Student Union
- By Parth Vohra
Is Campus Violence in US Scaring Foreign Students?
As violence unfolded near the University of Virginia-Charlottesville recently, international students about to start school in the U.S. asked themselves: “What just happened?”
Devesh Sahai, a junior in economics and foreign affairs at the University of Virginia-Charlottesville (UVA), was in India when Charlottesville dissolved into violence. He said he has never felt threatened by white supremacy and has not faced discrimination since he joined UVA in fall 2015.
But the events in a park near campus made him “a lot more cautious” when he returned this fall.
“On several occasions, I have had to deal with ignorance towards my cultural background, but at no point have I found this ignorance malicious,” said Sahai.
Among the uninformed questions about his ethnicity?
“What part of India is Dubai in?” or “Do you speak Indian?” Sahai explained. (Answer: Dubai is a city in the United Arab Emirates along the Persian Gulf. And, most of India speaks English because the British colonized the country for nearly 200 years.)
UVA hired Virginia firm MSA Security to assess safety-risks for large campus events, and it has increased campus police on UVA grounds, among other safety measures, according to University of Virginia President Teresa A. Sullivan on Thursday.
“Such events obviously make you consider the limitations of freedom of expression,” Sahai said. “While an integral tenet of democracy, freedom of expression needs to have boundaries … freedom of expression needs to be curtailed the moment it turns violent.”
Ali Muhsen, an environmental systems engineering senior at the Pennsylvania State University in State College from Kuwait, has weighed freedom of expression on college campuses. He says he is against it becoming a platform for “hate,” or “supremacy.”
“Giving a stage and an audience to someone who will encourage and spread hatred is not something I’d ever encourage,” wrote Muhsen to VOA Student Union.
At UC-Berkeley, 132 faculty members are pondering the same issues.
The faculty members have written to the campus community and called for a boycott of classes and campus activities during “Free Speech Week” September 24-27. The Berkeley Patriot, a conservative student group, said it had invited conservative personalities Milo Yiannopoulos, Steve Bannon and Ann Coulter to speak.
“As faculty, we cannot ask students and staff to choose between risking their physical and mental safety in order to attend class or come to work in an environment of harassment, intimidation, violence and militarized policing,” the faculty letter stated.
But this week, Bannon and Coulter said they would not be at the event because of "logistical issues," the Daily Californian reported.
Muhsen moved to the United States to study for an undergraduate degree in engineering in fall 2012, he said. He is part of the Kuwaiti Student Association on campus and is managing public relations for his club this semester.
Like Sahai, Muhsen said he has not faced discrimination in the United States, except when someone used a “racial slur” against him at a pit stop enroute to another city, he recalled.
White supremacy “doesn’t frighten me because I have hope that the world will not allow for such a thing to continue and grow stronger,” Muhsen wrote to VOA StudentU.
Neither does it frighten Jack Liu, an agribusiness management junior at the Michigan State University, who said he sometimes feels unsafe on campus because of the “unpredictable” nature of colleges campuses across the United States.
“It's like we never know what is going to happen in next second no matter where you are.”
Liu who is from Zhengzhou, China, moved to the United States for college in fall 2015.
While Sahai, Muhsen and Liu say they don’t worry about white supremacy, its presence continues to grow on college campuses, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
Since September 2016, 188 instances of white supremacist propaganda have been identified on 126 college campuses in 39 states, it said in a press release.
Liu hopes that incidences of violence such as Charlottesville never occur at MSU or any other campus in the future.
“It was terrible what happened,” he wrote to VOA StudentU, “and it made students want to hide in fear or be afraid.”
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- By Stella Hsu
Reports of visa checks, deportations worry Chinese STEM students in US
Geopolitical tensions and growing competition in tech between the United States and China appear to be spilling over into academia despite commitments from the world’s two biggest economies to boost people-to-people exchanges.
The United States remains the top choice for Chinese students seeking to study abroad with nearly 300,000 studying in American colleges and universities during the 2022-2023 school year. But reports of some cases that students and professors are facing extra scrutiny while passing through immigration and the deportation of others are raising concerns.
For Chen Xiaojin, a doctoral student studying semiconductor materials at a university in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, it has been six years since she returned to her hometown of Beijing.
