By Chido Nwangwu
This piece examines the implication of the threat by the United States of America’s President-elect, Donald Trump’s threat to mass deport illegal immigrants as soon as he takes power in January, 2025.
During and after his successful campaign to be voted back in as the 47th president of the United States, former President Donald Trump and his advisers have restated his campaign promises on immigration policy — ahead of his assumption of office in January, 2025.
The controversial politician (whose wife Melania Trump is a recent immigrant) continues to emphasize that his policy will go after “illegal immigrants” and many others for mass deportations and punishment.
During his victory speech on November 6, 2024, at Mar-a-Lago in West Palm Beach, Florida, Trump said “We have a country that needs help, and it needs help very badly. We’re going to fix our borders, we’re going to fix everything about our country….”
In a practical sense, the immigration interests of not-yet-adjusted and incoming Nigerian and African students will be severely affected, as much as the long-term business and acculturation interests of the United States by the broadly anti-immigration actions and agenda by the returning former President.
Trump, the politically deliberately divisive man seems, stuck in the outdated shibboleths of xenophobia and the loaded, vernacular of racial degradation of mainly persons of African heritage, Hispanics and some recent immigrants.
In recognition of some of these challenges and issues, Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center, stated on November 6, 2024 that: “Trump and his allies told us what he plans to do: mass deportations, ending birthright citizenship, ending the right to public education for immigrant children, internment camps, and using the military to hunt down immigrants.”
Looking at my previous notes, on Monday, July 6, 2020, at the instruction of the Trump White House, the United States federal Student and Exchange Visitor Program announced that, “The U.S. Department of State will not issue visas to students enrolled in schools and/or programs that are fully online for the fall semester nor will U.S. Customs and Border Protection permit these students to enter the United States.”
It added that “Active students currently in the United States enrolled in such programs must depart the country or take other measures, such as transferring to a school with in-person instruction to remain in lawful status…. If not, they may face immigration consequences including, but not limited to, the initiation of removal proceedings.”
With that announcement, the likelihood of the Deportation, in government lawyers’ language carefully baptized in neutral phraseology as “the initiation of removal proceedings” became immediate and traumatizing factors in their lives.
As the 45th President, Trump was opposed to, and suspended the H1-B and L-1 visas.
What ever Trump’s motivations might be, I believe that his actions and decisions on this issue do not serve the interests of the United States in this competitive high tech environment.
And, you ask why?
My answer is simple: both visas are the building blocks from where all of the largest technology corporations, here in the United States of America, attract and hire some of the world’s most intelligent Mobile technologies, ioTs, social media, data and algorithms experts and students!
I have witnessed and participated in some of the engaging digital events reflecting the genius and diversity of talents shown by some of these individuals. Especially, during my first attendance of the BBC-PRI World Technology Forum, in San Francisco, in 1993.
It is, largely, through those visas that Apple or Google or Microsoft, legally, sponsors the exceptionally gifted and hard-working computational sciences programmers who power the Amazon juggernaut in Seattle and the Googleplex in Mountain View. They make things “happen” inside, around Silicon Valley, Half Moon Bay, Cupertino, Menlo Park, San Francisco; far away in my nearby city of Austin Texas; and continents away in Mumbai, India etc.
I have been to these tech cities, except Mumbai.
These students who come to the promising shores of the U.S will study in person or online via Zoom or FaceTime to fulfill and feed their quest for education.
It was the great statesmen and icon Nelson Mandela who said “education is the great engine of personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mineworker can become the head of the mine, that a child of farm workers can become the president of a great nation.”
Without any doubt, such is the power of education.
The most potent instruments of indoctrination, propaganda and persuasion are, organically, rooted into the systematics of formal or informal education. Hence, in the early 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, American colleges, organizations and individuals offered scholarships to many students who will turn out to become the new leaders of their countries.
Around the centers of power and influence in Washington DC, being “American-trained” technocrat, ordinarily, gave such a person a contextual, advantageous consideration. There was competition between the international East and the international West; between communist, socialist countries and the capitalist, relatively free market forces driven economies over who will offer more scholarships and educational opportunities.
How did the United States of America, also known by millions of people as “God’s own country”, get to this unusual and anti-immigrants twists in its recent history?
-Nwangwu is the Founder of the first African-owned, U.S-based newspaper on the internet, USAfricaonline.com, and established USAfrica in 1992 in Houston. Follow on X @Chido247
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