My life on a student visa

Some personal reflections on recent events uptown

This is not a newsletter about me or my feelings, but the news about Columbia students getting pursued by ICE has hit really close to home, so I thought I’d take the chance to say a few words about my own experiences at the school.

Of course I know better than to let massive financial institutions upset me, even if they do provide the occasional education. But there is something uniquely demoralizing to me about the university leadership’s unwillingness to stick up for the foreign students getting swept up in Trump’s immigration raids.

I was a Columbia college student on an F-1 visa from 2004 to 2008, and then again in 2010-2011. For around a year after both graduations, I stayed on to do “optional practical training”, or OPT—you get a temporary permit to work in a field related to your degree before you get asked, in so many words, to get sponsored by an employer or go back home. I knew my status was conditional during this time, and I definitely avoided getting arrested, but I never felt constrained in what I could or couldn’t say at school.

That was because the culture of Columbia was very protest-y, whether the rallies were about war or real estate development or cafeteria food. Protests—from the left, from the right, for free speech and against it (though nobody would admit they were against it)—were just a part of campus life. It was not unusual on a given day for someone to be camped out on College Walk holding some kind of sign.

That was the deal, and for me, a big part of the school’s appeal.

Let’s rewind to 2003. I’m 17, I’m living in Geneva, and my life is friends and school and punk rock. Geneva’s a great place to grow up—it’s hard to get into real trouble, heavens knows we tried—but it’s not a great place to be young and restless and intellectually hungry. I was desperate to move, and New York was the temperamental opposite of Geneva: busy, noisy, dirty, big, exciting, and full of eccentrics.

New York, in other words, was the solution to my primary problem of boredom, and the only acceptable way for me to move there was to get into a really good school. So I applied to Columbia early, crossed my fingers, and waited.

I found out I’d gotten a spot when I was in Oxford, interviewing to read philosophy and Russian at Wadham College. The written test was a bust—I’d been told my Anora-level conversational skills would give me a head start, when in fact they expected a level of fluency I will never achieve. But the interview with the philosophy tutor went even more poorly.

“If God is all-powerful,” the don asked, “can he create a stone he cannot lift?”

I had nothing smart to say, so I blurted out the first thing that came to mind.

“How do you know it’s a he?”

I could tell from her face that it was the wrong answer.

That evening, on Oxford’s main drag, I went into a McDonald’s to check my Hotmail. It was a couple of days before I was expecting to hear back from Columbia, but there it was: an email from admissions. I’d gotten in.

I remember going out onto the street and finding a pay phone to call my mother. Then, I called my boyfriend to give him the news (subtext: we were definitely breaking up), and calling my host in Oxford to share it with her. I spent the next two days visiting a friend in London in a complete, giddy daze.

When I got home, I taped a large calendar on my desk, and until August 17, 2004, I’d cross out the days until I moved.

When I arrived in New York, I knew I’d found my place. I spent a week roaming the city before orientation began, staying with my aunt and uncle in Park Slope, buying terrible weed from a guy named Quentin (who I am somehow connected to on LinkedIn?), and developing a taste for black coffee and Tasti-D-Lite (RIP).

I also experienced something like culture shock on move-in day. It came in the form of my roommate, Ashley, a native of Virginia Beach. Ashley played college-level field-hockey, which I’d never heard of; put a half-dozen photo frames on the shelves but never bothered to replace pictures of the models, so we lived among unusually attractive, beaming families of ambiguous ethnicities; and by her bed had installed a white picket fence, just for fun.

I’d grown up in the U.N and taken school trips to India, Tanzania and Russia—but Ashley was the most exotic creature I’d ever encountered by a long shot. (She also snored like a dying walrus, but that’s a story for another time.)

That week, I made lifelong friends. We quickly realized we were all there for a version of the same reason. You know how Columbia describes itself as Columbia University In The City of New York? That was why so many of us went there. The Columbia part came with prestige and credentials and some genuinely incredible professors and classes, sure. But America has dozens of amazing universities, each more credentialed than the next— and none of us were exactly lining up to live in Chicago.

We were coming for New York, for the city and the campus and what it all represented in opposition to the rest of the United States. To me, a privileged international kid from Switzerland, that included the Iraq War, supersized meals, mega-churches, everything in every Michael Moore movie, and country music. To my friends, it might have been difficult parents, homophobic communities, levels of suburban boredom and malaise I could not even conceive of in Geneva (I remember the movie Garden State came out that year. My friends were obsessed, but I didn’t get it!) Everyone had their reason, and most of the time, it contained elements of dissent.

This oppositional culture has a libidinal appeal when you’re 18 and think everything sucks except Courtney Love, a view I stand by to this day. But I think it goes deeper than that. The idea of Columbia—one that I genuinely got a taste of, at least between 2004 and 2008—was a culture of protest, of debate, of challenging party lines and making up new ones. Vivian Gornick calls this “taking a position.” We loved to take positions.

So when I say I’m disappointed in Columbia, that’s what I’m talking about. Not that the school wants to protect their endowment (of course they do) or keep the Trump administration out of their hair (of course they do!) or even keep a particular tranche of donors and students happy. All of these things are cynical and, well, bad, but they are cynical and bad in an institutional way that make me outraged for all the usual reasons outraged people are outraged.

What makes me upset is squishier: Columbia’s completely squandered the spirit of the thing that drew so many students there in the first place. I am sure that students and faculty will keep putting up a fight, and be opposed to a great many things, and take lot of new and old positions. But I can say with certainty that if I were 17 today, I would not be throwing my hat in the ring, and nor would my friends, and we wouldn’t have met each other and worked on newspapers and made magazines and radio shows and mischief.

I’m sad for the experience that today’s 17 year olds won’t get. I can only hope they find it somewhere else.

I still can’t help wonder what would happen if I were a freshman today: if I’d been born twenty years later, decided to study philosophy and creative writing at Columbia, and went on to protest things that both deeply felt like the right thing to protest, but also protesting because that’s just what Columbia students do?

I’d still have a funny foreign name, and a bunch of passports, and family with easily Googleable links to countries that shan’t be named. I’d be writing the same snotty opinion columns in the school newspaper. I’d be on the same student visa as I was on in 2004. And, much like I did when I was a student, I might slip up when it came to that visa, and forget to have a piece of paper signed by the university administration before taking a trip home.

That mistake that landed me in secondary screening at the airport in 2005.

What happened then was unpleasant, but not dramatic. After examining the fat file of paperwork I always traveled with and finding the offending unsigned form (the I-20, if you must know), the INS agent took me to a room full of men who looked like they could have been my uncles. I sat and waited my turn for what felt like hours as the agents called out names: Ahmed, Mohamed, Hamed (I came to call this place the “Mohammed room”) along with a handful of unhappy José’s.

They finally called me up, explained my error, phoned the International Students Office, and sent me on my way. You can be sure that I never forgot to get my I-20 signed again!

If I’d made that error today, it wouldn’t be so easy. I might not feel comfortable going home at all. At the airport, with the wrong paper, I find myself sent away for good, or detained in some strange prison, or something else entirely.

I might have fled to Canada, like Ranjani Srinivasan. I might have found myself needing to sue the government to avoid detention, like Yunseo Chang. These students are not so different from the student I was when I went to college. And it’s shocking, though perhaps not surprising, how much the campus has changed.

These are all counterfactuals, I know. But if you think these cases are somehow unique, I’d encourage you to think again.