Not long after President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order closing the U.S. border to students, researchers, and other visitors from a half-dozen predominantly Muslim countries, the attorney general of Washington asked the state’s public colleges to comment as part of a lawsuit he filed against the travel ban.

The stakes are much higher this time around.

Jeffrey Riedinger, who was vice provost for global affairs at the University of Washington, submitted a pair of statements about its potential impact on international enrollments, scholarly exchange, and global research at his institution. “I believe there is significant cost to the university, both tangible and intangible,” inflicted by the travel ban, he wrote.

When a federal judge ordered a nationwide halt to the ban, a week after it was imposed in late January 2017, he cited, in part, its harm to states’ economies and “the operations and missions of their public universities and other institutions of higher education.”

Now, Riedinger, who retired last year, is feeling an impending, and uncomfortable, sense of déjà vu. With last week’s Super Tuesday primaries, an election rematch has been set, with Trump facing off against his successor, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Polls show Trump in the lead.

At a recent meeting of the Association of International Education Administrators seemingly every conversation circled, anxiously, to the presidential election. (The organization itself, like other higher-ed groups, is nonpartisan.)

Biden has perhaps not been the champion of global education that those in the field hoped for — his administration’s proposal to give green cards to foreign science and technology graduates has languished in Congress, and a call for a “renewed U.S. commitment to international education” has been short on specifics.

But international educators are deeply wary of a return to what many see as the bad old days of the Trump administration — when the president reportedly derided Chinese students as spies, federal officials put global research ties under the microscope, and international students became pawns in a political fight over reopening colleges during the pandemic. Among the fears is that, if re-elected, Trump and his allies could be more effective in pursuing their agenda now that they have more experience in how Washington works.

In particular, there are concerns that a Trump administration 2.0 could scare off foreign students just as international enrollments are rebounding from sharp Covid-related declines. In speeches, Trump has said he would revive, and expand, the travel ban and revoke the student visas of pro-Palestinian protesters.

Trump’s 2016 election “laid bare a lot of issues about how we in the U.S. as a society view people from outside,” said Rajika Bhandari, a global-education consultant and researcher. “I think the stakes are much higher this time around.”

And some experts worry that the tenor of the election debate itself, as both candidates try to position themselves as tough on immigration and China, could be unwelcoming.

A Link to Fewer New Enrollments

There have been 19 presidential elections since the Institute of International Education began collecting data on international enrollments in 1948, and an analyst would be hard-pressed to discern any election-year trends. In general, international-student numbers have increased steadily over the past 75 years.

Bhandari, who is principal of Rajika Bhandari Advisors, an international-education research and strategy firm, said shifts in student mobility aren’t always immediately visible in overall enrollment figures. For one, degree programs typically stretch over multiple years and enrollment totals also include recent graduates who are allowed to stay in the United States for a year or more to work while on student visas. And the decision to study abroad is typically a long-term one, with students and their families planning and saving for years. As a result, the fallout from elections or other events might not appear in the data for some time.

“The data often tends to obscure nuances,” said Bhandari, who used to oversee the annual international-enrollment survey.

Changes may be detected first in measures of new enrollments, which the institute has published since 2007. From a high of 300,700 in 2015, the year before Trump’s original presidential race, the number of first-time international students tumbled 11 percent during his time in office. (The calculation excludes 2020, when the pandemic halted travel and visa issuances.)

Bhandari suggests there may be a correlation between elections and student mobility — at least when Trump is on the ballot. A survey of prospective international students conducted in the run-up to the 2016 election found that 60 percent would think twice about studying in the United States if Trump were to win, compared with just 4 percent who had concerns about his Democratic rival that year, Hillary Clinton.

While the actual decrease in new enrollments was much more modest, a study by researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of Southern Mississippi found that colleges in counties that voted for Trump “experienced a greater and statistically significant decline” in new international enrollments in 2017 than those that went for Clinton. The “‘Trump effect’ on new international-student enrollment may not be hypothetical but empirical in nature,” the authors concluded.

