Regressions
For some time now I’ve been looking with sadness at the US. I remember back to 2002, when I applied for a fellowship for graduate studies in the US, then got the fellowship. I remember back to 2003, when I got my acceptance letter from Columbia University and moved to New York. 2005, when I graduated and decided to get a job in the US. 2007, when I decided to move to Seattle to join Microsoft, on my second H1-B visa. Those were big decisions to make, and I made them with overwhelmingly positive feelings.
I keep wondering if I’d have made the same choices today. Columbia has been disgraced in the last year, even before Trump started bullying it. University in general seems under threat, especially so for foreign students. The most recent farce from the Trump administration is a $100.000 fee for new H1-B visa applications. It is framed as a protection for the American worker, but look at this language from the white house website1:
It directs the Secretary of Homeland Security to restrict approvals for petitions from aliens that are currently outside the United States that are not accompanied by the payment, and allows case-by-case exemptions if in the national interest.
This is the second out of five bullet points in a section called Protecting American Jobs.
No specific targets, no explanations. It’s so arbitrary. Just another lever for the government to assert its power.
If I were in the position I was in the 2000’s today, what would I do?
Would I go to Columbia? Would I move to the US for graduate school? Would I stay on to get a job after graduation?
Most of the time now, I think I would not make those choices. There’s still a chance I would, but with a lot of apprehension, and after worried calculations of pros and cons.
It’s said that the future is here but unevenly distributed.
Two friends of mine from my first year in New York had tremendous difficulty getting back to the US after short trips to their home countries (Pakistan and Syria respectively) on their student visas, while still enrolled in their studies. This happened in 2004 or 2005, I think. They made it back eventually, but they had to spend several months lawyering up, and I imagine the experience must have left them shaken. I don’t know if they eventually got American citizenship, but if they did, they’ll probably be feeling uneasy these days.
I look back at those choices I made to go to the US in the 2000’s. I knew back then that it was a rare privilege. Now it seems even rarer.