International grad students not welcome at SIU

By Gus Bode

Eye on Earth III

For years, America needed its brains and created a dream to lure them. The most educated youth of the world responded to the call and came in this country. Every new generation took the promise for granted and strove for excellence. The best of them would have the chance to make the great leap across the ocean.

They do not expect much:just the opportunity to work hard.

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They usually come for graduate studies, and at SIU, they represent as much as 20 percent of the graduate student population. It has been a great deal for the universities; for an assistantship position offering a tuition waver and a humble stipend, they get cheap substitution for the regular faculty. Everybody looked satisfied. International students had a future to build and look forward to. The universities managed their budgets with more students and less faculty. The faculty could concentrate on their research.

Now, the attitudes seem to have changed and international students are not welcome anymore.

They have become too many, and American students have started questioning their being here.

As a result, preference is given to American students.

More and more international students do not get the financial assistance they need. It has become usual to see waves of them go from office to office and search, ask, beg for jobs. Some employees, already having comfortable positions, get annoyed with this presence.

They often forget that it’s only the need that makes these people neglect their pride. They have left the poverty at home only to replace it with another one here that combines with loneliness and despise.

Even if a student is admitted with an assistantship and has indicated on the Graduate School application form that he or she is entirely dependent on this assistantship, there is no guarantee that student will keep it. Thus, at least two students found themselves penniless and hopeless in the middle of their studies. Two identical stories come from COBA and from the College of Engineering.

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“I had an assistantship and I was doing well my job. There were no complaints. When it was time to renew my contract, I was told that because of budget cuts I could not keep the assistantship any longer. Later, I found out that the position was given to somebody else. People told me that this happened because my supervisor didn’t like me.”

These two guys are still wondering what was wrong with them that made their supervisors not like them. They cannot understand why.

They felt ashamed talking about it and prefer to forget it. They don’t know each other. When I heard the first story, I felt sorry but didn’t pay much attention. A month later, after I heard the second, I knew there was a pattern. This wasn’t an exception any more. How many other similar stories are getting forgotten out there?

If you have one of these stories, don’t hide it – share it with the chancellor, the Daily Egyptian or the University ombudsman! There is no reason not to be liked because you look or speak differently!

Graduate students are not the only ones experiencing different treatment. Nowadays, most campus student-worker jobs require federal work-study. Again, the explanation is “budget cuts”:if a student has a federal work-study, the hiring department pays only part of the salary, the rest being paid by the Federal Government. International students cannot get federal work-study and therefore cannot get these jobs.

At the same time, according to the immigration regulations, international students can work only on campus. Moreover, they cannot start working until they have a SSN. New students have to have been in the country for 15 days before they are able to apply for a SSN. After these 15 days, most of the few available positions not requiring a federal work-study are already taken.

The paradox is obvious:International students can work only on campus where they cannot find jobs, so they cannot work! Here we have a new policy in practice. We welcome foreigners in the American universities, but we only want them to spend their money here without giving them our jobs! In 1993, 7.5 percent of the undergraduate students at SIU were international; in 2002, their number fell to 3 percent.

American higher education is the most expensive in the world. Even Americans who have higher income than people in other countries can hardly afford it. How can people from poorer countries afford the expenses of out-of-state tuition, which usually is twice as much as the in-state tuition without any help? They cannot. Then, what about cultural exchange? What is this?

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