International students are welcome at Queens College

In an op-ed for the Eagle, Queens College President Frank Wu said international students play a key role in the QC community. Photo courtesy of Queens College

By Frank Wu

I wholeheartedly support the views expressed by City University of New York Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez in decrying the newly announced federal policies for international students who will be denied visas unless they participate in in-person studies this fall — a difficult, if not impossible, standard during this pandemic which has forced most of the nation’s students to engage in distance learning. Like all of CUNY, Queens College, has been made great and continues to thrive by welcoming people of the world to learn together. In keeping with that belief, our very diverse enrollment of almost 20,000 students currently includes more than 600 international students. 

Our colleges must continue welcoming students from the world over. I have a personal stake in this tradition. I wouldn’t be here, literally, if it were not for our great system of higher education. America has been called a “city upon a hill” beckoning with liberty and opportunity, and perhaps “campus on a hill” is an even better metaphor for what attracts people from Europe and Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Australia. 

My parents were international students. They came to this nation by invitation. They were even supported by scholarships. Their story is not unique. It is shared by many families. 

They made good on the investment. They became citizens. Their children were born on these shores. They contributed as workers and taxpayers. We have staked our future on this side of the Pacific Ocean. My late mother is buried in a cemetery here. We are not “going back" to where we "came from." 

Yet it seems all that has become a bygone era. The “Sputnik” moment during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union launched a satellite into space before the United States, persuaded everyone it was important to recruit talent and win the “space race.” After New York City avoided bankruptcy, its renaissance confirmed again that great line from the musical Hamilton: “Immigrants get the job done."

Now, however, American policy is becoming increasingly isolationist. Our goal seems to be to go it alone or even to get into fights with global allies.

Among the signs we are turning our back and closing the door is the ongoing hostility to foreign exchange students and even visiting scholars. The prejudice is not only explicit but also angry. People who wish to experience what we offer, who will pay handsomely for it — at rates an order of magnitude more than back home, effectively subsidizing our own citizens — are being deported and denied entry. They are blamed for disease and espionage on a group basis.

Some demagogues hate everyone they perceive as an outsider. Others are specific in singling out Chinese or a group toward whom they bear a grudge. Regardless, these attitudes betray our principles. Even as leaders rush to declare they are antiracist, they remain willing to express xenophobia. These attitudes are related. After all, many individuals belong to households with mixed status: A “Dreamer” may have a sibling with birthright citizenship.

Perhaps the argument that is most compelling to those whose circle of sympathy is limited is an appeal to national interest. Here is the proposition: Even if you care not at all about equality or avoiding stereotyping, you should be in favor of the openness of higher education. If international students in general, or those from the sources sending the most, vanished overnight, many academic departments would be decimated. High-tech companies would lose much of their talent. 

Ironically, our competitors would gain as we lose. People will pursue their careers where they are confident they can advance rather than be held back by hostility. For those who fear China, for example, that means Shanghai and Shenzhen will be able to recruit those who could have been the next entrepreneurs or Nobel Prize winners for America’s benefit. We will lose our ability to promote the ideals of our diverse democracy. The people who would have been exposed to our values on a daily basis, inspiring them long after their return, will come into contact with only the television caricature of our culture.

Queens College is cosmopolitan without being elitist. More than a hundred languages are spoken in the borough of Queens. The 7 train that runs from Main Street Flushing to Manhattan is famously a United Nations route. I am proud to have begun my time here as president of a school of strivers. Among our alumni are Congressman Adriano Espaillat and Cristina Jiménez Moreta. He went on to become the first formerly undocumented immigrant to serve in Congress, and she was named a MacArthur Fellow in recognition of her work advocating on behalf of undocumented immigrants — as she once was — which led her to co-found United We Dream in 2008. Like them, our students of all identities wish to improve their station in life, and by doing so promote the quality of life in their communities

Frank Wu is president of Queens College.