In mid-April, when he struck his stride in his first year at Harvard, Alfred Williamson felt unwell. The latest threats from the Trump administration against his university were now focused on the preventing international students from attending it.
Will Williamson, from Wales, consulted his American friends: should he worry?
“They said,” There is no way to do so, “recalls Mr. Williamson, 20 in an interview. “They said it was just a frightening tactic. But they were wrong.”
Five weeks later, just after the end of the spring semester, Mr. Williamson, now in a summer program abroad, won his phone and saw a stack of calls and missed messages. The threat that her friends had rejected had become a burning reality: the federal government had indeed blocked Harvard’s ability to register foreign students – Suddenly pushing Mr. Williamson and others in atrocious limbo.
While anxious messages scared on his phone, Mr. Williamson has traveled texts from worried family members (“I hope you are well”) and classmates not kind by uncertainty (“What are we going to do?»). He spoke to a close friend who called him in tears, devastated by the potential loss of financial aid of Harvard – of money which had not been equaled by the British universities and who had put the college at hand.
A judge made temporary prohibition orders on break with the efforts of the Trump administration. But Mr. Williamson and thousands of other international students are still obstructed by uncertainty, wondering what will come.
In the unleashed debates of the country on immigration, someone with the profile of Mr. Williamson – a white man and British in the United States to study science – would generally not be the objective of the debate. But like all kinds of students from around the world, also was swept away in the Trump administration’s fight over higher education.
