exactly will be vetted on their social media accounts. They could, for instance, have just forwarded or reposted a political meme, or made a comment on Gaza to come under the radar of suspicion.