Deeply Valuable, Yet Legally Precarious: The Fragility of International Student Status in the United States

Abstract

The United States has historically justified its investment in international student recruitment by emphasizing the research, economic, and intellectual dividends they generate, framing these contributions as key markers of academic prestige and instruments of global competitiveness. What that framing obscures is that the legal framework governing those students was designed to extract their contributions while retaining unrestricted executive authority over their legal status. This thesis argues that the legal precarity of international students was built into the student visa regime across more than a century of legislative and administrative development, and that the attacks inflicted on international students during the 2025-2026 period were the product of latent capacity the system had always possessed rather than the political character of any particular administration. Three major themes organize the analysis: the historical layering of administrative precarity into the student visa regime, its activation through contemporaneous federal action, and the normative case for statutory reform grounded. The thesis employs two principal methodologies: a historically grounded legal analysis tracing the construction of the student visa regime across more than a century of legislation and administrative practice, and case-based process tracing of the major federal actions taken against international students during the second Trump administration. Documented harms are evaluated at the individual, institutional, and national levels against three criteria: the system's own stated purposes, the governance standards of peer nations, and a unified fairness standard derived from administrative law and policy ethics. The findings establish that the student visa regime is unfairly exploitative, structurally unstable, and ultimately contrary to the national interests it claims to advance. Three legislative reforms are proposed: a Statutory Graduate Transition Visa, a U.S.-Educated Graduate Priority Track within other existing long-term application systems, and statutory limits on F-1 status termination. Counterarguments grounded in sovereignty, national security flexibility, and domestic labor market protection fail on empirical, structural, and historical grounds. The broader conclusion is that the student visa regime cannot be fixed by a change in administration, and instead must be addressed through express legislative action.