President Donald Trump’s promise of mass deportations, amidst a general climate of xenophobia and outright hostility to immigrants, has more than 1,000 international students at the University of Minnesota on edge.
“Trump has every right to fulfill his campaign promises, but the messaging that underlies his policies communicates that xenophobia is okay,” said G., a Ph.D. candidate in veterinary population medicine who moved to Minnesota to study at the U in 2021 after completing his veterinary medicine studies in Peru.
“I feel that people who have prejudice against immigrants might feel emboldened by President Trump and might feel encouraged to discriminate,” he said.
While scholars who come from abroad to study in Minnesota are here legally, their ability to remain in the U.S. is quite tenuous.
To pursue their studies here, international students must demonstrate proof of admission or enrollment at an approved university and proof of financial support for the duration of their studies (on average, two to three years for masters students and five to six years for Ph.D. students).
Continued enrollment in a graduate program requires the maintenance of satisfactory academic progress, as well as a certain minimum GPA. Straightforward enough, but once coursework is completed and a student moves to thesis work, metrics of progress vary from adviser to adviser, and discipline to discipline. The subjective nature of academic progress creates avenues for overwork and abuse of graduate students by bad actors.
When J.S.F., a Ph.D. candidate in electrical engineering from Brazil, applied to graduate school at the University of Minnesota, he expected it might be the key to a career in academia.
“Having the name of an American university on your CV helps you stand out when applying for academic jobs abroad. It’s like having an Ivy League on your CV in the U.S.,” he said.
In his lab at the U, he found the exciting semiconductor research he sought out, but quickly he saw his time in the lab extend well beyond the normal 9-to-5 schedule to meet his adviser’s expectations.
Roughly 25% of graduate students at the University of Minnesota are international students. According to J.S.F., many academic programs at the University purposefully recruit primarily outside of the country, and the proportion of international students in some hard science departments can be as high as 90%.
“I can’t help but wonder if departments go out of their way to recruit international students because they know they can push us harder without facing consequences,” he said.
In certain pockets of the University, this reality is an open secret. “Supervisors will specifically hire international workers because they know the inherent feeling of vulnerability makes it easier to get international workers to work more,” said a domestic Ph.D. student in engineering.
“I have had advisers in my department tell me directly that they hire international workers because they can get twice as much work out of them than domestic workers.”
Beyond academic progress, the precarity of maintaining legal status also stems from the need to maintain a paid teaching or research appointment for the duration of one’s studies.
If a department or lab runs out of grant funding — or has their funding abruptly cut, as some labs with National Institutes of Health funding, including at the U, are seeing — advisers will cut back on staff, leading graduate students to lose their positions.
“If you lose your research assistantship, you have to leave the country and you’ll probably never finish your degree,” says J.S.F.
Faced with the pressure of giving everything up and going home, international graduate students feel the need to always go above and beyond. “There’s definitely a higher standard for us,” said an engineering Ph.D. student from Iran. “If I had to leave here tomorrow … emotionally I don’t think I could take it.”
Graduate school holds a general expectation of being exploitative in nature. Indeed, low wages and long hours have spurred a massive wave of graduate student unionization across the country, including at the University of Minnesota.
As the U’s Graduate Labor Union gets to work enforcing the terms of its first collective bargaining agreement, issues affecting international students are top of mind. For grads at the U, the question is clear: Should Minnesota’s flagship research university get away with exploiting migrant workers with tenuous visa status?
“Residents of Minnesota really take a lot of pride in the U,” said J.S.F. “I wish they knew that the work going into creating a prestigious university relies on the exploitation of graduate students, especially those of us who are here on a visa.”