If Past Is Prologue

A reinstated travel ban — Biden repealed Trump’s executive order on his first day in office — could be just one of the international-education-related items on a policy to-do list if Trump were to win a new term. While just a fraction of the more than one million foreign students in the United States were affected by the original travel ban, it had an outsize impact on students from Iran and, as a result, on doctoral programs. While Iran is just the 14th-largest source of international students at American colleges, only three other countries account for more Ph.D. recipients.

Likewise, students and scholars were caught up in Trump’s geopolitical standoff with China. His administration started the China Initiative, a far-reaching investigation of academic ties to China; canceled the flagship Fulbright Program with mainland China and Hong Kong; and placed new restrictions on visas for Chinese graduate students, including barring graduates of universities that are believed to have ties to the Chinese military or national-security agencies.

Although the China Initiative resulted in few convictions, it had a chilling effect on international-research collaboration and mobility. In a 2021 survey by the American Physical Society, 45 percent of international graduate students and early-career scientists said they were reconsidering whether to stay in the United States because of its track record on research security. The Biden administration ended the China Initiative two years ago, but congressional Republicans have recently tried to restore it.

There’s also the possibility that a new Trump administration could pursue an even more aggressive policy agenda when it comes to China and higher education. In 2018, the then-president reportedly considered, but shelved, a plan to revoke the visas of all Chinese students. Would he be as restrained in a second term?

What we in higher education need to do is not stay away from the issues but find ways to be thoughtfully engaged.

While Chinese enrollments have fallen by 18 percent since Trump first took office, there are still nearly 290,000 students from China at American colleges — the majority of whom pay the full costs of their tuition. Their sudden disappearance would be a big hit for many colleges’ bottom lines. Over all, international students contributed an estimated $40 billion to the U.S. economy.

Meanwhile, some of the fastest international-enrollment growth has been from sub-Saharan Africa. Will students from the region feel comfortable studying in a country whose leader derided their homes as “shithole countries” and defended white supremacists?

John K. Hudzik, a past president of NAFSA: Association of International Educators and former vice president for global engagement at Michigan State University, said he is especially concerned about the potential impact of a Trump presidency on undergraduate students whose parents play a large role in deciding whether, and where, they study abroad. The United States “will still be the place for serious, cutting-edge graduate-level work,” Hudzik said. For parents worried about their undergraduate children’s safety, “Trump’s not going to do us any good.”

While certain potential policies could target or affect specific groups of foreign students, others could have a widespread impact. Not long before the 2020 election, for example, the Trump administration proposed placing strict caps on the amount of time international students can study in the United States, a change that would have forced large numbers of students to petition for extensions to finish their degree programs. After Trump’s election loss, officials ran out of time to enact the controversial regulation. It could be reintroduced by Trump.

Many international educators said they were worried that if he returned to office, Trump would make good on past threats to restrict or even eliminate Optional Practical Training, or OPT, the postgraduate work program for international students. Critics have charged that OPT takes jobs from Americans.

In a recent survey of 1,200 current, former, and prospective international students, four in 10 said they would not study, or would seriously reconsider studying, in the United States if OPT were no longer available. The survey — conducted by the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, Shorelight, and Whiteboard Advisors — also found that for 80 percent, the ability to take part in OPT influenced their decision to come here.

A group with whom OPT is particularly popular? Students from India, which recently overtook China as the top source of foreign students in the United States. In the 2022 academic year, more than one in three Indian student-visa holders was on OPT, compared with just 19 percent of those from China.

Risks, No Matter Who Wins

Biden, by contrast, has expanded the number of majors that qualify for three years of OPT, rather than only one. His administration also tried to bolster Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a program that protects undocumented young people brought to the United States as children from deportation and allows them to work and study here. Under Biden’s leadership, the U.S. Department of Commerce prioritized international education in the national export strategy, while the State Department has won plaudits for efforts to expedite the issuance of student visas at U.S. consulates.

