Being an international student advisor

Blowing off some steam.

In a former life, before becoming a full-time doctoral student, I was an international student advisor - an immigration advisor, really, for international students (and an occasional visiting scholar or faculty member). Now one of the funny things about working as an international student advisor (ISA) is that ISAs are responsible for carrying out certain things that are in fact quasi-judicial and quasi-enforcement functions. They not only interpret immigration regulations, but also determine when these regulations have been violated, and in so doing, have the authority to decide *what an international student’s legal status* in the U.S. is. There are certain advantages to this: it’s a load of work that might be left up to some government bureaucrat to decide, and one can imagine the inefficiencies - and injustices - that would cause. And yet, the question that occasionally pops into my mind is: why should an ISA have that power? How did we get deputized with this kind of authority?

I ask this question because, even though I’m no longer a DSO*, I hear stories about the kinds of decisions that ISAs make in difficult situations. The student immigration regulations are clear in their main outlines, but sometimes difficult to interpret and/or apply in their nuances. Take for example the following hypothetical situation, hardly unusual:

(a) an international student works off-campus as a waiter at a restaurant, getting paid under the table, and hides this from his school, knowing that it’s “working illegally”

(b) an international student gets a paid internship that’s done as an academic requirement or elective, but forgets to do the requisite paperwork to get authorization until several weeks have passed, and then goes to see her ISA to get the paperwork done.

Under the strict letter of the student immigration regulations as people in the advising business would read it, both students are engaged in ‘unauthorized employment.’ In case (a), the student would never receive authorization, as existing regulations stand, to do this kind of work (there is an exceptional situation that would permit this kind of work, but it’s so rare as not to be worth mentioning). In case (b), the student could have received authorization since the immigration regulations allow for academically-relevant employment experiences under certain constraints and parameters. However, because the regulations state that the student must receive ‘prior‘ authorization before commencing employment , the student could be still be considered in violation of the regulations since she was late in doing the necessary paperwork (the regulations don’t provide ‘grace periods’ or anything like that; prior authorization means prior authorization).

I recently heard - I won’t say how, and I can’t say where - of an international student advisor who was confronted with precisely the situation posed in case (b). The ISA told the student that his legal status was going to be ‘terminated’ because he hadn’t received ‘prior’ authorization for his paid internship, even though he would have gotten approval had he asked for it earlier in the semester. Termination of legal status is an electronic notification that’s made to the Department of Homeland Security, stating why the student’s status is coming to an end. Sometimes the situations are benign and don’t carry any negative implications or consequences: the student may have decided to withdraw from school and leave the U.S., for instance. But a termination due to a violation like ‘unauthorized employment’ - which aside from being convicted of a felony or being suspected of terrorism is at the top in the hierarchy of immigration sins - carries potentially far-reaching consequences. It doesn’t mean immediate deportation (at least I wasn’t aware of any cases where a situation like this leads to deportation), even though ‘unauthorized employment’ is a deportable offense, techncially speaking - the fact of the matter is that Homeland Security has neither the resources nor the inclination to track down every single student found guilty of every single work violation. But it does mean that the student’s legal status comes to an end, and that if she wants to be secure about her legal eligibility to stay in the U.S. as student, she must leave the U.S. and go through, in certain cases, a visa interview to request permission to come back in legal status. The problem is that applying for a new visa, or re-entering the country and going through immigration inspection at an airport or port of entry, could become an extremely problematic affair: anyone whose legal status was terminated because he or she was found to have worked ‘without authorization’ is at a greater risk of being refused entry, and in any event will have an extraordinary amount of explaining to do. In any event, it’s by no means guaranteed that even a good or conscientious student guilty of essentially carelessness should be able to come back and resume his studies.

After all these years, I can’t believe I still haven’t figured out a question: what gives a school administrator the right to wield this kind of authority? To impose these kinds of consequences? The standard professional ideology is that “it’s up to the student to know and follow the rules.” For the most part, that’s an entirely reasonable expectation. But life throws up complexities, and to trot out that mantra in difficult cases strikes me as an excuse to disregard the potentially enormous impact that an ISA’s decision can have on individual students’ lives. With the legal authority invested in the position ought to be a bit more sensitivity to the ethical and practical implications wielding such authority may have.

As any international student with some experience knows, different advisors have different interpretations of the regulations - some are ‘relaxed’ and some are ’strict,’ some are creative and ingenious in their interpretations while others are literal and unnuanced. The differences are personal, institutional, cultural - but they’re not professional. The profession, which is represented by NAFSA: Association of International Educators, has no standards about how to deal with cases like this; but it has workshops that teach ISAs about how to exercise discretion wisely! The temptation for many, however, is to not use any discretion at all, or rather to see no distinction when common sense tells you that differences in context exist, and that these differences may be relevant to how a situation ought to be approached. If ISAs don’t know how to handle that, then it may be something they shouldn’t even have. Maybe it should be left to a government adjudicator to decide both ’spirit’ and ‘letter’ of the law.