Visa Limit Changes Scramble Outlook for International Students

Editor’s note: The international students and alumni interviewed for this article requested anonymity because they feared that speaking publicly could jeopardize their visa status. Each is identified by their first initial.

The international student visa process, already complicated, is facing sweeping developments as the second Trump administration continues its overhaul of the immigration system. Students at Princeton’s Graduate School, where international students make up nearly 45% of the student body, said they are trying to make sense of the proposed changes.

Over the summer, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sought to impose new limits on how long international students can stay in the country, but a federal judge temporarily blocked the move on Sept. 14, a day before it was due to take effect.

Under the proposed rule change, international students on the most common visa types (F-1 and J-1) would be admitted to the U.S. for a fixed four-year period, ending a decades-old policy that allows students to stay in the country through the completion of their programs.

In issuing the temporary injunction, Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV of the U.S. District Court in Boston said the new policy would probably cause “catastrophic” damage to the U.S. economy and higher-education system. He added: “The government’s contention that the rule is necessary to safeguard national security borders on the absurd.”

DHS general counsel James Percival wrote on X: “Come on a student visa, take one class per semester, and stay here for decades. According to Judge Dennis Saylor, ICE must permit this rampant abuse of our immigration system.”

Under the new policy, international students would have to apply for an extension of stay with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which currently has a historically high backlog of more than 11 million cases, according to the American Immigration Council. Those with the ability to travel may also leave the U.S. and reenter to extend their visa, said Elizabeth Goss, an immigration attorney and CEO of Goss and Associates.

Not much has been shared about the updated extension of stay review timeline. There are currently no options to expedite applications, “so they could sit forever,” Goss said in August. Students are allowed to stay in the U.S. while their application is processed.

R., a first-year Princeton Ph.D. candidate, holds Canadian citizenship but was born in Iran and fears the association could negatively impact her visa application under the proposed policy change. Speaking before the injunction, she said she was considering whether to complete her degree in four years instead of five but said it would be challenging to produce quality research and prepare for the job market in that tighter timeframe. “It’s just a lot of uncertainty,” she said.

The new rules also would require students applying for Optional Practical Training (OPT) work authorization after graduation to submit an extension of stay application in addition to the standard OPT application. Nearly 1 in 5 of the international students under Princeton’s visa sponsorship during the 2024-25 academic year were graduates enrolled in OPT, according to Princeton’s Davis International Center.

The processing speed for OPT applications, which can only be filed 90 days before a student’s graduation date, is already a concern for international students, according to Y., a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate from China. She worries that if her extension of stay is not approved by the time her OPT is, she would not be qualified to work. One of her friends, she said, needed to pay to expedite the OPT application, a fee recently raised to $1,780, to be able to start work by a certain date.

“I’m just a student, I don’t have that much savings,” Y. said. “I don’t want to pay for that, but if I’m in a situation that I have to pay for that, I will.”

Goss, who has been working in the immigration field for nearly three decades, called the changes enacted by the first Trump administration “death by a thousand paper cuts.” But the second term, she said, is worse.

“Instead of throwing something at us once a month, I feel like it’s once a week,” she said. In early August, Citizenship and Immigration Services implemented a new policy that allows officers to outright reject incorrectly filed visa request applications without first issuing a Request for Evidence, a move that could jeopardize the many applications completed by students without legal assistance.

Associate professor Andrés Monroy-Hernández, who came to the U.S. from Mexico to study at MIT in the early 2000s and is now director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at Princeton, said he is saddened by the recent restrictions on international scholars, but thinks there may be an upside to the changes for other countries.

“I think there are more opportunities outside the U.S.,” he said, noting an emergence of strong human-computer interaction programs in South Korea and the United Arab Emirates that were started by his colleagues.

When asked about the Trump administration’s concern that international students educated by U.S. universities will only be recruited by other governments to develop their industries, Monroy-Hernández said that his international colleagues might have chosen to stay in the U.S. if they had received more compelling job offers.

“And those offers could be easier [to come by],” he added, “if the environment was more accepting of international students.”

V. *26, a recent Princeton Ph.D. graduate from India, said the latest restrictions have made it more difficult to travel to conferences or visit home. He is currently unable to visit India because there are no visa appointments available to confirm his reentry to the U.S.

According to U.S.-based law firm Morgan Lewis, the backlog is the result of the administration’s new online screening requirements and its discontinuation of third-country visa processing, which allowed travelers to renew their U.S. visa abroad. DHS now requires renewals in the visa-holders’ home countries. For high-demand countries like India, where there are only five visa-processing offices, the wait time could stretch from two months to 10 months depending on the visa type, according to the website Visa Grader, which tracks data from the State Department and other agencies.

Despite the disruptions, V. is still determined to build a career in the U.S. “I think for me, I have invested eight years here, and so it’s a sunken cost fallacy,” he said. “But if someone has a choice, early on, I just don’t think that they would want to pursue that dream anymore, because I think the reality is very different.”