While a graduate student’s life is generally filled with stress, financial challenges, and lack of supporting services; the international student has to deal with several extra layers of hardship and insecurities. What makes it worse is the ambivalence they experience towards their situation from the rest of the population, including their fellow national students. This creates a sense of alienation, and a feeling of being on their own in the struggle. When the world hears their grievances, it responds with a few words of sympathy, pleads ignorance, and makes a concluding gesture with a shrug or a pat on the back.

The biggest shackle they wear, and the root of their distress, is their immigration status. For an international student to study in the US (or other western countries), they need to obtain a visa to be able to enter and stay in the country for the duration of their degree. For many international students, especially those who are citizens of some middle eastern and Islamic countries, obtaining such a visa is an arduous process that is neither transparent nor deterministic. Moreover, at least in the US, whenever the visa expires, the student has to travel back to their country to renew it, incurring extra costs and inconveniences. If their visa expires or their status is lost, they need to leave the country in a couple of weeks, barely having the time to transition or get their life in order.

However, the impact of having this weight hovering over their head transcends simply being a matter of inconvenience. It also implies that they are not allowed to work part time off-campus, limiting their options to make a living. In addition, their access to financial aids and assistant-ship is restricted; many scholarships and fellowships are bound to citizens and permanent residents only. This only leaves the few open to international students highly competitive.

Last, but actually most, this fragile and vulnerable situation makes an international graduate student easy pray for abuse. Their ability to finish their degree is tied to maintaining their legal status as students. While nationals and permanent residents have the option of changing careers and joining the industry, international students do not enjoy this freedom; they either finish the degree or go back home. In many cases, home does not provide any future career opportunities. In some cases, it is virtually a death sentence to be sent back to a country torn by inflation, crime, dictatorship, or war.

Sadly, many advisors perceive this situation as an opportunity. They find international graduate students perfect candidates for exploitation. Knowing that the student has no option but to please them in order to graduate one day, the advisor feels free to overwork the student, to abuse them, and to prolong their years in school until they suck them dry.

I only need to look around me to see so many souls with faces so heavy they no longer have any ambitions. One such student told me that their only hope is to remain sane by the time they finish their degree. For a person to choose to do graduate studies, it means they have a lot of determination and big dreams. Otherwise, they would have succumbed to the lure of industry as an easier and much more profitable choice. To see such willpower and hope shattered by some heartless advisors is something that should make those in power ponder for a second. It should make them wonder whether this is acceptable. More importantly, it should make them reflect on what they can do about it: what they can do to establish a guarantee of some minimal decency.

International graduate students constitute a most diverse and educated population that one day will lead humanity’s strife and progress towards a better future, especially in those countries that need it most. One only needs to internalize that to treat this demographic group more respectfully and gently.