At first, it was the COVID-19 pandemic that kept her from going home. But over the past two years, she has been deterred by accounts of Chinese students majoring in science and engineering being required to reapply for their visas upon returning to China.
She also says she is worried by reports over the past six months of Chinese students being deported, even at nearby Dulles Airport.
"My current research is relatively sensitive, and my boss [adviser] is getting funds from the U.S. Department of Defense, making it even more sensitive,” she told VOA. "I am afraid that I won't be able to return after I go back [to China]."
Chen says that if she did return to China, she would have to apply for a new visa.
In a report late last month, Bloomberg said it had found at least 20 Chinese students and scholars with valid visas who were deported at U.S. Customs since November and barred from reentry. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency does not release relevant data.
Immigration attorney Dan Berger represented one Chinese student who was deported late last year. He tells VOA Mandarin that the student studied biological sciences at Yale University and was about to complete her doctorate.
She visited her family in China and got a new visa but was deported by customs at Dulles Airport and barred from reentering the country for five years. Berger said he did not see anything suspicious in the transcript of the conversation between the student and the customs officer.
"We have seen what seems like a pattern over the last six months of Chinese PhD students being turned around…. more than I've seen in quite a while," he said.
Matthew Brazil, a fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, said neither country seems willing to explain the situation. However, he believes that in most cases, the United States must have valid reasons for blocking visa holders from entering the country.
In some cases, the student’s background may not match what is written on the visa application. In other cases, customs agents may also find something that the State Department missed, and once they see it, they are responsible for taking action.
"I wish the Chinese side would be specific about their students who were refused entry,” he said. “The fact that both sides are mum on details and that the Chinese side is engaged with the usual angry rhetoric means that each has security concerns. And that says to me that there was good reason for the U.S. to stop these particular applicants."
Brazil also sees a connection between the entry denials and export control regulations issued by the United States in October 2022 that restrict China's ability to obtain advanced computing chips, develop and maintain supercomputers, and manufacture advanced semiconductors.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection is one of the law enforcement agencies authorized to investigate violations of export control regulations, he said.
"Beijing's intelligence agencies are known to focus attention on PRC [People's Republic of China] students and scientists headed abroad who study or work on dual-use technologies controlled under the Export Administration Act — compelling Chinese students and scientists to report on what they've learned when they return to China on holiday,” he said. “This has been true for decades."
Bill Drexel, a fellow for the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, said the U.S. government did find some cases where students tried to steal strategic technology for China.
"I think it would both not be surprising that they found some really questionable or incriminating evidence for some students,” he said. “It would also not be surprising if, in their hunt for really solid evidence, they also may have made some mistakes on other students.”
Drexel adds that “it’s just kind of an unfortunate fact of the time that we live in and the tactics that the CCP uses when it comes to these measures."
In a post on X in early May, U.S. ambassador to China Nicholas Burns tried to dispel concerns about visas and entry to the United States for students and scholars. In the post, he said "99.9% of Chinese students holding visas encounter no issues upon entering the United States.”
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal Monday, Burns said it is China that is making it impossible to promote people-to-people ties. Burns told the Journal that students attending events sponsored by the United States in China have been interrogated and intimidated.
He also said that since U.S. President Joe Biden and China’s leader Xi Jinping held their summit in San Francisco last year, China’s Ministry of State Security and other agencies had interfered with Chinese citizens’ participation at some 61 events.
At a regular briefing on Wednesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning dismissed those accusations, saying that they did not “reflect reality" and that went against key understandings reached by both countries’ presidents in San Francisco.
“The United States, under the pretext of 'national security,' unjustifiably harasses, interrogates, and deports Chinese students in the U.S., causing them significant harm and creating a severe chilling effect,” Mao said. “The image of the United States in the minds of the Chinese people fundamentally depends on the actions of the United States itself.”
Drexel said he believes Burns’ comments about visas and students' willingness to study in the U.S. still ring true.
“On balance, it's still the case that American universities are overwhelmingly warm towards Chinese students and want them in large numbers," he said.
However, Berger, the immigration lawyer, is concerned about the chilling effect recent cases involving Chinese students could have.
"In general, we are being more careful about advising Chinese graduate students in STEM fields about traveling and letting them know that there is some small risk,” he said.
Even though the risk is small, it does seem to be real at the moment, he said.
Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
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