I moved to the US and attended university only a few years after 9/11. At the time, the country was fighting wars on two fronts, Afghanistan and Iraq. The 9/11 Commission’s report had not come out yet, and there was still a great deal of sensitivity around the attacks. Country music was riding high in the charts, and it was my impression that Americans, never shy to waive the flag, wore their patriotism even more openly in those days.
Michigan State University is located in East Lansing, right next to the state capital of Lansing and while there were other industries in the area, East Lansing retains the atmosphere of a campus town because its economy is supported in large part by the 50,000-or-so university students, 10 per cent of which comprise international students (much higher than the US average of 5.9 per cent). Generally, the local community tended to be friendly towards students.
In all the years I spent in East Lansing before, during, and after grad school, I cannot recall a significant incident when I felt unwelcome or threatened for my name or the colour of my skin. If anyone had a dislike towards me, they remained outwardly civil for me not to notice, and that is all you can reasonably expect in this world. In California, I was mistaken for Hispanic a couple of times, and I got some curious looks from a gas station cashier in rural Pennsylvania, but I cannot recall an unpleasant incident when I felt discriminated against -- certainly nothing that would have made me advise prospective international student, from Pakistan or elsewhere, to abandon plans for the US as a higher-education destination. To quote Bryan Adams, ‘Those were the best days of my life’.
Fast forward to 2016, a few months before the election of Donald J Trump as president, I received a message from a friend and former supervisor at a campus job. The gist of it was, ‘You made the right choice to leave when you did’. Even in a college town with an economy reliant on international students, the atmosphere had shifted. Immigration, both legal and illegal, was a key issue in the 2016 US presidential campaign. Rhetoric during the campaign and the 2017-2021 term that followed would frequently get heated and venture into the realm of racism and xenophobia. While that had fallout for many people, barring a few cases, international students remained spared to a large degree.
Although Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, by the Spring of 2021, the environment in the US had turned sufficiently unwelcoming to discourage a family member who had been accepted to 13 out of 14 universities in North America to pass on US universities in favour of a Canadian university. At the time, I was not entirely convinced this was the right choice, but the news and events of the last three months have changed my mind. Here is a rundown of recent developments.
The shuttering of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), funded by the US State Department, received a lot of coverage. The Institute of International Education (IIE), also funded by the State Department, also appears in the firing line. This matters to international students because the IIE administers scholarships and student exchange programs for American students to study abroad and vice versa.
In Pakistan, the renowned Fulbright Program allows Pakistani students to undertake graduate studies (MA/ MS, PhD programmes) at US universities, and the Global UGRAD-Pakistan student exchange programme lets Pakistani students in undergraduate programmes take a semester at a partner university in the US. There are already reports of American students in IIE-run programmes having their funding suspended mid-programme (‘Funding freeze leaves Fulbright and study-abroad scholars stranded’, Washington Post, March 11, 2025). News broke earlier this week that the Global UGRAD-Pakistan programme has been suspended. As of now, the 2026 Fulbright programme by the US Educational Foundation in Pakistan (USEFP), under which Pakistani students study in graduate programmes at US universities, is still moving forward.
The above State Department-funded programmes account for a few hundred Pakistani students every year, accounting for a small slice of the 10,988 Pakistani students studying at American universities in 2023/24. Of the vast majority that make up the rest, many graduate students fund their education by working as research assistants or teaching assistants.
Funding for research assistants often comes from research grants secured by faculty members. The two largest agencies that provide research grants are the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), both of which reported cuts or suspensions of research funding, leaving graduate students dependent on those grants hanging mid-semester.
Many others rely on teaching assistantships, the availability of which depends on the financial health of academic departments and universities. Here, too, the current administration has been working down a list of universities, coercing them into ending diversity programmes and targeting openly pro-Palestinian students under threat of suspension of public funding that ranges into hundreds of millions of dollars for each institution. Most that I am aware of have succumbed to this pressure. Princeton University is the only one I am aware of that has stood up to the Administration’s pressure tactics so far.
Undergraduate students generally do not qualify for research or teaching assistantship positions and often pay for most of their programme and living expenses out of pocket, with a small scholarship partially offsetting the sticker price of tuition. Undergraduate and graduate students bearing these costs themselves are less likely to be affected by the funding cuts and suspensions, but that does not mean that they are free from peril. By what has been reported so far, students have been picked up by plainclothes, and sometimes masked, officials of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Several have been disappeared to a holding facility in Louisiana. Some have been denied re-entry into the US at port-of-entry and forced to fly to other countries.
The actions of ICE are sweeping and have targeted not only international students holding visas but also green card holders. A family member currently studying in a leading programme in the US was advised by her university not to travel to Pakistan until she has graduated.
A few days ago, it was widely reported that the State Department had the visas of 300 international students cancelled. Indications are that the common thread connecting all these students is their vocalising opposition to war crimes. This is now equated with anti-Semitism while turning a blind eye towards war crimes, which is all the justification needed in Trump’s America.
National Public Radio (NPR) has reported that there is now a layer of political appointees installed at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) that vets outgoing communication and what research may be published. Last month, three faculty members at Yale announced they were leaving and moving to the University of Toronto as a direct result of the Trump Administration’s policies. They are not the only ones escaping the stifling of academic freedom, the cuts, the freezes, and the weaponisation of accreditation against American universities. Several European countries are preparing programs to enable academics at American universities to move their work to Europe (The Guardian called it ‘scientific asylum’).
Today, America is still home to what are, in my view, most of the world’s best universities, with the best university system, graduating students into the most advanced economy and much of that can be credited to its ability to attract the best and brightest from across the globe. But, if the country becomes increasingly inhospitable to students and immigrants, how much longer can that remain the case?
Unless something changes, America is turning anti-intellectual and inwards. It looks like the beginning of the slow decline of American academia. I am not one to tell anyone to reconsider attending a US university, but every day I see the risks associated with it grow and that is not congruent with a leading higher education destination.
The writer (she/her) has a PhD in Education.
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