By Patricia Lopez / Bloomberg Opinion
As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump was so keen to retain foreigners who choose to study in the U.S. that he made an unusual pledge: “You graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country,” he told the “All-In” podcast last June. “And that includes junior colleges.”
It was a surprising promise, not only because of Trump’s long history of anti-immigration rhetoric and policy but also because, well, it made sense. Foreign students attend college in the U.S. on temporary visas. Unless they can persuade an employer to hire them upon graduation, they typically have only a few months to leave the country.
If only Candidate Trump could get a meeting with President Trump. Maybe he could convince him that giving green cards to graduates who wish to stay in the U.S., and contribute their talents to the country that educated them, is a great deal — for America and for Donald Trump.
Instead, since taking office, the administration has embarked on a policy of canceling student visas over the smallest of infractions. Many students were unaware their visas had been yanked until they were arrested. In the space of a few months, more than 1,800 students at 280 colleges and universities had their visas revoked and were marked for deportation. They include Mahmoud Khalil of Columbia and Rumeysa Ozturk of Tufts, who were arrested for, respectively, demonstrating and writing against Israel’s actions against Palestinians, as well as Zapata Velasquez of the University of Florida, who was taken into ICE custody after being arrested for driving with an expired registration and unpaid traffic fines.
This purge of students who are in the U.S. legally and have been vetted rigorously is as senseless as it has been ruthless. It has damaged U.S. relations with foreign countries, panicked students and their parents, and sown doubt about the very academic freedoms that attract students to the U.S. in the first place.
To get a sense of exactly how, I spoke last week with Suzanne Rivera, president of Macalester College, a small, private liberal-arts college in St. Paul with more than 2,000 students, 13 percent of them international. Founded in 1874, it has long cultivated a mission of fostering global understanding. A chief attraction is the college’s Kofi Annan Institute of Global Leadership, dedicated to one of its most famous alumni, the Nobel laureate and former secretary-general of the United Nations.
Rivera told me she is “mystified” at the sudden demonization of international students. “Why would anyone not want to retain the extraordinary talent of all the students who come to the U.S. because they know we have the best higher education in the world?” she said.
Instead of planning for their futures, she said, students are consumed with worry. “They are anxious and, frankly, scared,” Rivera said. So Macalester is providing housing and meals to foreign students who want to stay in St. Paul over the summer, fearful that if they return even briefly to their home countries, they will be denied re-entry.
When the college did this during the worst of the pandemic, as international travel was shut down, “we had federal health relief to cover those costs,” Rivera said. “This time it is our federal government that has created this feeling of crisis and fears for students’ safety. It’s unconscionable.”
Trump’s campaign to eject future scientists, engineers, mathematicians, medical researchers and others is not only misguided; it has also proved to be an embarrassing failure. After dozens of losses in court and multiple restraining orders, the administration in April restored student visa registrations for thousands of foreign students.
As Trump contemplates his next moves on immigration, he should reconsider his green card idea. The U.S. has more than 1.1 million talented students from around the world attending its colleges and universities, and has invested years in their education. They have already proved to be a solid return on investment, contributing almost $44 billion to the U.S. economy annually and supporting nearly 380,000 jobs. They add to the richness of academic life, benefitting American students as well.
Why should they have to take their skills back to the countries that they came from? There is a deal to be made here — one that appeals to students, universities, businesses and American pride — and Trump is uniquely positioned to make it.
Patricia Lopez is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. She is a former member of the editorial board at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, where she also worked as a senior political editor and reporter. ©2025 Bloomberg L.P., bloomberg.com/opinion. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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