“If Biden was re-elected, it would be more business as usual,” said Anna Esaki-Smith, a global higher-education consultant. If Biden hasn’t been as forceful an advocate for international education as some in the field hoped, there has been progress in his three years in office, and Esaki-Smith and others fear that the momentum could be lost.

Alan Ruby, a senior fellow at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, said Trump would not need to pass legislation or rewrite regulations to have an adverse effect on international students. During his first term, Trump ordered up heightened screening of student and other visas at the border, effectively slow-walking mobility. “Maybe the policies won’t have changed,” Ruby said, “but the enforcement will be tougher.”

By the last challenge, we realized we were giving them the playbook of how to get a ban that would survive legal scrutiny.

What’s more, Trump and his officials would return to office more experienced, with a better understanding of administrative policymaking. For instance, it took a year and a half and three different executive orders before a version of the travel ban was eventually upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. “By the last challenge, we realized we were giving them the playbook of how to get a ban that would survive legal scrutiny,” said Riedinger, the former Washington vice provost.

At the same time, international-education groups, which largely stayed out of the political fray in the past, have become savvy and more mobilized. Last fall a group of education organizations, advocacy groups, and think tanks announced a new coalition to “speak with one voice” for international students. And back in 2020, colleges succeeded in pressing Trump to rescind a visa policy that would have forced international students to enroll in in-person classes or leave the country in the middle of the pandemic.

“We’ve realized that what we in higher education need to do is not stay away from the issues but find ways to be thoughtfully engaged,” said Miriam Feldblum, executive director of the Presidents’ Alliance, a nonpartisan group of college leaders that is one of the founding members of the new international-education coalition. “We’re equipped, we’re engaged, we’re prepared.”

But Ruby, the Penn professor, said the election debate — with its isolationist overtones and competition to get tough, or tougher, on China — could itself have an impact on international students. “The message will be viral,” he said, “and it will echo beyond 2024, no matter who wins.”

Seven years ago, Ahmad Ezzeddine, vice president for academic student affairs and global engagement at Wayne State University, found himself at ground zero in responding to the travel ban. Back then, his Detroit institution enrolled more students affected by the executive order than all but 10 other colleges.

This time around, Wayne State has been roiled by conflict over the Israel-Hamas war. In last month’s Democratic primary, more than 100,000 Michiganders voted “uncommitted” to protest Biden’s support for Israel, and the inflamed rhetoric around the war could affect students from the Middle East or other Muslim countries.

“At the end of the day, it’s going to be the perceptions of prospective students and researchers that matter,” Ezzeddine said. “They want to know, is it going to be a welcoming experience?”

The U.S. ‘Isn’t an Island’

Hudzik, the former Michigan State vice provost, said supporters of international education need to remember that they are operating in a very different political and geopolitical environment today, no matter who is in the White House.

Members of Congress have called for expelling international students who support Hamas or Russian students in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine. Policies that affect international students are being enacted at the state level — a Florida law passed last year prevents public colleges there from hiring graduate assistants from China, Iran, and other “countries of concern,” hamstringing their recruitment of international students at the graduate level. Even Biden, while more supportive of international education, has kept in place Trump’s restrictions on Chinese students and cancellation of the China Fulbright program.

“Even if Trump is elected it won’t be the end of the world,” Hudzik said, “and even if he isn’t, we’ll still be in a difficult environment.”

But Fanta Aw, NAFSA’s executive director, cautioned that international educators must also maintain a global perspective. Almost half of the world’s population will go to the polls in the next year, including major sending countries of international students, like India, and other prime destination countries, such as Britain and Canada. “The United States isn’t an island unto itself,” Aw said, and the outcomes of those electoral contests could affect global-student mobility, too.

With almost eight months to go before the November 5 election, Aw said it was important to continue to press for regulatory and legislative changes that could benefit international students, not just take a wait-and-see attitude. “I’m not personally waking up every day thinking about the election,” Aw, a naturalized U.S. citizen, said.

“We can spend our time thinking about these issues or we can do something about them. Go and vote.”