【by Chiara Pavone, Dec. 2025】
Nowadays, being an international scholar on a non-immigrant visa feels like being the forgotten middle child. Conversations on campus with other faculty members recently revolve around a set of well-tried topics: the increasing use of AI by students; the debilitating lack of research and program funding; and, finally, the impact of the latest news item and government policy on our students—and, especially, on non-citizens and permanent residents. In the (usually fairly well-meaning) exchanges I have had on this last topic, I found my own precarious immigration status looming large and yet unmentionable: a sore spot that my interlocutors might intentionally, if unmaliciously, skirt around.[1]
The omission is, in some cases, an innocent one. It seems like many scholars in my position have, historically, chosen not to disclose their immigration status, and that many consider it a “private” issue. Moreover, in a higher education where finding and keeping stable employment is becoming, increasingly, a mirage, not everyone has the bandwidth to keep up to date with the latest developments on foreign immigration—especially considering the rapidly changing (and often ambiguous) nature of such developments.
The ICE raids in metropolitan areas have been the most cruel, visible—and advertised— sign of the stance of the matter in this Trump’s second term. However, less widely covered has been a move that impacts universities even more directly: the September 19, 2025 presidential proclamation, which requires all employers in the United States looking to hire foreign workers to pay $100,000 per each of their H-1B visa applications.
The visa—which I am also currently on—has been under scrutiny since before the 2024 elections, ostensibly because of the high number temporary foreign employees relying on it in the IT sector. The H-1B visa, however, is hardly a prerogative of Silicon Valley workers. It constitutes, in fact, the most common pathway for international workers to go from their first job in the country to more stable and long-term forms of residency (such as the “Green Card”)—independently from the field they work in. It should not come as a surprise, then, that higher education—perhaps more than other fields, depending as it does on the global exchange of knowledge, ideas, and capital—would have a considerable number of people hit by such changes to the immigration system.
The (willful or not) diffused ignorance on temporary work visas and those who benefit from them at American colleges might also be due, however, to the sparse nature of the reporting about this issue.[2] Those platforms that have offered coverage are adamant to focus on one issue in particular, the larger financial damages that the proclamation and other, recent non-immigrant visa restrictions will inflict to the American economy as a whole. According to NAFSA, the financial loss is, indeed, significant: for every three international students, one US job is created and/or supported, and in 2024, roughly one million international students brought nearly $55 billion into the economy in toto.[3]
However, as an avid and concerned reader of such material, I found myself wishing to see more of the two facets of this unfolding economic catastrophe that seem to be conspicuously missing: the human and the political aspects of the “non-immigrant visa question.”
In the Asian Studies Program at Bard College—the institution I am currently employed by—we feel the former aspect more keenly than in any of the other parts of the institutions, as at least two thirds of the faculty are current or former H-1B visa holders. This composition reflects that of many Ph.D. programs in the same field in the whole country, since many East Asian, South Asian, South-East Asian and European students have, historically, been attracted to graduate programs in the United States because of their prestige, employment outcomes, and funding opportunities hardly provided in their home countries—especially to pursue studies in the humanities and social sciences (a set of disciplines that Asian studies departments usually straddle). Every short chat with colleagues and friends in the field is especially painful, lately. While, according to the latest official interpretations, the September 19 proclamation does allow for international students on a current F-1 visa to apply for it to be converted in an H-1B without requiring the employer to pay the $100,000 fee, there are murmurs in the hallways—from people on both sides of the job market—that search committees are “encouraged” by administrations to prod for the candidates’ immigration status and quietly screen those lacking permanent residency.[4] And it is, from a certain perspective, hard to blame this new form of discrimination.
New restrictions on visa durations and travel between renewals make the transition from F-1 to H-1B, and from H-1B to green card, a battle royale with no certain winner. Between colleagues leaving the United States “preventively” before being deported (because they participated to the wrong protest, said the wrong thing on social media, or teach topics deemed “questionable” under the current regime) and friends choosing not to finish their Ph.D. programs (because of the lack of job prospects, institution-wide funding cuts, and plain despair), it is clear that American higher education—in Asian studies like in any other field—will soon find itself lacking not only the number, but also the diversity of instructors and researchers that made it competitive and attractive.
Here we finally see the outline of the political effects of the new immigration measures, combined with the government’s loud campaigns against DEI programs. Having less applicants to higher education jobs, and with less varied educational and social backgrounds, is tied to the Project 2025 dream of a white, conservative, monocultural nation. In a memo made public on August 15, 2025, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced stricter background checks for all visa, green card, and naturalization applicants, aimed at screening “Anti-American” behavior—an expression undefined in American law, and whose interpretation is thus left to USCIS officials themselves. Naturalization applicants will also be required to undergo “neighborhood checks” and offer proof of “Good Moral Character”—parts of the screening process that have not been implemented since 1991.[5]
Of course, the United States is not the only country that has taken stricter measures against foreign immigration. Most European countries (and lately, Japan, among others) have elected populist governments outspoken in their hate and scapegoating of foreigners as the main responsible for economic recession—a recession that has, nevertheless, very international roots. The same governments have brought with them a wave of policies aimed at repressing speech and undoing legal protections for ethnic and gender minorities. The political, social and economic climate in Europe—and, once again, in Japan—in fact, and as many have observed, presents striking similarities to that preceding World War II.[6] The United States provided then the ideological refuge to the many individuals—and intellectuals—persecuted by the European portion of the Axis.[7] It is quite certain, however, that this time it will not be a haven for anyone, citizens and non-citizens, within and without higher education, and for many years to come.
