With attention deservedly focused on the Department of Homeland Security’s increased use of violence to detain, deport, and in some cases, kill immigrants for the assumed crime of driving while Latino, the Trump administration continues to roll out rules and regulations that will seriously impact the nation’s economic future and our future as a nation of immigrants.
Changes to rules regarding international student visas as well as barring the admission of those who might potentially apply for government benefits in the future are literally guaranteed to undercut the country’s future growth.
And why are these rules deemed necessary? For no other reason than to advance the anti-immigrant nativism long maintained by President Trump and his xenophobic counselor, Stephen Miller.
Take the case of international students.
International students have historically brought significant benefits to higher education institutions, by subsidizing the tuition paid by domestic students while adding global diversity and understanding to thousands of campuses.
And they have contributed to the overall U.S. economy.
According to the International Trade Administration of the Department of Commerce, international students added a combined $42.9 billion to the economy in the 2024-2025 school year and supported more than 355,000 jobs across the country.
Up until now, international students on F-visas were allowed to continue their studies until the completion of their programs, as long as they remained in status.
But new rules would allow international students a fixed period of no longer than 4 years to complete their degrees, while also prohibiting graduate students from changing majors, transferring, or completing additional degrees in different fields.
According to the Education Data Initiative, completion of a doctorate, for example, can range from 5 to 11 years, and the average time to complete a bachelor’s degree is closer to 5 years.
Once their time is up, students would have a maximum of 30 days to find a job, leave, or be subject to deportation.
The decline in international students, which the new rules virtually guarantee, are bound to hit Ohio with a vengeance.
Ohio currently enrolls just under 36,000 international students, a figure which already reflects a decline of nearly 3,000 students from just a year ago.
Enrollment declines at Cleveland State University, for example, are expected to cost the school an estimated $11.5 million in lost tuition revenue this year alone.
For a state whose international students contribute an estimated $1.3 billion a year to the overall economy, and support almost 11,000 jobs, the loss of even more foreign students is a self-imposed wound that provides no understandable benefit.
As Marcello Fantoni, Kent State’s vice president of global education remarked, “There is damage done there, and it will take a long time to be fixed. A long time.”
The same is true with the new rules published on July 20 regarding what is known as the “public charge ground of inadmissibility.”
The new procedures, which lack clear standards or measures, allow the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to block the entry of otherwise legal immigrants who they think — again, without a clear standard of evaluation — could apply for government benefits at some point in the undefined future.
And these include benefits as modest as taking part in a school’s free lunch program. To be clear, the rules aren’t about preventing noncitizens, including green card holders, from accessing benefits: those prohibitions are already on the books. The new rules are about allowing federal immigration services to ban low-income, legal immigrants.
As with the changes to international student visas, this new rule will cost the economy dearly.
According the to the libertarian Cato Institute, the population most likely to be hamstrung by these revisions contributed $2.8 trillion more to the U.S. economy from 1994 to 2023 than they received in benefits or other costs.
In Ohio, in 2023, immigrants earned $27.3 billion and paid $7.3 billion in state taxes. Although it is difficult to calculate how much of that will be lost with the new regulations in place, the loses — and there will be losses — are once again self-imposed injuries generated solely because of this administration’s well-documented animosity to immigrants, particularly low-income immigrants of color.
As they rampage through Trump’s second presidency, neither he nor his enablers see any reason to disguise this. We have become all too familiar with Trump’s denigration of “shithole” countries, or his repeated insistence that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Commenting on the Supreme Court’s recent decision to block asylum seekers at the border, Stephen Miller crowed “America’s doors are [now] closed fully to asylum seekers.”
He could have said the same for refugees. Of a ceiling of 7,500 refugees permitted for FY 2026, a historical low, all but three of the 6,668 accepted were white South Africans. When the administration added an additional 10,000 slots this past May, all were reserved for white South Africans.
As fans cheered for the U.S. men’s national soccer team in the World Cup, it was not lost on many how well the team actually represented today’s America. Of the 26 players, nearly half have dual citizenship; 6 were foreign born, and 5 others were born to immigrant parents.
And yet a DHS social media post sought to drum up support for the U.S. at the World Cup by calling on fans to “DEFEND THE HOMELAND: One Nation. One Homeland. One Team,” a slogan frighteningly reminiscent of the Nazi’s “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer” (One People, One Nation, One Leader).
As the administration continues to use both violence and rule-making to make immigrants’ lives intolerable and to slam shut the door shut to most future immigration, its measures are both economically self-destructive and a refusal to accept that we are, in fact, a country of many different people, all yearning to breathe free.
This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.
