We should encourage, not restrict, international students

In the past week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has told foreign students that their visas for study in the U.S. will not be valid if their universities conduct classes only online. Harvard and MIT have sued to stop this order.

More than one million international students study at American universities each year, which is a tremendous success story. Tuition and fees bring in billions, but, more importantly, American universities profit from having many of the world's best and brightest attend their schools.

This comes on the heels of a decision by the Trump Administration that will restrict several categories of visas for foreign workers, particularly H-1B visas for workers with specialized skills. The administration has argued this will protect jobs that can be filled by Americans, but a good deal of research shows that bringing in highly educated workers with special knowledge - think Silicon Valley - actually increases not only the number of jobs, but the salaries of workers in the same field.

This past spring, the administration gave international students some leeway, since the shutdown in many schools occurred in the middle of a semester, but now it seems determined to enforce the rule in order to force schools to have in-person classes regardless of the health risks, just so the President can claim that life is returning to normal, with no regard for the facts on the ground.

Even universities opening early in mid-August are hard-pressed to know what the state of the pandemic will be at that time and whether they will press forward with in-person classes. Harvard President Lawrence Bacow noted the decision came down without notice and "its cruelty was only surpassed by its recklessness."

This is a subject that I been looking at closely because from 2011 to 2014, I was Chairman of the Board of the Fulbright Commission on the island of Cyprus. Now, I am writing a book about that commission, which was unusually large and active for historical reasons tied to the 1974 war that split the island and the power of the Greek lobby in Washington.

I have interviewed dozens of former grantees. Many returned to Cyprus after their studies and occupy positions of influence even while maintaining ties with the U.S. One, Dr. Leontios Kostrikis (BSc, MSc, Ph.D. in virology at NYU), is Cyprus' Dr. Fauci. A colleague from the same village, Constantinos Pitris, is a professor at the University of Cyprus and still holds the patents on the imaging technology he invented at the University of Texas that allows doctors to find a rare form of cancer. He went on to simultaneously earn a Ph.D. at MIT and a medical degree at Harvard.

Nektarios Paisos received a special Fulbright grant after a worldwide competition and did his Ph.D. in computer science at NYU. Nektarios, who is blind, now works for Google in New York developing applications so that people with disabilities, particularly the blind, can use Google and other sites. Like Nektarios, many Ph.D. candidates slide into corporate positions where they find commercial applications for their research. Those applications create jobs and wealth.

In the last academic year, some 53,000 international students attended universities in Illinois. They brought nearly $2 billion into the state that helped create some 25,000 jobs. America competes for these students and other universities around the world would be happy to have them.

If the administration actually cared about creating more jobs and wanted America to continue to lead in a host of scientific fields, it would do well to pay attention to the data and help international students come to America instead of hindering their paths during these extraordinary times.

• Keith Peterson, of Lake Barrington, served 29 years as a press and cultural officer for the United States Information Agency and Department of State. He was chief editorial writer of the Daily Herald 1984-86.