AUTHOR
Chiara Pavone is an Assistant Professor of Japanese in the Program of Foreign Languages, Cultures, and Literatures at Bard College, USA. Chiara Pavone’s research is broadly concerned with the production, canonization, and circulation of disaster narratives. Her doctoral dissertation topic at the University of California, Los Angeles, focuses on media and works of literature produced after the March 2011 Great Eastern Japan earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster with the objective of unveiling “the evidence of radiation as a trope in a public sphere that has strived to erase it.” Her work draws on scholarship in ecocriticism and ecofeminism, political philosophy, and queer theory to propose a mode of reading Pavone calls Radioactive Aesthetics. She delivered a Bard Zoom lecture on the subject in March 2023. Publications include the coauthored “Spoiled Meals: Immunitary and Metabolic Imaginaries in Kawakami Mieko’s ‘Dreams of Love, Etc.’ and Murata Sayaka’s Convenience Store Woman” in Literature after Fukushima (Routledge, 2023). Professor Pavone is the recipient of numerous honors from UCLA, including a dissertation year fellowship and Sasakawa graduate fellowship. She previously taught in UCLA’s Department of Asian Languages and Cultures on subjects ranging from global narratives of crisis to beginner and intermediate Japanese and Japanese civilization.
NOTES
[1] While this choice might have its own reasons and merits, it is a fact that this privacy has caused my institution’s union chapter considerable difficulties in tracking down all of those that might be affected by the recent changes to the non-immigrant visa system in the United States; and that there might be good reasons to be less secretive about it as well.
[2] Even the Chronicle of Higher Education’spage tracking this government’s “higher education agenda” is conspicuously missing any mention of the latest immigration policy developments: “Tracking Trump’s Higher Education Agenda,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 4, 2025, https://www.chronicle.com/article/tracking-trumps-higher-ed-agenda#id=tts_immigration.
[3] “International Students Contribute Record-Breaking Level of Spending and 378,000 Jobs to the U.S. Economy,” NAFSA: Association of National Educators, November 18, 2024, https://www.nafsa.org/about/about-nafsa/international-students-contribute-record-breaking-level-spending-and-378000-jobs.
[4] Megan Cerullo, “USCIS Clarifies Who Must Pay $100,000 Fee for H-1B Visas,” CBS News, October 22, 2025, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/100000-h-1b-visa-fee-who-pays/.
[5] Allison Moodie, “USCIS Expands Screening for ‘Anti-Americanism’ in Immigration Applications,” Boundless, August 21, 2025, https://www.boundless.com/blog/uscis-anti-americanism-policy-update. Camillo Montoya-Galvez, “U.S. to Resume ‘Neighborhood Checks’ for Citizenship Applications as Part of Trump Push to Heavily Vet Immigrants,”CBS News, August 26, 2025, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/neighborhood-checks-citizenship-applications/.
[6] It should be observed that some countries are already very much involved in wars of expansion and violent aggression, which is hard to predict when and how will end, and with what consequences, in at least two different parts of the world.
[7] Notoriously, however, the US weren’t accepting refugees from Japan, China or Asia in general. At the time, the Immigration act of 1924 and the Chinese exclusion act of 1882 were both in effect.
REFERENCES
Cerullo, Megan. “USCIS Clarifies Who Must Pay $100,000 Fee for H-1B Visas.” CBS News, October 22, 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/100000-h-1b-visa-fee-who-pays/.
“International Students Contribute Record-Breaking Level of Spending and 378,000 Jobs to the U.S. Economy.” NAFSA: Association of National Educators, November 18, 2024. https://www.nafsa.org/about/about-nafsa/international-students-contribute-record-breaking-level-spending-and-378000-jobs.
Montoya-Galvez, Camillo. “U.S. to Resume ‘Neighborhood Checks’ for Citizenship Applications as Part of Trump Push to Heavily Vet Immigrants.” CBS News, August 26, 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/neighborhood-checks-citizenship-applications/.
Moodie, Allison. “USCIS Expands Screening for ‘Anti-Americanism’ in Immigration Applications.” Boundless, August 21, 2025. https://www.boundless.com/blog/uscis-anti-americanism-policy-update.
“Tracking Trump’s Higher Education Agenda.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 4, 2025. https://www.chronicle.com/article/tracking-trumps-higher-ed-agenda#id=tts_immigration.