Trump Bans Foreign Students At Harvard … Again

Again? Still? Where did my Harvard scorecard go, anyway?

In our last exciting episode of All Your Indoctrinated Children, Harvard had successfully, if temporarily, parried a move by the Department of Homeland Security to decertify the school from the Student Education Visa Program (SEVP). Even that success was limited, however, by the State Department’s decision two days earlier to halt all processing of student visas while creating a new vetting system to prevent Hamas propagandists and other malcontents from taking advantage of American hospitality. While Harvard and other schools would have no access to new foreign students for recruitment until the new vetting standards are put in place, at least Harvard could keep the nearly 7,000 already enrolled — 27% of their entire student body — and recruit more later.

Or so they thought. While the administration appeals the injunction on the SEVP decertification, Donald Trump took another route to cut off Harvard’s lucrative foreign-student business late yesterday:

President Trump suspended Harvard from participating in the student-visa program, effectively prohibiting foreign nationals from attending the nation’s most prominent university.

The proclamation issued by the White House late Wednesday ramps up Trump’s attacks on the university, which has fought back against the administration in federal court. The proclamation seeks to prevent students from receiving visas to study for six months and perhaps longer.

The escalation comes as Harvard has declined to negotiate with Trump after the school rejected a series of demands from the administration’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism. Those demands included oversight of faculty hiring, viewpoints and student admission at Harvard. Trump has pulled billions of dollars in federal research funds, threatened Harvard’s tax-exempt status and probed its acceptance of foreign donations.

Is Trump defying the Boston judge who let Harvard off the hook for a while? Not directly:

Trump’s Wednesday proclamation uses a different path to blocking foreign-student enrollment, saying he has executive authority rooted in the Immigration and Nationality Act, passed in 1952, to ban people whose entry would be detrimental to the U.S.

The proclamation cites “misconduct and crimes committed by foreign students at Harvard” as the reason for the ban and accuses the university of either not properly reporting crime statistics from foreign students or not policing the crime. It also says that the university has “extensive entanglements with foreign countries, including our adversaries” and cites the university’s receiving funding from China.

Does the Immigration and Nationality Act give the president the ability to exclude a school from the SEVP? Its language is arcane and extensive, but at first blush, it seems at least a debatable point. The INA gives the Secretary of State broad powers to declare entrants inadmissible and remove them (via a removal court process in 8 USC 1533, notably), but there seems to be no specific language at all about students or education in Title II except generally in 8 USC 1153, under visa allocations. It’s very possible that I have missed some reference to such authority in other areas of this incredibly dense statutory construct, although the question does not appear to have been raised enough for any legal commentary on it … yet.

The executive branch has plenty of authority to deny student-visa applications generally, of course. Marco Rubio can take his sweet time in generating a new vetting scheme for access to those visas. The question is whether the INA gives Trump executive-order authority to exclude Harvard from accessing such students outside of the SEVP certification process. Expect to see this as a topic of discussion in a Boston federal court soon — very soon. 

However, at some point Harvard has to learn the mathematics of their predicament. The only people who care about Harvard are (a) Harvard, (b) some other elite colleges that know they will be next, and (c) the Protection Racket Media that hates Trump and is even more despised than the sneering elites at Harvard. For most of the last two years, the country watched as Harvard sacrificed its Jews to pander to its foreign masters, and then lied repeatedly about it in Congress and in the media. Other than the media, they have no real allies — and they don’t have the moral high ground either. Their conceit about “independence” wears pretty thin when it’s clear that they define it as “sucking at the public teat without any accountability whatsoever.”

In the end, Harvard is signing up for a four-year war that could easily turn into eight or twelve if Republicans win the succeeding presidential elections. And the longer that Haaaaahhhhvaaaahhd holds out for the elites’ right to be vile anti-Semites, the more likely that outcome could be.