Immigration

Fiona Harrigan | From the October 2025 issue

Suguru Onda was one year away from finishing his Ph.D. at Brigham Young University (BYU) when he received potentially life-altering news. His name had appeared in a criminal records check and his visa had been revoked. He would need to return to his native Japan right away or else face deportation.

Onda had accrued a few speeding tickets during his six years of study in the United States, but that seemed an implausible reason for losing his visa. The only other explanation, his lawyer Adam Crayk told Deseret News, was a 2019 fishing offense in which members of his church group harvested more fish than his license permitted. The charge was dismissed and Onda continued his research on computer vision and machine learning.

When Donald Trump retook the presidency in January, his administration started to revoke legal status for international students it deemed "pro-Hamas." But Onda "has little to no footprint on social media, doesn't speak out about politics, and, to our knowledge, was not involved in any protests on college campuses," reported Adam Small of Utah's KSL NewsRadio.

The same day that Onda and several other international students sued over their visa revocations, the government notified BYU that Onda's legal status was restored. It was "as if it was never revoked," Crayk told KSL.

Although it backed down in this particular case after Onda fought back, as of late April the State Department had revoked the legal status of over 1,800 students at more than 280 colleges and universities, according to an Inside Higher Ed report. That includes students who participated in campus protests last year, even if their participation was nonviolent and noncriminal. Students reportedly had their legal status revoked for harmless traffic violations. With the State Department using artificial intelligence to cancel visas and offering little justification for revocations, international students are worried about doing or saying anything that might ruffle federal feathers—and unsure what, exactly, could trigger a change in their legal status.

That is making some prospective international students think twice about where they want to study. International student enrollment in U.S. postgraduate programs for the 2025–26 school year is down 13 percent, according to survey data from NAFSA: Association of International Educators. "The uncertainty that international students currently in the U.S. have experienced has had a ripple effect on prospective students and how they're looking to the U.S.," NAFSA CEO Fanta Aw told Marketplace.

The U.S. has long been the leading study destination for international talent, but the government has been threatening that advantage both by making it difficult for students to work legally in the U.S. after graduation and through more overt crackdowns on specific nationalities and universities. During the first Trump administration (before the COVID-19 pandemic hit), those policies led to an 11.4 percent drop in F-1 visa (a nonimmigrant visa for foreign students) enrollment. The second Trump administration seems dedicated to making that even worse.

These crackdowns don't just mean lost students. They mean companies that won't be founded, economic activity that won't be generated, and groundbreaking research that won't happen in the United States.

The U.S. contains 38 of the universities in Times Higher Education's 2025 rankings of the 100 best universities in the world, and seven of the top 10. The quality of American higher education and the prospect of working in the U.S. after graduation are major reasons why this country hosts more international students than any other nation does.

Today, the U.S. hosts 1.1 million international students, who comprise about 6 percent of its total university student population. Foreign students make up far larger shares at some top-ranked universities. As of fall 2023, 44 percent of Carnegie Mellon University's undergraduate and graduate students came from abroad, according to a New York Times report. About 40 percent of undergraduates and graduate students at Columbia University, 39 percent at Johns Hopkins University, 30 percent at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and 28 percent at Harvard University were international students. Cornell University, Duke University, Stanford University, and Yale University all have a student body that is one-quarter nonnative.

America's international student population has risen each year since 2000, with a few exceptions: following stricter post-9/11 visa processing, during the beginning of the first Trump administration, and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Short of government-imposed barriers and black swan events, American universities remain magnetic to international students.

"Higher education is, effectively, a major American export—and one where the foreign students consuming it do so in American communities, also spending money on housing, groceries and books there," reported The New York Times in May. International students "contributed about $43 billion to the U.S. economy during the 2023–24........

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