With students at many colleges wrapping up final exams this week and preparing for their winter break, a number of schools, including Harvard, U.S.C. and Cornell, are advising their international students to return to campus before President-elect Donald J. Trump is inaugurated on Jan. 20, the New York Times reports. During his last administration, Trump imposed restrictions on entry to the United States from seven majority-Muslim countries, a policy that stranded thousands of students who were abroad at the time. Later in his term, Trump added more countries to the restricted travel list.
Colleges are expecting action early in the Trump administration and are warning students to prepare for possible delays at the border and in the processing of paperwork, along with an imminent travel ban. “A travel ban is likely to go into effect soon after inauguration,” Cornell’s Office of Global Learning warned students on its website late last month, advising them to be back in the United States before the start of spring-semester classes on Jan. 21. “The ban is likely to include citizens of the countries targeted in the first Trump administration: Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Myanmar, Sudan, Tanzania, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, and Somalia. New countries could be added to this list, particularly China and India.”
Comparable advisories and guidance have come from Harvard, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania and Wesleyan University. The advice is precautionary in nature, since the policies of the new administration remain uncertain. Trump has said that he wanted to bring back or strengthen some of the travel restrictions he imposed in his first term. At an event in September with a Republican donor, Miriam Adelson, Trump said he would “seal our border and bring back the travel ban,” apparently referring to his restrictions on travel from some majority-Muslim countries. He also said that he would “ban refugee resettlement from terror-infested areas like the Gaza Strip.” More than 1.1 million students from outside the United States were enrolled in American colleges and universities in the 2023-24 academic year, according to Open Doors, a data project partially funded by the U.S. State Department.
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